For impact: It’s diacope baby, diacope”

by Peter Watts

Oh dear. It wasn’t my intention but I appear to be channeling Austin Powers, which for a British blogger is mortifying. Utterly mortifying. And I also seem to have gotten myself lost in a loop of this week’s topic: the diacope, which is a wonderfully useful rhetorical tool for creating  impact and soundbites. Fabulous soundbites, such as:

“Yeah, baby, yeah.”

It’s  just two words, put together in a structure of A-B-A (sorry, couldn’t resist attaching the YouTube clip).

“Bond, James Bond.”

Once again, supremely memorable, and just two words: A-B-A.

How about “Drill, baby, drill”. Suddenly it’s the 2008 election all over again, and even though Sarah Palin didn’t actually coin this particular phrase, that A-B-A carried her to fame if not to elected office.

Diacope is an easy way to slip a soundbite into your presentation. Let’s take the word “service” as an example. Here’s some differing diacopes that could land a service message:

• “Customers demand service. Exceptional service”
• “Our core value is service. Award-winning service”
• “Our focus is service. Timely service”

A-B-A creates a soundbite without an overt sense of  drama, and the first time you try out a new technique, that’s a great place to start. After a little successful experimentation though, you could try diacope’s  splashier big cousin: A-A-B-A.

In “White Christmas”, Danny Kaye uses the phrase: “The Theater, the Theater, what’s happened to the Theater?” Fans will recognize that as the opening line of “Choreography”.

Kenneth Williams meanwhile, playing Julius Caesar in “Carry on Cleo” used diacope for the fabulous: “Infamy, Infamy; they’ve all got it in for me.”, thereby abusing Shakespeare while simultaneously demonstrating that diacope can play with word sounds as much as with the words themselves.

Here are a few possible A-A-B-A business samples, this time playing with the theme of “strength”:

• “Strength, strength, industrial strength.”
• “Toughness, toughness, rock-solid toughness.”
• “Muscle, muscle, absolute muscle.”

As you read these examples, you might think  they look painfully awkward on the page, and that’s because like many rhetorical tools, diacope is more intended to be said than read. It needs the inflection of human voice to breath  life into the words. Also don’t forget that you’re  reading these in isolation and normally they would be blended into a longer phrase:

“Bandwidth, bandwidth, affordable high-capacity bandwidth. We want to put streaming video and voice services within the reach of the regular subscriber, not just those willing to pay through the nose for premium services. That’s our goal with these new high-capacity, low-cost, high-bandwidth products.”

When folded into a phrase, the A-A-B-A format gives a power-lifter lift-off to your message.

Yeah, Baby, Yeah!

(Sorry. Last time I’ll do that. Honest!)

Antithesis: An easy way to sound profound

Naughty gets you straight into presentation heaven, and antithesis proves it.

Antithesis injects poetry into your presentation. In the words of Mark Forsyth, author of the fabulous “The Elements of Eloquence”, it lets you sound profound even when stating “the bleeding obvious”.

In the world of rhetoric, antithesis is fracking; unsubtle but highly effective.

To create antithesis, take two loosely opposing statements and yoke them together. For example, from Mr. Charles Dickens:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” 

Let’s apply that approach to something simple, such as the weather. Right now I’m looking out of the window of a New England coffee-shop. It’s snowing:

“It was exciting weather, it was depressing weather.”

Profound, if confusingly vague. You might be wondering what use is a technique so muzzy to a business presenter, so let’s step it up a gear:

“Some solutions work perfectly. Other solutions do not.”

As Mark Forsyth suggests, this is indeed “the bleeding obvious” but it’s a wonderful jumping-off spot from which you can now talk about how your own solution belongs firmly in the former category.

“Some initiative are destined to soar, while others are doomed to sink.”

“There are days when it all goes smoothly. There are days when it all falls apart.”

Now try taking commonplace sayings and using poetic license to cheat your way to something witty:

For example,

“A stitch in time saves nine. A stitch in 19 suggests paranoia”

“To forgive is divine. To want payback is human.”

