Eureka!
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Spending too much time on the context/problem is one of the most common characteristics of ineffective presentations. Speakers invariably try to squeeze more material into a presentation than can be briefed effectively in the time allocated, and they tend to start presentations much more slowly than they finish. The natural tendency of most speakers is to spend 60% of their allocated timeslot on the first 50% of the material. Consequently, the material that follows the context/problem—what the audience came to learn—gets short shrift.
Here’s a simple example of what can happen. Suppose you have one hour to present a topic. This is the typical sequence of events.
You know that you can present about 20 slides in an hour. You budget 5 slides for the introduction/context, 5 slides for alternative solutions, 5 slides for tradeoffs, and 5 slides for the selected solution, impacts, and conclusions. You figure the first 10 slides are easy and will take about 2 minutes each to present. The last 10 slides are meatier and may stimulate questions, so you budget 4 minutes each for them. This feels about right: 20 minutes on the context, 40 minutes on your main message.
You are comfortable with the intro and alternatives material, and you have plenty of detail. You end up with 15 slides on those topics and only 9 slides on the last two topics. Now your briefing is 24 slides, but you figure you can easily cram that into the time slot.
As you present the familiar, comfortable front-end material, you spend more time than planned. Rather than 2 minutes per slide, you spend 3 minutes per slide. Since you have more slides of that comfortable context material, you end up consuming 45 minutes, or 75% of your time slot, on context. Now you only have 15 minutes, or 25% of your one-hour time slot, to discuss your main message.
This scenario unfolds in four out of five briefings I attend (including many of my own, early in my career). Even speakers with the best intentions can fall into this easy trap. If some members of the audience want to discuss the front-end material, you are vulnerable to presenting more context than necessary.
Here are a few suggestions for avoiding this trap.
Assume that your audience is reasonably smart on the context. Purposefully minimize introductory material. If the audience asks questions, fill them in verbally or offer to provide more context as a follow-up. Most people forgive you for treating them like they are more knowledgeable than they might be. Audiences are less forgiving when you waste their time with basics that are already well known.
Build your main message first, and then add only the context and introductory material you need to make your point. Too many people start with what they know well rather than starting with the main message they want the audience to receive.
Begin your briefing with a few simple slides that you can present quickly, setting a pace for the presentation. It is extremely common for presenters to spend 15 minutes on the first slide of a 30-slide presentation, mired down in some hairy topic and setting a slow pace. Once you dig this hole, it is difficult to recover. It is hard enough to speak clearly when you are comfortable with the topic and the timing; a speaker who feels rushed has tremendous difficulty communicating effectively.
Don’t be afraid to pause in the middle of your briefing to check your timing, collect your thoughts, and adjust, or to let an important point sink in. Audiences appreciate it when a speaker pauses occasionally. This is generally viewed as an attribute of good and great speakers.
There are many good reference books filled with techniques for better speaking. Most of these tips are obvious, or they are easy to say and hard to do. There is only one way to get comfortable at public speaking: Do it. It is easy to speak to others when you have confidence in what you are saying. It is hard when you fear that they know more about your presentation topic than you do. In general, it is rare to be asked to speak in front of an audience that is more expert than you are. PhD oral exams and assignments in speech classes are two obvious exceptions. If you get nervous before speaking, as most people do, remind yourself that you probably know this topic better than anyone in the audience. That thought can be very comforting and help you to relax.
The best way to combat fear is proper preparation. Rehearsing alone in dry runs can be mildly helpful but is no substitute for a live audience. So if you are going to rehearse, try to find an audience, even a small one, to listen and critique. Being prepared with an honest presentation that makes its points in a memorable way should give you confidence and reduce your fear.
CHAPTER 6
Selling an Idea
Selling is persuading someone to buy something. The something may be a product, a service, an agreement, an exchange, a plea, an observation, or a story. You may simply be trying to persuade someone to believe you, or you may be asking them to exchange a wad of money for a product or service. You want, and sometimes need, to be persuasive. What does this take?
Everyone needs to sell, and sometimes the act of selling something or persuading someone escalates into a high-stakes communication. When we are young, we may want to sell our parents on letting us stay up past curfew to attend that special concert with our friends. Or we may want to convince them that our preferred college choice (a remote, well-known party school) is better than their preferred college choice (a local, nerdy school). As we move into our professions, the need for selling occurs frequently.
