Practical Eloquence Blog |

How to Talk So People Listen

By Jack Malcolm / 6.13.2013 / No Comment

Do you sometimes feel like you’re talking to yourself? Do people start to look at their phones a few seconds after you start speaking to them? Do you have trouble getting people to return your calls and emails?

If the answers to any of these questions make you uncomfortable, you might want to take stock of what you’re saying and how you’re saying it. The first step is to figure out why people won’t listen. Maybe it’s because:

You waste their time
They don’t trust you
You’re boring

The solution is simple: anything you say must be relevant, true to the best of your knowledge or ability to verify, and stated in a way that is clear, concise and compelling.

Relevant. This is the most important principle for being heard. Attention is a scarce commodity these days, so if you want it, you have to give something of value in return. Is it something they care about? Will it improve their life in some way? Do you filter what you say through the “so what” test? Do you know enough about the other party and their situation to add value? In conversation, do you listen with the intent to understand, and then reply with something meaningful? Do you adapt to their style instead of making them adapt to yours?

True. Content is still king, and yours had better be solid if you want to gain and maintain personal credibility. Just as a restaurant with great atmosphere and fine china in the world won’t stay open long if it uses rotten ingredients, being articulate and forceful won’t help you if others perceive you’re full of BS. Do you have sufficient, accurate and relevant evidence to back up your statements? If you’re hoping to influence someone decision, have you prepared to the point where you can anticipate and answer their main questions?

Clear. Make it easy for them to understand you. Simplification is not “dumbing it down”—it’s getting to the essence and stating it in direct, unambiguous language. If people can’t understand what you’re saying, they’re unlikely to make the effort to listen. Are you addicted to meaningless, multi-syllabic buzz words? Do you use big words in an effort to make yourself sound more intelligent? Do you speak in vague generalities? Do you speak with excessive “ums” and other filler words?

Concise. Part of not wasting someone’s time is being efficient in the time it takes to express your thoughts. This goes hand in hand with being clear, because the effort to be concise exposes the fuzziness of your thinking. Do you get right to the point, or do you backtrack, go down blind alleys and meander like a spy who thinks he’s being followed? Do you give the bottom line up front so that they don’t have to endure all the context?

If people trust you and you don’t waste their time, you may not have to worry about the third problem—being boring. But just in case, the fifth principle may help:

Compelling. Techniques that can make your speech compelling and memorable include using vivid language, unique and interesting stories, apt analogies, and painting word pictures. But the best way to be interesting to someone else, paradoxically, is to be interested in them. Perhaps the greatest value you can bring to someone in a conversation is to make them feel good about themselves. Think about it: people love to talk about their kids, but look for the exits when others talk about their own. Being interested in others will also make you more empathetic, which enables you to tap into the emotions that resonate with others.

Book Recommendation: Quit Whining and Start Selling by Kelly Riggs

By Jack Malcolm / 6.11.2013 / No Comment

Judging by the title, you would think that Quit Whining and Start Selling is one of those motivational books that is long on exhortation and inspiration and short on practical advice. At least that’s what I thought when Kelly Riggs asked me to review his book.[1] I was skeptical—not because I’m opposed to motivation but because you’re not likely to find it in a book.

The book is actually very engaging and motivational, but, the title does the book a disservice, because its real strength is in its practical, solid sales advice. Reading this book is like having a wise and experienced sales coach looking over your shoulder providing guidance on the critical performance factors at each stage of the sales cycle. The book is arranged in eight parts, roughly in the order of the sales cycle:

Part I frames the discussion by defining the elements that lead to sales success. Riggs reminds us that none of us is destined to success or failure—“you are destined to whatever you have the desire and the discipline to create.“ The discipline part comes in the form of the next six parts: defining what your customers are buying, analyzing and planning your work and your sales approach, and improving effectiveness at each stage of the sales cycle.

Part II, What Are You Selling?, gets you thinking about what your product or service means to the customer. Kelly reminds us that superior products do not just sell themselves, and the standard trite talk about quality, service and value does nothing at all to differentiate you in the customer’s perception.

Part III is the shortest in the book, comprising only two chapters, but in my own opinion it’s the most important concept of all. It’s best encapsulated in the quote by Deming: “If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” An effective sales process is the key to consistent sales performance, and the only way to know what is working and what isn’t.

Parts 4-7 show how to improve your effectiveness in each stage of the sales process: Planning, Discovery, Presentation and Delivery. This is where the meat of the book comes in with specific face to face selling ideas and techniques.

Part VIII is about personal success habits, and is the most “motivational” part of the book. It’s a useful reminder that you have to work smarter and harder to reach the top 1% of your profession.

Quit Whining and Start Selling is also a good read, full of engaging stories and examples that illustrate important points. I also appreciated that each chapter is book-ended by excellent quotes that set the stage at the beginning of each chapter and brief “1-on1 principles” that sum up the principal lesson.

I wrote earlier that you’re not likely to find motivation in a book, but upon reflection that’s not quite accurate. Motivation does not come from hearing things you already know; it comes from learning new things that you know can improve your results if you implement the process. Process plus discipline will carry you through even when short term enthusiasm fades away. If you look at it this way, Quit Whining and Start Selling is a quick read that can have lasting impact on your sales career.

Note: You can purchase the book in soft cover directly from Kelly’s web site, or a Kindle version from Amazon.

[1] That’s my subtle way of introducing the fine print disclaimer. I provided a promotional blurb for the book. (Not that it made the cover.)