….and our entry point:

“If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, is the path to heaven paved with naughty thoughts?” 

These final examples aren’t the world’s strictest examples of antithesis, but they have a certain fun quality to them. They take a commonplace saying, from which everybody assumes a certain sentiment (smugness and/or condescension), and then flip that sentiment on it’s back for a surprise ending. Surprise endings are good. They keep the audience engaged and make things memorable.

Presentations remembered use techniques like antithesis. Presentations forgotten, do not.

Opinion is a persuasive tool

Audiences, be they customers or colleagues, act when presentations are delivered with the fist-punch impact of belief. They remember presenters who deliver not just the facts, but the flavour of their opinions.

I’m pleased and delighted to be able to say, that as of this month I’m going to be writing for the business website ManagingAmericans.com. My first piece is live on their blog today. It’s all about opinion, and why it’s a good idea to not just have one, but to be out loud and proud about it when you want to persuade an audience.

I’ll be talking about why so many presenters are reluctant to stray from the facts-only format, and then examining three easy ways to use opinions within your next piece of persuasive speaking.

Please drop by the blog by clicking here. Come share your opinion!

Sales presentation outline

by Peter Watts

Here are eight ideas for creating a sales presentation outline that targets your sales message onto this specific customer, in this specific moment.

No two customers are alike, so time spent customizing your outline will infinitely raise your chances of success.

1. Link to the sales cycle

What stage of their buying cycle is the customer currently in?

Early in the sales cycle: Address broad issues

If the customer is early in their buying cycle, and you haven’t yet had the opportunity to clarify their exact needs, then address your presentation towards how your product meets challenges encountered by customers in that industry.

Mid-point in the sales cycle: Targeted problems and pay-offs

By now you will have had meetings with the customer and understand their specific issues. Tie your presentation into how you specifically address those issues.

Late in the sales cycle: Reassurance

When the presentation is the final stage before the customer makes their decision, it becomes more about reassurance that you are the best vendor to go with. Focus onto evidence of other successful implementations and after-sales support.

2. Know your key message

As part of your preparation, ask yourself what would be the one thing that you want every audience member to be saying as they leave the room. Write that message down, and ensure it is no longer than the length of a standard Twitter message; 140 characters or less.

Link every slide that you use and every phrase that you speak directly back to that key message.

One of my golden rules for presenting is “Never underestimate the ability of an audience to completely miss the point!”, so don’t be afraid to repeat your key message. The more ways you can link it into the presentation, the more likely it is that the audience will lock onto it and remember.

3. Link product features to key message: Three at most

Many standard sales presentation decks come with slides that list key product features. These slides can be deadly for any presenter who attempts to read their way through those lists.

Know in advance which specific features on the slide relate to the key points that you want the customer to appreciate, and address those points alone. Ideally address just two features. Address three as an absolute maximum.

4. Get ready for objections

What is the sales objection that you least want to encounter during your presentation?

Anticipate that objection and prepare an answer for it in advance. If you can deal with that objection, then you can deal with anything!

5. Ask for the business

You are there to sell, so lead by telling the customer exactly that! Use phrases such as “I would very much like to be able to welcome you as a customer” in order to demonstrate that you want their business and are prepared to work for it.

6. Prepare a clean hand-over

How will you guarantee that all who attend are left with easy ways to follow-up with you, or even better, with easy ways for you to follow-up with them?

Ideally, obtain attendee contact details and then follow-up by phone or e-mail to invite additional questions. Start a discussion!

7. Keep it short

Many sales presentations go on far too long. This means that customers tune-out and the key information you want to communicate becomes drowned in a morass of slides and extraneous details.

Nobody was ever shot for a having a presentation that was too short. Many though have lost the deal by having presentations that were too long. Be brutal in editing your presentation to bring it down to the shortest time possible.

8. Stand-out by customizing

The common factor amongst sales presentations that fail to win the business is that they are all standard presentations; a standard company slide deck delivered rote because the sales person didn’t care enough to customize for the customer.

