Practical Eloquence Blog |

Breaking the Law for Principle and Profit

By Jack Malcolm / 2.3.2015 / No Comment

I’ve never been a particularly subversive individual (at least after about 6^th grade) but occasionally I like to break stupid rules just because they’re stupid. That’s why I technically broke the law today by taking an Uber ride to the airport.

It was amazingly fast, easy and pleasant. The best part was the transparency: I could see clearly where my driver was and when he would arrive to pick me up, which is totally different from my usual experience calling a cab for the airport. They’re usually slow, but the worst part is that you can never tell when they will be there. One time, the cab was so late in getting me that if I had not rounded up a neighbor to take me to the airport I would have missed my flight.

This situation has persisted for long time because the taxi service in Broward County has been a quasi-monopoly sustained by a web of supportive rules promulgated by obliging politicians and bureaucrats. They’ve managed to make Uber an outlaw and the Sheriff’s department is trying to catch and fine any drivers they can catch.

The theory of free market capitalism is that progress is driven by innovation. New entrants find better and cheaper ways of serving a market, and incumbents either match the improvements or give way to a fitter competitor—except when they find it easier and more profitable to strangle the innovation in its cradle by resorting to red tape, regulation, and heavy-handed enforcement. When they force new entrants to play by the rules that they helped write expressly to protect their inefficiency, backed by their incestuous ties to local law enforcement, most innovators can’t compete.

Uber is a different animal. They have deep enough pockets to fight back, vowing to pay the fines of their drivers to give them a fighting chance to show the market how much better their service is. But of course that support will only last if customers show their support. I’m doing my small part by writing this article, but more importantly I am doing it by voting with my dollars.

I would like to say it’s the principle of the thing, but the real reason I’m willing to break a stupid rule is quite frankly commercial. When you can get speed, reliability, courtesy AND a lower price, I say long live the free market!

Presentations - Sales

The Critical Importance of Quality Signals in Sales Presentations

By Jack Malcolm / 2.2.2015 / No Comment

The decision has already been made

When you shop for a new car, you are probably not an automotive expert who knows all about the fundamentals of a vehicle’s quality: all the hidden things such as the engine, transmission, steering and brakes. How well will the vehicle perform, how reliable will it be, etc. But you can see the car’s finish, and you can slam a door to listen for that satisfying sound that tells you it’s solid and precisely machined. On the other hand, if you notice a blemish in the paint, it’s likely that no number of impeccable reviews would overcome your impression of poor quality. Although you might not admit it, those little quality signals can have a huge influence on your final decision.

Let’s carry over the idea to B2B sales presentations. Suppose you’re a high-level decision maker for a very expensive and technically complex investment facing your company. You have people who have done the detailed work of gathering information and winnowing out potential vendors, but now it’s your responsibility to make the final choice, and you are about to listen to each salesperson or selling team make their pitch. What will you use to decide?

In my book Strategic Sales Presentations, I shared the story of the PR firm that presented to the senior leadership of a large West Coast technology company. The presenting team did such a marvelous job during the presentation that they last person was barely out the door when the CEO turned to my friend and said, “Hire them.”

That CEO had made a decision based on the substitution principle. Daniel Kahneman tells us in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, that our minds like to take shortcuts, so when we are faced with a highly complicated and difficult decision, we often substitute an easier question for the harder one:

“Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.”

Any time you make a buying decision, you are essentially making a probability judgment: that the decision you make has the highest likelihood of making you better off while avoiding additional problems. Probability judgments are always hard, and even more so when they are based on multiple factors that are outside your area of expertise—and the larger and more important the deal, the greater the chance that the key deciders will be generalists. So, it behooves you to get the quality signals just right.

This is in no way a repudiation of my cherished principle that content is king. You absolutely must have a strong and relevant solution to succeed in the long run—a professional and smooth presentation won’t sell a bad solution. But unfortunately good solutions can easily be derailed by bad presentations. Your company may have billions of dollars of assets, thousands of highly competent employees, and state of the art technology, but the decision makers who count can’t see all those things. All they can see is you. You are a signal of quality.

What signals do potential customers look for, albeit unconsciously?

Do you have my best interests at heart? Do you have a thorough grasp of my business and personal goals; do you understand the problems and opportunities that your offering impacts; what will it be like to work with you; do you sound honest?
Are you competent? Are you prepared, efficient and organized; if I scratch beneath the surface of your presentation, do you have depth of knowledge; do you sound confident in what you’re talking about?

Presentations

Does Your Presentation Sound Like Voice Mail Hell?

By Jack Malcolm / 1.29.2015 / No Comment

I did not receive a newspaper this morning, which was inconvenient. But placing the call to register a complaint was worse. I knew what I wanted to hear, but I had to endure a (to my mind) convoluted series of questions and choices before I finally received the verdict: “We are not able to deliver your paper today.” I was utterly unable to reach a live person.