Dan Roam’s book, The Back of the Napkin, provides an excellent discussion of some fundamentals of observing, articulating, and selling ideas. He frames his visual thinking analysis with four steps: look, see, imagine, and show. Looking is collecting raw information as a visual sensor. Seeing is the act of observing, mentally processing that information, and filtering, sorting, pattern matching, and prioritizing standout images. Imagining is using our brain’s ability to process the physical things we see and transform them into logical models, patterns, and cause-and-effect relationships. It is thinking about what we don’t see, and reasoning about why the things we do see are what they are. It is what sets humans apart from other life forms. Showing is the way we communicate our mental picture to ourselves and to others in order to inform and persuade.
When it comes to seeing and showing, Roam recommends the 6Ws model (see Table 6-1) for organizing information and communicating our thoughts to others. His central thesis is, “For every one of the six ways of seeing, there is one corresponding way for showing; for each one of these six ways of showing, there is a single visual framework that serves as a starting point.”
TABLE 6-1. Visual Frameworks
Even though Roam might have called this the “Four Ws + 1 and two Hs” model, the 6Ws is more memorable. Most of us relate questions to words that begin with w, and this set of interrogatories is a great framework for observing and analyzing a situation, a problem, or a solution. They also help us compartmentalize our observations into multiple aspects so that we observe and communicate a more complete picture.
With some minor extensions of this model, these dimensions are a good framework for reasoning about selling. My extensions are as follows. First, separate out the who and the what. The reason for this is that selling is an action: You want to sell something to someone. The who now allows you to capture observations about the someone, and the what allows you to capture observations about the something. Second, add a which question that can be used to characterize the sort of language you should use to make your proposal. Language does not refer to whether you should speak in English, Portuguese, or Mandarin. It refers to the tone and shades of your sales pitch that will appeal to your intended audience. This includes the jargon you might use (demonstrating some savvy in the field), the maturity level of the audience (expert, skilled, amateur), the style of the audience (analytical, driver, amiable, expressive), and other sorts of presentation attributes that attract the audience to your sales pitch.
With these extensions and a few wording changes, we now have an 8W model.
1. To whom are you selling?
Understand the audience.
2.
Why would they buy?
Understand their motivations.
3. Where do they live or operate?
Un derstand their domain and environment.
4. How will they realize value?
Understand how they operate.
5. When are results expected?
Understand their timeframes.
6. How much value will be realized?
Understand the impact for them.
7. Which language should you use?
Understand their channels of communications.
8. What should you sell them?
Understand how you both benefit.
A seller should answer these questions before delivering a value proposition. I have found this approach to be a best practice among the many exceptional salespeople with whom I have worked in my life. They intuitively know they must show their client multiple dimensions of information so that the client can see the value of their product, idea, or solution. This maximizes the persuasiveness of their sales argument. Knowing this, sellers spend time diagnosing their client’s needs so that they can understand the whole picture from the client’s point of view. This is the point of Roam’s book, although he captures it in a beautiful treatment of visual thinking and communicating with pictures.
We can use this 8W model in a somewhat abstract way to examine the breadth of the solution space that most sellers must be able to navigate. Most product lines span a broad spectrum of client contexts. How broad? This is a simple problem to analyze with the 8W model. You can do a coarse analysis of your marketplace by estimating the number of different client contexts in which you sell. Table 6-2 summarizes some examples of distinct answers to the eight questions, using very generic answers just to demonstrate the variety of contexts.
TABLE 6-2. Examples of Answers to the 8W Model Questions
Diagnostic Dimension Examples of Distinctly Different Client Contexts
To whom are you selling?
Executives, managers, practitioners
Professionals, skilled artisans, amateurs
Parents, teachers, children
Why would they buy?
Cost savings, time savings, quality improvement
Necessity, luxury
Best value, best reputation, best quality, best price
Where do they live or operate?
Locally, nationally, globally
Commercial, government, academia, family
Financial, industrial, entertainment, technology
How will they realize value?
Automation, process improvement, simplification
Prestige, efficiency, usefulness, longevity
When are results expected?
Immediately, days, weeks, months, years
Single instance, multiple instances, continually
How much value will be realized?
Small, moderate, large, very large, extra large
10% to 50% more or 10% to 50% less
$100s, $1,000s, $1,000,000s
Which language should you use?
Analytical, driver, amiable, expressive
Jargon, formal, informal
Technical, financial, emotional
What should you sell them?