This presentation is possibly the first time that this prospective customer has encountered the service-levels of your company, and in this presentation moment, you are those service levels.

Every moment that you spend customizing your presentation outline to reflect that customer, their industry, and their needs, is time well spent. It is time that shows you care. It is time that shows the customer they can trust you. It is time that shows you want their business.

Related articles

• Sales presentation strategy (speak2all.wordpress.com)
• Sales presentations: Understatement makes a great big statement (speak2all.wordpress.com)
• Sales arguments that build presentations (speak2all.wordpress.com)
• Sales pitch strategy (speak2all.wordpress.com)
• Top Five Sales Presentation Mistakes (heavyhittersales.typepad.com)

Sales presentations: Understatement makes a great big statement

“Brits aren’t the most uncivilised people in the World.”

By Peter Watts

Imagine you’re at a cultural event where representatives of national travel agencies are pitching their various tourism opportunities. How would you react when you heard that British sales statement?

A big chunk of the audience would respond with a mental process something like this:

 “Well of course you’re not uncivilized…..   There are lots of nations way more uncivilised than you…….   In fact, now I think of it, you’re really way up there towards the top league when it comes to being civilised. …….   And just to prove it, look at how wonderfully self-deprecating you are, you fabulously civilised little nation you!”

Now let’s consider another representative, only this one uses phrases such as “We’re the biggest….” or “We’re the best….” or “We’re the greatest……”.

The typical audience response to these great big claims?  An unspoken but instant view of “No you’re not!” This response may also be followed by one of the many local epithets of disdain that give language such tremendous colour.

It’s a challenge faced by sales presenters. You need to establish credibility for yourself and your product, but big-claims make the presenter sound bigheaded and audiences don’t like a bighead.

There is a solution. It’s a classical speech form called Litotes, which is used for dealing with exactly this problem. The heart of the technique is to express greatness by using a double negative such as “not unattractive”. It’s a global technique found in languages as diverse as English, Dutch, Italian, and Chinese.

Here are some examples of Litotes forms that you might use in a sales presentation:

Litotes sales statement:	Perceived by customer as:
“We’re not the smallest X in the business”	“We are the largest X in the business”
“We are not unrecognized for X”	“We’re award winning for X”
“We’re not unfamiliar with X”	“We have an intimate knowledge of X”
“It’s not unknown for X to be said about us.”	“X is said about us. You’re going to be saying it too!”

Litotes enable you to shout to the rooftops about your product’s major strengths, and do so without risking arrogance.

In terms of sales presentation structure, this isn’t a technique to either lead with or finish on. In those two prime locations you want big bold statements, whereas litotes is a guided missile of an understatement.  Use it during the middle sections of a pitch.

In this position the litotes appearance of self-deprecating modesty will keep your product’s credibility and your own personal likability warmly bubbling in the mind of the audience.

Sales presentation strategy

By Peter Watts

What is your primary goal in making a sales presentation? It’s to sell something.

So why do so many sales-presenters try to conceal the fact? You might be amongst them. Do your sales presentations open with phrases such as:

• “Your success is important, and we’re going to look at how our products can help you be even more successful.”

• “We’ve helped many organizations achieve benefits, and in this presentation we’ll explore how we could help you to do the same”

• “The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate how our products offer you the best value solution.”

All commendable sentiments, but also great big honking fibs!

A lot of salespeople, especially the salespeople with the really big impressive job titles such as “Senior Strategic Account Director” or some other business-card hokum, have internalized the message that selling is just a little bit dirty. To be after the customer’s cash is sleazy and liable to make them doubt your credibility.

Actually no. If you want to make the audience doubt your credibility then attempting to conceal the primary purpose of your presentation is a far better place to start!

You’re there to sell and the customer is there to buy.

It’s actually two highly compatible agendas.

Within public speaking there is a topic called ethos, and this is all about credibility. As public speaking expert Andrew Dlugan explains, ethos is everything you include in a presentation to show that you are credible in your subject, trustworthy as a speaker, and compatible with the audience viewpoint.

