My previous post covered one big lesson from watching a pitch competition; today I cover three additional observations. Watching eleven pitches in a row can be fascinating and a bit excruciating, but being able to compare them side by side in real time can also offer some valuable lessons. Here are a few that I gleaned from watching the Workforce One StartUp Quest competition on Monday.
Make it a conversation and not a commercial. The pitches that sounded canned fell flat. The pitch that I had rated the lowest sounded like it was written by a first-year marketing student being graded based on number of platitudes and buzzwords. The presenter I had rated the highest, as did the judges, spoke directly to the judges, had tons of personality in his voice and face, and sounded like a friend explaining a great business idea.
Don’t overcook the soufflé. Go easy on the emotion. We’re told that people make decisions emotionally and not rationally, and that’s generally true. But we also like to see ourselves as rational decision makers, so when someone makes it too obvious we feel forced into a corner and we react badly to it. For example, one of the pitches played on the love and concern that one has for elderly parents who live alone. The first tug at the heartstrings worked fine, but the second felt a little forced and the third went over the top, to the point that one of the judges commented on it during the Q&A.
Prepare for Q&A as much as for the presentation itself. This is the real main course, because your listeners want to see how well you know your stuff when you’re off-script. First rule: answer the damn question. Second rule, keep your answers short and to the point. One question about the team’s marketing plan turned into an excruciatingly long dissertation on general marketing principles that had the audience looking for a hook. In fairness to the person answering, he was put on the spot by the main presenter, who fielded the question and passed it right to him without warning—which points out the third through fifth rules: anticipate, anticipate, anticipate!
Have you ever entered an elevator, in a hurry to get to one of the higher floors, only to find that some prankster has pushed every button? How did it make you feel?
Now, imagine that the roles are reversed: you are that prankster, and your audience is the frustrated person in a hurry to get to their intended destination. That’s what happens in a lot of presentations that I observe.
For example, yesterday I attended the StartUp Quest Pitch Day at the Broward County Performing Arts Center. Eleven teams competed to present their business plans to a panel of judges made up of venture capitalists and other investors. While it’s true that the situation is artificial (there are no actual dollars riding on the outcome—at least not immediately), it was still obvious that most of the speakers were pushing far more buttons than they needed to get to their destinations.
For example, it’s a good idea to begin with a grabber story that engages attention and interest, and personal stories that bring a problem to life are perfect for that. But the problem with personal stories is that you’re tempted to go into much more detail than the audience needs to get the picture, and going on too long can ruin the effect you’re trying to create. Create the effect and move on.
Next, it’s a good idea to show the huge market potential of your product, but we don’t need two minutes of detailed statistics to prove that there’s a lot of money being invested in alternative energy sources or that our population is aging rapidly—everyone gets that. Make the point and move on. If you have a half dozen competitive advantages, don’t spend equal time on each; hit the one or two strongest and move on.
The problem with pushing too many buttons is not just that you take more time than you need, or that you can frustrate listeners, it’s that every time the door opens at the wrong floor you run the risk that riders will get off.
In real situations, such as in a strategic sales presentation, there is even less excuse for pushing too many buttons, because if you’ve researched, prepared and shaped the conditions for success, you should know precisely which button to push for each of the decision makers and important influencers in the room. Anything more than what you need is wasted or worse.
In military tactics it’s a truism that if you try to attack everywhere you won’t be strong anywhere. You need to find the decisive point and concentrate overwhelming force at just that point of attack. So, when you do get to the main point, go for broke. As 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.”
It’s the same way in persuasive communication, beyond just presentations.
My old swimming coach Jack Nelson was a master of motivation. Read this article in the New York Times to see how he applied his talent to engineer one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history. What made him so good was that he knew each of his swimmers intimately; he knew what they would respond to and how they would respond; he knew just which buttons to push and how and when.
Is your clock running?
This question is prompted by a speech that John W. Gardner, a noted educator, delivered to McKinsey and Co. in 1990. His audience was composed of highly successful people in the prime of their lives, (people just like those who read these posts), yet he felt compelled to deliver an urgent message about avoiding complacency and staleness.
Gardner said,
“We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits? A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.”
We all know people like this, people who have stopped learning and growing, who haven’t had an original thought since maybe their twenties, who are counting the diminishing number of years until they can retire and really stagnate. Some have checked out because they’re satisfied with where they are, or because they have learned their jobs so well they can basically do them in their sleep. Some less fortunate ones have simply learned to accept their dissatisfaction, defeated by apathy, bureaucracy or boredom. My Dad worked in the private sector all his life, and in retirement went to work for a county agency. After a week on the job his coworkers pulled him aside and told him to stop working so hard, because it made them look bad. He went with the flow at work, but his clock kept running and he kept his zeal for learning. The week he died, at 86, he had just attended a class to learn how to use yoga to improve his golf game.
The good news is that your clock does not have to stop, and even if it has, you can rewind it and start it again. As Gardner explains, life is not a mountain that has a summit, or a game with a final score.
“Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.”
The important thing is not to lose your zest for learning and growing. No matter how old or how young you are, it is never too late.
Although it’s an extreme example, a story that I read recently in the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel illustrates this well. As described in the article, Tom Galjour has Stage 4 metastatic small cell lung cancer. Two and a half years ago, he was told he had at most a few weeks to live. Soon thereafter, he was rushed to the hospital, where the doctors prescribed hospice and morphine. His friend Ted Owens called Galjour’s ex-wife and said, “You better come, too—it’s time”, at which point Tom said, “Time? Time for what? This is bull___!” as he ripped off the wires connecting him to monitors. He refused hospice and left to die at home. After suffering in bed for two weeks, he told Ted, “Hand me my guitar. Screw this, I’m not ready to go today.”
