Clueless
Tom Morello, the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, is not happy that Paul Ryan likes his band. Morello says Ryan “is clueless” about the band and what its lyrics stand for.
I’m even more clueless, because until today I had barely heard of RATM, and had never heard of Morello.
But the most clueless in this scenario is Morello, along with so many other entertainers who get upset when “the wrong people” like their music or when they take meaning form their lyrics that was never intended. Springsteen is embarrassed that Chris Christie is one of his most ardent fans, and while I love Jimmy Buffett and would love to sit down and have a margarita with him, I would be very careful not to discuss politics. (Although we do agree on manatees.)
Here’s a newsflash for musicians—and for everyone else: once the message leaves your lips, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.
Your message does not belong to you anymore. Once your message hits your listeners’ brains, it ricochets wildly around their existing attitudes, models and memories, finally coming to rest who knows where. Communication is about your listener. Every listener is different from you in some way, so there is always a certainty that they will interpret your message at least slightly differently than you intended. Multiply that by thousands of fans, and you have an almost infinite number of varied interpretations.
Would Jesus recognize the interpretation of his message today? Would Lincoln, or Gandhi?
So, what does this mean to you as a communicator?
- Unlike a rock star, you can make the effort to learn and understand as much as possible about your audience to make sure your message is tailored for the best fit.
- Unlike a rock star, you have the advantage of being able to pay attention to your listener, to ask questions, or to reframe or rephrase your message as necessary.
- Unlike a musician, you’re not solely in transmission mode all the time—or are you?
There’s a cure for this
The bad news for anyone delivering a presentation is that, despite all your hard work and careful choice of content to include in your presentation, most of it will go in one ear and out the other.
Researchers once ran a test to measure how much of a presenter’s message sticks in the minds of their audience. They found that immediately after a 10-minute presentation, listeners only remembered 50% of what was said. By the next day that had dropped to 25%, and a week later it was 10%.
Why is that important? In a typical strategic sales presentation, your audience members will not make a decision right after you’ve spoken. It might be a week or even longer after your presentation. By that time, they may no longer remember specific details but various audience members may each have their own “headline” in their mind that they retained from the presentation will retain an impression of your message. Or, they may have forgotten the impression but may retain an interesting story or intriguing statistic you gave them.
Since very little of your message will stick, you must be absolutely clear in your mind which 10% you want them to remember, and then design your presentation to make sure that happens. The first step is to choose a clear and compelling theme, as described in last week’s article. In effect, you first write the headline and then craft your content to reinforce, repeat and dramatize it.
If you want to be sure it’s saved in their memory, here are five tools under the acronym SAVER:[1]
STORIES: Stories stick. Humans have passed on learning for millennia, and our brains are exquisitely attuned to hearing them, getting drawn in to their reality, and remembering them. But make your stories have a purpose beyond mere entertainment: because they’re so memorable, it’s important that any story you tell supports your theme or one of your main points.
ANALOGIES: Familiar things are more easily remembered, and analogies make things familiar. If you’re presenting an idea that is a big change from the status quo, analogies can make it seem safer by its familiarity. If it’s a sales presentation, some of the best analogies are drawn from the way your customer does business. If you can show them how your solution fits with something they already do, you get the double benefit of familiarity and credibility.
VISUALS: Forget the myth about auditory, visual and kinesthetic. We’re all visual learners; pictures stay in our minds far more commonly than abstract concepts and words. John Medina tells us in his book Brain Rules
EXAMPLES: Examples make abstract things real. You see it every night on the evening news: if they run a story about the unemployment rate, they will profile a family struggling to make ends meet. Chip and Dan Heath call it the Mother Teresa effect, because she said, “If I see one, I will act.”
REPETITION: Churchill said, “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.” This is excellent advice, but pay attention to the subtlety: Churchill repeated it slightly differently each time, so that it doesn’t sound repetitious.
When you craft your presentation, first make sure you get your facts straight, but then go back and use SAVER as a checklist to make sure they pack maximum impact.
[1] Actually, acronyms also work well, but I didn’t include them because I couldn’t think of an acronym for the extra “A”.
The father of all persuasive communication, Aristotle, taught that persuasion results from a combination of logos, pathos and ethos, and that ethos is the most important persuasive device.
While I believe this is not necessarily true in all persuasion situations, it is definitely true that who you are perceived to be by your audience is a huge factor in the success of your persuasive efforts. Their readiness to listen and to act on what they hear is powerfully affected by their perception of you as the messenger, and that perception is situational: it depends on your fit with that particular audience’s expectations for your particular topic.
Ethos often works not only by credibility but also by inspiration. If the audience looks up to the speaker, they want to be like him or her; they want to gain by association and agreement with his views.
Ethos gains special importance from the fact that it begins to work on the audience before you open your mouth. How you appear, what they know about your reputation and credentials, even the way you approach them, all send loud signals that affect how they will respond to your words.
In sales and marketing, we see that ethos can even affect how objects are perceived. A well-established brand influences how potential buyers perceive a product. Commodities can be turned into sought-after treasures simply by carrying a certain brand. Even price can be a form of ethos. An expensive bottle of wine has a different ethos than a cheap one. It works in reverse as well—many people refused to buy BP gasoline after the Gulf oil spill in 2010.