There are things that you can do throughout the sections of a presentation to build-up your ethos as a speaker, but nowhere is ethos more important than the section right at the beginning. This is where the audience asks themselves: “Can we trust this person?”

If you’ve just started your presentation with a sweet sounding but rather transparent fib about your primary purpose, then what do you think you just did to your ethos level?

You avoided any words to do with sales because you didn’t want to sound sleazy, but instead you’ve made yourself sound evasive. And sleazy!

Here are some ideas for professional ways to tell the customer that you’re interested in the colour of their money:

• “I would love to be able to welcome you as a customer.”

• “I would be delighted to have your business.”

• “I want to demonstrate how buying our product will meet your goals.”

All of these statements say “I want your business”, and all of these statements start with the first person “I”. This is important. It’s you that’s standing in front of the customer, and you that is asking them to believe the words that are about to come. Even if you are representing a larger organization, using the word “I” gives meat and ownership to those words.

Now for the little bit of blog-magic. Take any of those three phrases in red, and stick them in front of  any of the three earlier phrases in blue. The result sounds a lot stronger doesn’t it.

By being upfront, you create transparency. Transparency creates trust. Trust creates credibility.

Credibility creates a winning sales presentation.

Sales pitch strategy

By Peter Watts

To succeed in your sales pitch, use common ground

Audiences like to believe that presenters see, hear, and feel the world as they do. When this occurs they become more inclined to give credibility to the presenter’s sales message.

How much thought do you put into selecting the most appropriate persona for your presentation?

Persona is the technique of deciding which personal or professional characteristics will give you the most connection to the customer audience.

Ask yourself two questions:

1. Where do I have common ground with my audience?

2. In which areas am I different from the audience, thereby signalling incompatible agendas?

Successful sales presentations amplify similarity, while minimising difference.

Let’s take a ten second case-study: Imagine you are the Sales Director of an IT company. We’ll call it TekHouse. You’ve been invited to speak to a conference of IT Directors on the subject of data security. If you win them over, this audience could represent a sea of new business.

Step 1. Identify the optimal persona for the audience

We naturally have multiple persona that we slip into throughout the day. Think of the subtle variations in behaviour and attitude that you would demonstrate when alone with your partner, or alone with your children, or alone with your boss, or with your colleagues, or with your friends from outside of work, or with your parents. Shakespeare had it absolutely right: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.”

Whilst remaining true to who we are, we naturally swap the masks of our persona in order to match with whatever audience is before us. Except, when we make a sales presentation. Then we tend to forget all about persona, and instead go with the role of “company representative”. That particular mask however, is not the only one that we could select, and might not offer the best match with the audience.

For example, as Sales Director of TekHouse, you have multiple persona possibilities:

TekHouse Representative: This will win you points with audience members who are already fans of TekHouse, but distance you from anybody who prefers your competition. From the perspective of winning new customers, all you’ll achieve is preaching to the converted.

Sales Director: All of the audience are IT Directors. None of them are Sales Directors. Majoring on the fact that you are “Sales Director of TekHouse” will therefore only create distance.

A business user of IT products: This persona identifies you as part of the pesky community that your audience has to support and police. Not good.

A member of the IT industry: This persona brings you closer to the audience. Everybody in the room is a member of the the IT industry. This persona allows you a modicum of common bond.

A business director, with all the people issues, budget issues, and time pressure that the role of being a director involves: Managing people, budgets, and time is a topic that unites everybody in the room. A pitch constructed around this area of shared ground will maximise the audience’s view of you as somebody who shares their concerns and day-to-day reality.

Step 2. Adapt your presentation to that persona

Without radically altering the sales presentation that you intend to make, channel it towards the focus-point of that shared persona. Which of your talking points can be illustrated by speaking from the view of a business director? Where can you include broad collective pro-nouns that start with phrases such as “We can all understand…”, or “We’ve all experienced..”

Step 3. Having picked the persona, stick to it

Personas need to be consistent. If you decide to make an ad hoc quip about how annoying  you find it to remember IT passwords, then ask yourself which persona you’ve engaged. Who complains about changing passwords? Users do, and for this particular audience, “users” is the collective noun for folks that life would be easier without. Especially users who forget their passwords!

