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”.