Although it seems like a simple concept, ethos is a product of many elements, including your appearance, credentials, motives and actions.
Appearance: It helps to be attractive, and it helps to fit the audience’s expectations. It’s unfair but true that attractive people are also seen as smarter and more likeable, which definitely helps their persuasiveness. Appearance can also be affected by what you wear. Robert Cialdini showed in experiments that people wearing suits were given more respect and achieved greater compliance with requests, for example.
But appearance is not all-powerful, as was demonstrated last week by Bobak Ferdowski. Who would have picked this guy for a NASA flight director?
Credentials and reputation: Ferdowski’s credentials as a NASA flight director far outweigh the audience’s expectation of what a flight director should look like. Credentials are a form of brand. A Harvard professor speaking about a topic in her area of expertise will automatically be accorded greater credibility than someone with less impressive academic credentials.
While credentials are about qualifications, reputation is about your qualities: who you are, what have you done,and how you have done it. I recently taught a class to a group of engineers, all of whom had advanced degrees from top schools. They told me that, within their company, they pay very little attention to where someone went to school, but a lot of attention to which projects they’ve been involved in; the more prestigious the project, the more prestigious the engineer.
The irony of credentials and reputation is that if you spend too much time emphasizing them, you may come across as either defensive or boastful. You’ll be better off if you can get your introducer to say something about you.
Motives: Any time you’re trying to “sell” ideas, your listeners will be more receptive if they feel you share their values, and will be sensitive to your motives. Although they know you will benefit somehow if they acquiesce, try to make your message as listener and customer-focused as possible by couching it in their language and in accordance with what they value. But don’t carry this too far: when the benefit is entirely on your side, be up front about it. Sometimes a heartfelt, “I need your help” goes further than a listing of advantages and benefits.
Action: During spoken communication, ranging from face-to-face to large keynote speeches, the speaker’s actions, such as their tone of voice, facial expressions, stance and gestures all contribute to the ethos component of persuasion. The main keys here are to be authentic and confident.
In my own work as a presentations trainer, ethos is especially dependent on actions. If I tell my students that they must carry themselves or express themselves in a certain way, you can bet that they will immediately notice when I don’t follow my own rules. Do as I say, not as I do, does not work for presentations trainers.
What applies to presentations trainers actually applies to anyone: who you are and what you do often speaks much louder than what you say. Don’t just say it—be it.
If it doesn’t fit here, it won’t be clear
The first step in planning a strategic sales presentation is deceptively simple: knowing what your key message is. When you take the time up front to write a theme, it provides brevity, clarity and impact, which helps you and your audience. The theme gets right to the heart of the matter.
Have you ever come away from a presentation and had trouble figuring out or remembering what the speaker was trying to say? Usually it’s not your fault—the speaker probably did not have a clear idea in his or her own mind why she was there or why you should have been.
When that happens, a tremendous opportunity has been wasted by the salesperson, not to mention the valuable time of the high-level decision-makers in the room. How likely is it that they will be able to act on your message when decision time comes, or that you will be invited back?
The bottom line is that you want your listeners to be absolutely clear what you want them to do and why. If you’re not clear on that, why should they be?
The solution to this all-too-common problem is, rather than immediately creating an outline of your points or creating your slides, you should take a few minutes to crystallize a theme for your presentation. The theme is simple: what do you want them to do and why should they do it? To make it even simpler, complete the following sentence before every presentation:
You should __________, because __________.
“You should”__________: What do you want them to do?
Always remember that a sales presentation is still a sales call. Any good sales call begins with a clear purpose: why are you taking time out of your busy sales day to go on this call? What do you intend to accomplish? How will it advance your sale or your position within the account?
So, the first part of the theme is to spell out your purpose in specific, output-defined terms. In other words, don’t have something mushy such as, “educate them on the benefits of cloud computing”. How will you know they’re educated? Will you give them a test? A better way to write this would be: “Gain agreement to form a task force to explore cloud computing”. (Naturally, if it’s a closing call, your purpose should already be pretty clear.)
Just the exercise of forcing yourself to be specific will clarify your mind tremendously and will make the rest of the presentation go much more smoothly.
“…because________: Why should they do it?
This is where you state your value proposition for this particular audience—not the generic one that says, “We are the nation’s leading provider of blah-blah-blah…” Based on your work before the presentation, you should a very clear idea of the specific reasons they should buy your solution. Although it depends on the audience, very rarely will those reasons be based on product specifications. At senior decision making levels, the why is generally expressed in terms of business improvements, solving problems, or improving processes.
“…because you need it to meet your goals of increasing flexibility and lowering your IT costs.”
Even better: “…it is the only way you will meet your ambitious flexibility and cost reduction goals.”
When you write your theme, it is for your use only, to help you organize the presentation, so you don’t have to write it down in marketing language. For example, your theme could be: “Buy our solution, because if you don’t there is a good chance your project will fail.” That’s probably not something you would say in exactly those words, but it very easily could be the impression you want to leave in their minds.
Think of your theme as the elevator pitch for a very short building. If it takes you more than about 25 words to craft it, you probably lack clarity.