Identify what common characteristics you share with your next audience, and then let those characteristics become the basis for shared success.

Step 4. Remember: It’s child’s-play

Think about how much pleasure small children get from simple shape-matching games. Maybe you’re even one of those people who can remember that far back into their own childhood. Shape matching is something that we started to do naturally from the age of two. As adults the same aptitude continues. We verbalise it with phrases such as “a square peg in a round hole” when we want to denote a situation that doesn’t work.

To bring the skill of persona into your pitch strategy is fundamentally as simple as asking what shape the audience is, and making yourself into as similar a shape as possible.

Create common ground, and the common ground will create pitch credibility.

Papal Update: March 14th

A new Pope has been announced and much press comment has been attracted by his conscious usage of the little used title of “Bishop of Rome”.

Like any vast and hierarchical bureaucracy, the Vatican can either support or frustrate a leader in their attempt to realise their vision for the Church. In selecting this persona, we’re seeing the new Pope exercising strategic awareness of which audience he must first win over, that being the Cardinals and Bishops of the Catholic Church.

The persona chosen is saying “I am one of you”.

Book review: Your Best Just Got Better

Why this is a must-read productivity guide

by Peter Watts

It’s a pleasure to review a book that has changed not only how I achieve results, but most importantly has affected the results that I choose to achieve.

This is a book that you can immediately gain from.

Training to give presentations that make a powerful impact on audiences is akin to training as an athlete. It takes dedication, practice, the ability to execute on that practice, and above all it requires the drive to push beyond your comfort levels. It’s an iterative process of strengthening skills and reaching for the next stage. If every presentation is just 1% better than the last, then you know you are improving as a speaker.

This is the approach that Jason Womack takes in his personal productivity guide “Your Best Just Got Better”. I’ve read many such books, and this is the first one that has made a permanent change to the way that I work.

The story starts with what Jason calls “MITs”. MITs are your Most Important Things. Across the course of “Your Best Just Got Better” he urges you to consider these areas in close-up. What are they? Why are they important? To what outcomes are they leading you?

He then sets out a number of ways to keep you on track (or in my case: get yourself back on track) towards hitting those goals.

Here are just a few of the things that I do differently, every day, as a result of reading “You’re Best Just Got Better”.

15 minutes: Set a timer

I now set a timer for work activities. I decide upfront how long I’m going to spend on a task, set the timer on my phone, and then concentrate completely for that allotted period. There’s a timer running right now for example. 30 minutes to complete the first draft of this blog.

Jason encourages you to work in 15 minutes blocks, so this is a two-block activity.

The running timer enables you to establish what your daily productive base-line looks like. From that point of awareness you can then find ways day-by-day to increase the number of 15-minute blocks that are truly productive for you. Each day you get to see how your best just became that little bit better.

Team You

Another idea from the book is to be highly aware of the people in your network that you rely on in order to do your job effectively, and to help you move to the next stages in your career. Those networks are wider and richer than we might initially realize. I now consciously schedule “Team Peter” time to make sure I’m identifying and building those relationships. This one exercise alone has already made my life as a travelling presenter into an easier and more emotionally rewarding experience

ABR – Always Be Ready

A great deal can be achieved with those little 15 minute Lego-blocks of time, so long as you can utilize them when unexpected delays such as late flights or late meetings disrupt your schedule. One simple idea in the book is to carry in your bag a small number of ready to mail Thank You cards. Having those cards at the ready, means that when delays hit, you can use the time to send a hand-written thank you to somebody in your network. Foot-tapping time becomes team-building time.

Know Your Tools

This was another one that has really helped me. I’m notorious for buying software and learning just enough functionality to get me out on the road. At that point my learning stops, and I limp along with the product as best I can.

I now use another of those 15-minute blocks, just once per week, to learn something new about my software tools. Gradually. Iteratively. Week-by-week. Take Scrivener for example, the professional writing software that I treated myself to last year. Just one 15-minute block per week to learn new Scrivener skills has made a huge difference to my productivity.