Tom managed to get out of bed and restart his life. He decided to supplement his medical care with his own approach, which included buying a $4,000 sniper rifle (hey, everybody has their own way of enjoying life) and lifting weights. At 64, weighing 150 pounds and hooked to an oxygen machine, he recently benched 240 pounds, and now is aiming for 260.
As the article says, medical research hasn’t found a correlation between “fighting spirit” and survival rates. Maybe Galjour would have survived this long even without this attitude – but would that life have contained the same level of zest and richness? He is one man who has refused to let his clock stop…
I’ve written before about one of my favorite books, Mindset by Carol Dweck. Dweck’s research has found that children grow up either with a fixed mindset and believe that intelligence and ability are innate and unchangeable, or a growth mindset which holds that we can improve and grow through effort. Her studies have shown that children with a fixed mindset, even those who are very bright, tend to protect their status as “smart” and are less likely to risk their self-image by trying difficult things; they also give up faster. In some small way, even at an early age they are at risk of letting their clocks run down.
Fortunately, a growth mindset can be taught to children at an early age; maybe it’s important to teach and reteach that lesson to adults as well. For starters, we can dispel the myth that entrepreneurship is for the young. Research has shown that there are twice as many entrepreneurs over 50 as there are under 25. In fact, adults who have a ton of life experiences under their belts may be better positioned to make wise choices about how and where to spend their energies.
I’m not referring to working harder; if you’ve gotten to the point where you can still be effective with less work, you’ve earned it. But you will do yourself a favor if you channel that extra time and energy into keeping your clock running, either through maintaining curiosity or increasing commitment to something that is important and is bigger than just you. A good example is John Spence, who recently wrote about his own effort, now that he has turned 50, to devote a part of his time over the next decade to learn how to paint.
Regardless of how successful you are, you have far more capacity in you than you have yet realized. I’ll let Gardner have the last word on this:
The thing you have to understand is that the capacities you actually develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges –and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.
Keep the clock running: stay challenged, curious and committed.
The first two articles in this series dealt with ways to benefit from exercising patience during persuasive conversations, on the time scale of seconds and minutes. Those time frames require tactical patience, and requires developing new habits, so that you can practice the skills without having to think about them in the moment. In this article, we turn our attention to the times between persuasive conversations, or the power of patience over days, weeks and months. This is strategic patience, and it may require a change in your attitude and in your thinking processes, as you navigate the intricacies of relationships, decision processes, preparations and negotiations over time.
Relationships take time. Last week, I experienced an example of strategic impatience which will probably be familiar to you. I accepted a LinkedIn connection request from someone I did not know; I was flattered because she said she enjoyed reading my blog. Then, not 24 hours after connecting, she sent me an email aggressively trying to sell her company’s services. In this case, her haste was not only ineffective, it was counterproductive. (It wasn’t a total loss for me; I learned how easy it is to remove a connection on LinkedIn)
My aggressive new friend probably knows that trusting relationships take time, but she let her hunger for immediate results override her common sense. Maybe it’s not her fault: I’m sure she’s under pressure from a sales manager who wants sales now.
We all want a lot of strong relationships at the top of the relationship pyramid, where people who are able to help you take your phone calls. But the problem for most people is that they only pay attention to others in their network when they need something. If they haven’t patiently nurtured their network by staying in touch and by giving instead of taking, that will be too late.
Acceptance time. One of the reasons that you need patience is that persuasion implies change, and change usually takes time. You may think your idea is brilliant, but you’ve forgotten that it took you time to arrive at that conclusion; you’ve forgotten what it’s like not to know what you know, and not to believe what you believe. If it took you time to get to that point, why do you think you can short-cut that process for others?
They will need time to absorb the new information, to think about it, discuss it with others, and quite frankly just to get used to the idea. It’s hard to get someone to change their mind quickly or too far in one jump. You might need patience to nudge the needle, or otherwise your efforts may fail or even backfire. Pushing too far, too fast, will activate their inner two-year-old, and they will assert their independence by shoving back.
Patience is especially critical when you are involved in complex sales. It’s natural to want to rush your customers through their decision process as quickly as possible, especially when your solution will have such an impact on their business that they leave money on the table every day that they don’t implement it. So you step over potential allies to try to get right to the C-Level where decisions are made quicker, you give incentives (i.e. drop your price) to close this quarter, and you save time on your presentations by throwing in stock slides and stale information.
Nemawashi is the Japanese name for the patient preparation of an idea by talking to all the relevant people behind the scenes, long in advance of when you need the decision to be made. It may seem like it takes extra time, but besides improving your chances of gaining agreement, it actually saves time by shaping the conditions for the agreement you want and by enabling much more rapid and focused execution once the decision is taken.
Measure twice, cut once. It’s hard to avoid a cliché on this one, but if you haven’t got time to it right the first time, when will you have time to do it over? The patience to prepare and plan is probably the most obvious – and ignored – application of the concept there is. Whether you’re preparing for a presentation, meeting, sales call or conversation, a few hours of preparation can save you weeks or months of work and worry. Whether it’s one more tough question you can anticipate, or double-checking your facts, or researching additional attendees, this can be some of the most profitable time you can spend.
Negotiation strength. In negotiations, the side in a hurry will lose, because there is no reason to accept a poor bargain until you have to. When time is on your side, impatience to get a deal closed is a form of unilateral disarmament. Unfortunately, this seems to be the dynamic at work in Afghanistan, as the US has announced a strict timetable for withdrawal by the end of 2014. As our adversaries like to say, “You have the watches, but we have the time.”
It takes patience to build patience. If this series on patience in persuasion has inspired you to work on strengthening your patience, please realize that it will take time. Patience at the tactical level is a skill, and proficiency takes time.
The only impatience you should have is to get started immediately.