Products, services, knowhow
Sports equipment, clothing, housewares
Raw data, filtered data sets, analysis
If you quantify the number of distinct possibilities in each dimension, you can make a rough guess of the number of different value propositions with which you might be confronted. If all the dimensions were independent and all permutations were possible, the number of different possibilities would be surprisingly large. If each dimension had just three distinct answers, there would be 6,500 different value propositions. Although my assumptions are weak—the dimensions are not all independent and the categorization of distinct contexts is usually rough and arguable—the conclusion is strong. There are almost always a very large number of possibilities, and you can’t afford to have canned sales pitches available for all of them. Consequently, most salespeople need to be good diagnosticians, which requires keen observation skills.
Many sales organizations sell a broad product line with diverse usage models. They must create highly customized value propositions where the number of distinct possibilities is in the millions. Many global system integrators, defense contractors, software product companies, and retail companies have very capable sales forces dealing with this challenge of very context-dependent value propositions. Searching out that one sharp needle in this haystack of possibilities is the exciting detective work that motivates many sellers. To stand out, they must understand the customer’s context by diagnosing the answers to the first seven questions of the 8W model, and then synthesize a solution from their product line by asking themselves the eighth question.
This discussion has dealt with professional selling. What does it take to communicate persuasively in a one-on-one situation like a conversation with your mother or a one-to-many situation like a presentation to colleagues?
VALUE-BASED SELLING
The verb to sell can take on many different meanings. Here are the Dictionary.com definitions for sell when it is used as a verb with an object:
To transfer (goods) to or render (services) for another in exchange for money; dispose of to a purchaser for a price: He sold the car to me for $1000.
To deal in; keep or offer for sale: He sells insurance. This store sells my favorite brand.
To make a sale or offer for sale to: He’ll sell me the car for $1000.
To persuade or induce (someone) to buy something: The salesman sold me on a more expensive model than I wanted.
To persuade or induce someone to buy (something): The clerk really sold the shoes to me by flattery.
To make sales of: The hot record sold a million copies this month.
To cause to be accepted, especially generally or widely: to sell an idea to the public.
To cause or persuade to accept; convince: to sell the voters on a candidate.
To accept a price for or profit from (something not a proper object for such action): to sell one’s soul for political power.
To force or exact a price for: The defenders of the fort sold their lives dearly.
Informal: to cheat, betray, or hoax.
The first 10 definitions boil down to two core meanings: to exchange something for money, or to persuade someone. The eleventh definition is also an important one, with a negative connotation. We will discuss that later.
If you are going to exchange something for money, you have to create a value proposition that has at least equal value to the client for the money they are going to give you in return. In many situations, the value to the client is intangible. Nevertheless, you need to monetize your offer so that the client believes that what they need or want is worth the price you are asking. To gain agreement for the transaction, a seller must do two things: create a value proposition, and persuade the client that the value proposition is credible or better than available alternatives.
The most important lesson in selling is that value is in the eye of the beholder. I chose these exact words for two reasons. First, the value of most things we want to sell is as immeasurable as beauty, which is the well-known basis of the statement. Second, beauty and value can only be measured from the observer’s perspective, or in this case, that of the buyer. We all have different tastes in art, food, pets, and friends. Their beauty/value is subjective, different to us than to other people. Sure, there are some things that most people agree are beautiful, at least within a given culture, but to varying degrees. You would be perplexed if you tried to quantify the difference between your appreciation of Pink Floyd and mine. I think Zion National Park is twice as beautiful as the Grand Canyon. Do you?
For most things that people are trying to sell, there is no formulaic definition of value that allows a seller to say that this thing is worth this price. Although sellers may present such arguments, buyers rarely ag
ree. Everyone has seen commercials where a vendor offers their product at a discounted price, adds in a few sweeteners, and claims that you pay only $19.95 for this $79 value. Sellers imply that the “value” is the list price of their product plus the list prices of the sweeteners. This may make sense to them, but we know better. The true value to us is what we are willing to pay for it based on our own sense of values.
Creating a value proposition is another exercise in understanding the receiver before beginning to transmit. This is the basis of one of the habits in Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This is particularly important in selling because a buyer wants to trust a seller. When money changes hands, the stakes escalate. The communications between buyer and seller become the make-its (trust builders) or the break-its (trust destroyers).
Persuading
Persuasive communications are communications whose specific purpose is to gain agreement on something. Here are some examples.
A lawyer’s closing statement to a jury on the guilt or innocence of a defendant
A job interview
A politician’s speech requesting your vote
Pickup lines in a bar conversation with a new acquaintance
An essay on a college entrance exam
A parent’s plea to improve their child’s grades and study habits
The 8Ws model provides a solid framework for the various aspects that a receiver is likely to see in the value proposition, idea, or suggestion that you transmit. If these are the aspects that people observe, these are the aspects that you should consider and communicate.