Whiteboard Selling Book Review

By Jack Malcolm / 5.28.2013 / No Comment

If you want to be different from your competitors, build your credibility with prospects and customers, and get your audiences more engaged in your presentations, Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales Through Visuals, by Corey Sommers and David Jenkins can show you how.

As the title of the book indicates, the authors urge salespeople to can their slides and conduct their presentations interactively using a whiteboard.

There are some strong arguments for getting away from slide decks:

As I’ve written before, senior level executives (and probably everyone else) often dread having to sit through the standard sales deck, with its reams of slides displaying the “company history” and walls of words. If you show up and do something different, they will definitely pay attention.
Some salespeople are just projector operators. They show up, connect the laptop, and read off the screen a presentation that someone else put together. If you could train a monkey to operate the projector, or better yet, just email the slides in advance, you would deliver equal credibility and value at a much lower cost.
Sustainable agreements are much more likely when the customer is actively engaged in telling you their story and building the solution with you. The design of most presentations fosters a transmit-only approach and discourages questions and interactivity.

Whiteboard Selling shows how to encapsulate a large slide deck into a single whiteboard that builds the story you need for particular stages in the sales cycle, including qualification and discovery, why change, competitive comparison, making the business case, and closing. That’s a particular strength of the book—it’s as much about effective sales process as it is about presentations.

In their words, “it should be a cohesive visual that tells a singular story within a defined space”. This phrase neatly captures the two principal advantages of the whiteboard approach. It allows you to build a story with your customer while also harnessing the power of visuals. You’ll know you succeeded when the customer insists on saving what’s on the board so they can sell the idea internally.

Even if you don’t want to take the drastic step of getting rid of your slides entirely, the discipline of going through the whiteboarding process would definitely sharpen your thinking and your delivery.

Some people reading this review might shudder at the thought of unleashing your sales force onto the world armed with nothing but colored markers. How do you ensure quality and consistency? Have no fear; the book is actually written with sales and marketing managers as its audience, and devotes substantial space to the process of designing, training and implementing a whiteboard approach in your sales organization. As such, it’s not really a “how-to” for individual sales professionals, although any reasonably intelligent and experienced salesperson could probably design their own.

While the general approach outlined in the book makes excellent sense, I would guess that the challenge—and effectiveness—of rolling out the process to the entire sales force is not as straightforward as the book makes it appear. In fact, the close scripting required to ensure a consistent message would seem to detract from the flexibility and natural flow that effective sales conversations require, possibly defeating the purpose.

Maybe the ideal approach combines the best of both approaches. Ironically, the authors advocate using PowerPoint to design the whiteboard templates to begin with. That got me thinking: why not combine both approaches? Tablets running MS Office could be used to project slides, and the presenter could write and draw on the slides just as with a whiteboard. It’s worth finding out, and I plan to experiment with the approach and write about it in upcoming posts.

Persuasive communication - Presentations

When Analogies Fail, and What You Can Do About It

By Jack Malcolm / 5.21.2013 / No Comment

When using an analogy, you have to think more than one step ahead

You know how those Viagra commercials show you how wonderful life is with their drug: with virile types driving big trucks or couples lounging in an outdoor bathtub? Right after those scenes comes the disclaimer that tells you about the risks you run when you use the wonder drug.

This article is the disclaimer. So far, I’ve written about how powerful analogies can be in your presentation, but you do run risks when you deploy that “perfect” analogy. After all, persuasion is a two-way street, and your audience may not passively sit there and accept what you’re selling. You may be so focused on getting your chess pieces into position to attack your opponent that you overlook the danger to yourself. Any time you decide to use an analogy to dramatize of support your proposal, you run several risks:

They may shoot down your analogy. In 1988, Dan Quayle was debating Lloyd Bentsen in the Vice-Presidential debate. Quayle tried to defuse concerns about his youth and inexperience by pointing out: “I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.” Bentsen replied: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Many analogies seem to fit so well that you take it for granted they will be accepted without argument by your listeners, but be prepared in case someone in the audience tries to show that the analogy does not apply.

They may turn your analogy against you. Your listeners may accept the analogy but point out a different lesson from it. For example, the story above made the point that an opponent may crush your analogy. But someone could weaken that analogy I used above by pointing out that the Bush-Quayle ticket actually won.

This points out the danger of falling in love with your own analogy; you see its beauty but may be blind to its weaknesses. Listeners who are opposed to your idea are going to be much more objective and may bring to mind other details about the source analogy that are just as important. Every analogy is going to have differences as well as similarities, and you can count on listeners to point those out. Here’s an example of someone trying to use an analogy to sell a new concept, from the movie Jurassic Park:

Dr. Hammond: All major theme parks have had delays. When they opened Disneyland, nothing worked.
Dr. Malcolm: But. John. If the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.

They may counter with a stronger analogy. You see this all the time in the Sunday morning news shows where competing experts debate some pressing international question. One may bring up WWII to urge that we stand up to an aggressor nation, and the other will counter with the specter of Vietnam.

“Pressure-test” your analogy. As with anything else you put into your presentation, spend some time considering the opposing point of view. It will help strengthen your arguments and you might even learn something that will improve your proposal. Put yourself in the position of a skeptic and try to poke holes in your own analogy, and then come up with answers to those counters. In Quayle’s case, Bentsen was expecting the Kennedy analogy; if it was that obvious to the opposition, Quayle’s handlers should have anticipated his reaction.

If you’re going to use a story, research it to get all the facts, because the part that you remember is only a small part of the entire story. When I thought of the analogy contained in the Dan Quayle story, I did not automatically think focus on the fact that Quayle did, after all, win the election.