Persuasive communicators know the power of stating their Bottom Line Up Front. They state their main point immediately and then back it up with the necessary evidence. Develop the habit and you are more likely to be heard, understood and believed.
You are more likely to be heard because listeners’ gnat-like attention spans are likely to be hijacked at any time. Take too long to get to your point and you will find that impatient listeners have already started thinking about something else. If they believe what you say, it doesn’t matter so much if they tune out after they’ve heard your point. If they don’t believe, it, they may at least pay close attention to the rest, if only to refute your point. It’s like a newspaper article—even if you don’t read the whole story, you get the gist of it from the headline.
You can’t convince others unless they understand you, and putting the bottom line up front helps here as well. First, it makes you think clearly about what you want to say; in order to give your bottom line up front, you have to know what your bottom line is. Although this may sound obvious, too many speakers ignore this rule. They launch their half-baked thoughts into a monologue and think through what they are saying as it comes out. That’s where the ums and ahs, the irrelevancies and even the occasional contradiction come in, further confusing the listeners and taxing their patience. Sometimes more is actually less, because the added verbiage makes it harder for people to follow your thinking.
Second, stating your main point up front gives the listener the big picture which they can then use to better organize the additional information that follows. For example, slides which use a headline containing the main point instead of a meaningless or ambiguous title, are shown to improve user comprehension and learning of the material.
Finally, putting the bottom line up front makes you more credible. You will sound more crisp and confident, and that sends a powerful signal that you know your stuff.
By the way, if you still want to put the bottom line where it usually goes, there’s no reason you can’t also put it at the end. Repetition doesn’t hurt—as long as they already have heard the bottom line up front.
You mean, we have a choice?
I’m getting ready to go to Japan and China to run some classes, and since I haven’t been there in a couple of years, I’ve gone back to some trusty resources to help me ensure that I can speak the language of my listeners. No, I’m not referring to actually learning Japanese and Chinese, but I do want to make sure that I am sensitive to the thinking and communication styles of my hosts and students.
As the world becomes increasingly global, it becomes more and more important for communicators to be aware that there is no one best way of thinking and communicating, and unless you get at least a passing familiarity with other cultures, you are at best leaving effectiveness on the table and at worst at risk of committing a serious faux pas.[1]
When I first went to China about fifteen years ago, I had the good fortune to read a book called Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands 
While that book is still an excellent resource for customs and behaviors, another resource I’ve found to be very useful is Professor Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions website. Based on research he did for IBM during the 1970s, Hofstede isolated five cultural characteristics and measured the degree to which they apply to various countries (the definitions are my own, and are vastly simplified).
- Power distance: the amount of respect and acceptance that lower ranking people give to those of higher rank.
- Individualism: the amount of emphasis on group harmony vs. individual needs.
- Masculinity: emphasis on competition and achievement, vs. the feminine values of modesty and caring.
- Uncertainty avoidance: the amount of tolerance for ambiguity and unstructured situations.
- Long-term orientation: this dimension was added later, and describes the extent to which the members are willing to defer rewards.
It’s tough to go into too much detail in a short article, but I have found it helpful to, first, check out the US measurement for each characteristic, and then compare it to that of the country to which I am traveling. From Hofstede’s web site, here are the measurements for the three:
| USA | JAPAN | CHINA | |
| PDI |
40 |
54 |
80 |
| IND |
91 |
46 |
20 |
| MAS |
62 |
95 |
66 |
| UAI |
46 |
92 |
30 |
| LTO |
29 |
80 |
118 |
The web site also has a written explanation for each country that you might find helpful.
Understanding others often begins with understanding yourself, so a third resource that I’ve used and liked is Americans at Work: A Cultural Guide to the Can-Do People
BILL: We need to schedule the next team meeting.
HIROKO: Good idea.
BILL: How about next Tuesday morning?
HIROKO: Tuesday?
BILL: Yes, would 10:30 be OK?
HIROKO: 10:30? Is it good for you?
BILL: Yes, it’s fine.
HIROKO: I see.
After this exchange, Bill confidently enters the meeting date into the calendar, but Hiroko thinks he has made it quite clear that the meeting time is not good for him. He never directly answered Bill’s question, and never said yes.
Although these resources make for fascinating and useful reading, it’s important to keep in mind that they all address averages, not individuals. You can always find impatient Chinese, subservient Americans, and spontaneous Japanese, so don’t try to force-fit everyone you meet into a number.
Secondly, I haven’t seen research along these lines, but in my own travels I’ve noticed that frequently corporate culture exercises greater influence on how people think and communicate than national culture. I saw a dramatic demonstration of this in Japan two years ago, when I worked with two different companies in the same week. In the first, my audience consisted of salespeople, and they fit the Japanese image very closely. Later that week, I trained some engineers who were as open and challenging in the classroom as any American group I’ve worked with, shattering two stereotypes in the process.
I’m a big believer in the dignity and worth of sales as a profession, and have always had a strong desire that it be perceived that way by its practitioners and especially by its clients. On the face of it, the notion of sales as a profession seems absurd. To most people, professional is not an adjective that springs readily to mind when they think of salespeople. The stereotype: out only for themselves, unqualified, dishonest…
Who is a professional? Some answers immediately spring to mind: doctors, lawyers, military officers. What they all have in common is that they have clearly specified paths to attaining their status, and sacrosanct standards and certifications by which they must earn the title of professional. Sales is a long way from that, and I’m not sure it will ever get to that point.
Yet, just as a printed certificate is no guarantee that someone will act professionally, I believe that one can be a professional by acting like one. Professionalism does not come from a certificate; it comes from conduct and action.
What does it mean to behave and act professionally?
- Professionals put clients first. Do you look after the best interests of your clients, even if it will cost you a commission in the short term?
- Professionals keep up with a recognized and growing body of knowledge.
- Professionals act ethically at all times.
Do you personally want to be viewed as a professional? Do you want to improve the image and status of the sales profession? Act with these three things in mind, and you will be a professional.
This is how I do it…
There are hundreds of books written on leadership every year, most of which claim to analyze and isolate the traits that make someone a good leader, as if there is a secret formula for leadership that can be bottled and sold. The fact that each book’s secret formula is different does not seem to deter the writers or their readers.
There is no secret formula or combination of traits that will make anyone the best leader, and an excellent illustration of this can be found in Walter Borneman’s new book, The Admirals, which chronicles the careers of the four American admirals who achieved five-star rank while leading our nation to victory in WWII.
The highest ranking (by design, he was the first promoted to the new five-star rank, so that he would have seniority), most influential, and least heralded was William Leahy, who served during the war as FDR’s personal military adviser.