Jason Womack 

Finally we have the author himself. Jason Womack gets very involved with his readers. He has a formidably active blog, twitter presence, and a weekly podcast. There is a lot of information out there to support you as you read the book, and if you fire Jason a question, he’ll send you back an answer.

My timer tells me that I’ve now been writing for 29 minutes and 15 seconds. Time to sign-off, other than to say:

Presenting is a rewarding and challenging skill, and it takes a focus that “Your Best Just Got Better” can prime you to achieve.

“Your Best Just Got Better” is available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It is published by Wiley and available in a variety of formats including e-books and audio

Broc Edwards guest-post: Downton Abbey and dealing with the FutureNow

The Broc Edwards guest post edition!

by Peter Watts

Following on from our recent Downton Abbey article, here is a guest-post from Broc Edwards over at the Fool With A Plan leadership blog. Broc puts forward eight topics to keep in mind as like the inhabitants of Downton Abbey, we all continue to face a changing world around us.

fool (with a plan)

I really enjoy Downton Abbey and I’m super excited about the new season. A friend turned me on to it this Fall and my wife and I quickly watched the first two seasons. I really shouldn’t be able to relate to it – after all, it’s a period drama (soap opera?) about British aristocracy and their servants in the early 1900s.

Except it’s not. It’s about humans dealing with the inevitable change of FutureNow. The tried and true traditions of the 19^th Century have been blown up and burned down in the onslaught of change in the early 20^th Century. Industrialization, automobiles, air travel, women’s rights, democracy, revolutionaries, class systems (and duties and obligations), a world fighting a new kind of war and the horrors it brings all get thrown in the societal blender. The characters, rich or poor, weak or powerful, are just humans trying to find…

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Round. Nick Clegg’s Conference Speech Problem

by Peter Watts

Nick Clegg of the British Liberal Democratic Party, chose yesterday to forgo the stage for his leader’s speech at the Party Convention and to instead speak from a little round podium that had been placed in amongst the audience. He spoke quite literally in the round, with people all around him.

Was this a good style for conference speaking?

In one word: No

It was a horrible, horrible mistake for anyone performing a keynote. If an organizer ever suggests it to you, fire them immediately and get someone who knows what they’re doing.

Here’s why:

Leader of the Band

We want leaders in both politics and business who look like they’re capable of striding the world stage. To speak from a little raised podium makes you look more like the guy conducting the village band in the park on a Sunday afternoon.

While speaking from “amongst the people” might appear to create a nice contrast to the big staging of the big political parties, the contrast fails because here it merely suggested that the Liberal’s are a little party. The corollary thought to this is that they are a little party, with little ideas. And having merely little ideas they are all the more likely to be shoved-around, sat-on, and eventually sliced-off by their far larger and more aggressive coalition partners, the Conservative Party.

They’re Behind You….

Golden rule of speaking: Always look at your audience. Speaking “in the round” like this guarantees that at any given moment, there are a chunk of them that you can’t see.

If you do ever find yourself in a position where you have to speak in the round, then one approach to still being able to look at the whole audience can be the Square Dance.

Rather than revolving on the spot, which looks odd, the speaker moves through the four points of a square. It’s walk two steps, speak 60 – 90 seconds. Walk two steps to 90 degrees, speak 60 – 90 seconds, and repeat. Just be careful with your movements. Get the timing or direction wrong and you fall off your platform.

For Nick Clegg however, the Square Dance wasn’t an option. The TV cameras were the true target audience, and because they were all pointing in one direction, the speaker had to do so as well.

I don’t know how Nick Clegg felt about having all those people behind him, but had I been the one speaking, they would have been making me feel mighty uncomfortable.

To speak from the floor and achieve that amongst-the-audience feeling is a tremendously powerful technique. Don’t throw away the stage though in attempting to achieve it.

Keep the stage. Come down from it. Stand immediately in front of it.

And keep the whole audience, immediately in front of you.