What does this have to do with anything? It reminded me of many sales presentations I’ve seen. The presenter is chained to a long and mostly irrelevant slide presentation. Maybe they put it together themselves and are proud of every animation, bullet point or slick picture. Worse, it might have been something produced by their marketing department to tell “their story”, and which they’re not allowed to deviate from.

It reminds me of the time a guy came to my house to sell me an alarm system. He had one of those old-fashioned notebooks with slick graphics that he tried to force me to listen to page by page. I told him to speed it up and just answer my questions, and he said that if he did that, I would not buy—because I had to understand everything to make the right decision. He was right about one thing—I did not buy, because it was more fun to tell him to pack up his notebook and leave.

Is your presentation an algorithm or a hypothesis?

These types of presentations are like algorithms, where a pre-defined process, followed exactly, should lead to a pre-determined result. There are two problems with this: sometimes things happen during the presentation which throw the process off track, and even when everything proceeds properly, the audience may feel like they’ve been manipulated, like objects passing through an assembly line.

Think of your prepared presentation as a hypothesis, and your delivery as an experiment. Your hypothesis is about what this particular customer needs to hear at this particular time to make a decision that will be of particular benefit to them. Like any hypothesis, it needs to be validated, so the presentation itself is an experiment. If you’ve done the right kind of work, the hypothesis should be fairly close to the truth, but you will not know for sure until you’ve gathered data in the form of reactions, questions, and objections from the audience, and made adjustments accordingly.

You may end up validating your hypothesis completely; in some cases you will mutually agree that the hypothesis was wrong; the most likely result is that there will be some audience-driven adjustments which will make the presentation and the solution better. Regardless of how it turns out, people will feel like they were heard, respected, and empowered to make the best decision for themselves.

The irony is that the surest path to this level of flexibility and responsiveness in a presentation is thorough preparation. Preparation will make you learn your message and your material so that you can have the confidence to deviate, without being worried that you’ll lose your place on the slides. It will enable you to look your listeners in the eyes while speaking, rather than reading your words off the screen behind you. It will give you the depth to answer drill-down questions. In short, preparation will give you the freedom to be yourself, and give your audience the gift of speaking to a live person.

Uncategorized

Motivation is for Amateurs

By Jack Malcolm / 1.26.2015 / 2 Comments

Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson recently completed an astonishing free-climb of the Dawn Wall, a nearly sheer 3,000 foot face of granite in Yosemite, one that is only slightly rougher than the granite countertop in my kitchen. It took them 19 days, and at one point Jorgeson tried and failed 10 times to make the crossing of Pitch 15. After the tenth try, he contemplated giving up but instead rested in his tent on the rock face for two days to let his fingers heal, and then made it on the eleventh attempt. Think about the magnitude of that—the incredible skill, sheer physical effort and the courage it took just to complete one section of 32.

At that point, was it motivation that got him through? I don’t think so. But who cares what I think? Here’s what Jorgeson said in a TV interview on the morning after: (it’s not an exact quote because I didn’t write it down) “What got me through was resolve. I would not accept failing.”

This wasn’t bravado after the fact—here’s what he said while still on the climb:

“After 11 attempts spread across 7 days, my battle with pitch 15 of the Dawn Wall is complete. Hard to put the feeling into words. There’s a lot of hard climbing above, but I’m more resolved than ever to free the remaining pitches.”

There’s that word again, resolve. How is it different from motivation?

Motivation gets you to the base of the mountain; resolve gets you to the top.
Motivation gets you through the first few weeks in January; resolve keeps your resolutions through December 31.
Motivation keeps your spirits up; resolve doesn’t care how you’re feeling.
Motivation is a glittering veneer that soon wears off under hard use; resolve is the iron core that remains.
Motivation can be fragile; resolve is antifragile because it gets stronger under pressure and duress. Like the calluses on a climber’s fingers, it gets stronger with use and challenge.

When I say motivation is for amateurs, it’s not that motivation is bad. Motivation will get you started, and an occasional refresher will recharge your enthusiasm. But when you’re attempting something truly difficult and worthwhile, there will be times when you hit a spot where motivation will not be enough, where all the best intentions you have won’t keep you going. That’s when you need good old-fashioned resolve. That’s where the pros come in.

Resolve may be easier to summon up when you have no choice, such as what Rob Konrad, a former Dolphin player who fell off his boat and swam 16 hours to shore, had to do. But the paradox is that you can choose to have no choice, if that’s possible. Jorgesen said he would not accept failing, and that choice left only one avenue open to him, to keep going until he succeeded.

There are plenty of motivational speakers, but no “resolve” speakers. That’s because resolve is not something you can have or show just by listening to someone else. It only comes from that voice inside you that refuses to let you quit. Resolve is what Kipling was referring to when he wrote:

“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them, Hold on!”

I hope you will never need resolve, because you only need it when times are tough—almost desperate. But let’s leave Jorgesen with the last word:

“I think everyone has their own secret Dawn Wall to complete one day, and maybe they can put this project in their own context.”