Sales Training Blog

Start your next sales presentation with a story not a joke

 For those of us making persuasive presentations, there is nothing funny about the cliché that says you should start every presentation with a joke.

Stories, both funny and serious, are the way to begin a persuasive presentation because they engage an audience and invite an empathetic response. When you tell a story about the most embarrassing moment in your life, audience members either start thinking about a similar event in their lives or imagine being put into your story’s situation.

I'm not telling  you to avoid jokes, humor is one of the most powerful persuasive tools a presenter has. It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the time and task. Humor has the power to invite an audience to like you, and lighten an audience’s critical thinking and thus resistance to change. Powerful things.

But as you start a persuasive presentation your priorities should be different. You MUST get your audience INVOLVED right from the start. This is where stories are just more powerful.

I did a survey about this for my book, "Presentations That Change Minds."

In the survey, 41.8% of presenters said they begin their business presentations with a humorous story, and 37.8% with a serious story. Only 19.3% begin presentations with a joke and only 14 % of presenters  jump right into their content without any opening.

A you plan your next presentation, look for a story that get your audience involved with your subject matter.    

Click on the chart to see the survey results.

Link to the press release from PR Web

A dating game presentation w/Steve Jobs and Bill Gates!

Now that Steve Jobs is back at Apple I look forward to seeing the master presenter back in action. Looking back, it's fun to see Jobs using a tried and true presentation approach many salespeople use when their content is not enough to hold an audiences attention of pouring your content into the format of a popular TV game show. These days Jeopardy! is a favorite. Here is a great video clip from 1983 where we see a young Jobs as the host of "The Dating Game" with a young Bill Gates as a contestant!  

 

Jobs vs Gates. How Jobs puts his idea in your mind, not just the screen

There's a great post contrasting the graphic presentation styles of Bill Gates and Steven Jobs on the Presentation Zen blog. Blogger Garr Reynolds roots for Jobs' use of minimal graphics over Gates' slides with more complex information.

While the graphic contrast is striking, I'd like to add a bit about how the content strategy is very different. Jobs uses his slides in a sequence to involve his audience.

Take the challenge of selling a new idea that emerges when three or four elements combine. The common approach that Bill Gates (as well as 90% of presenters I have seen) is using above is to show all elements on the screen with arrows linking them and then explain how each comes together to form the new idea.
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Steve Jobs took this same "several elements create a new idea" challenge, but instead, used a sequence of slides to get the audience more involved during his recent presentation that introduced the iPhone.

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As Jobs returned to the stage at MacWorld, possibly to introduce a new product, he surprised the audience by announcing that Apple was introducing not one, but three revolutionary new products.
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He went on to list all three (shown left 1 to 3) calling each "revolutionary" as he did.
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Then as the screen (4) showed the three new products just named, Jobs repeated those product names with a chant like pacing, "An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator."

As he did, the graphics representing the three products morphed into a single 3D shape (5) which started to slowly rotate in the center of the screen.
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Mid way through Job's third repetition of the new products, ("...an iPod, a phone...") he stopped and looked knowingly at the audience. The audience laughed appreciatively. Jobs paused and asked, "Are you getting it?
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Jobs held up a single finger (6) and said,”These are not three separate devices this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone. Today Apple is going to re-invent the phone, and here it is!"
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Bill Gates showed the relationship between the elements of his idea by displaying them on a screen graphically linked with arrows.

Steven Jobs used a series of simple slides to surprise and involve the audience and ultimately to let them "see" the idea in their minds. Jobs never actually displayed an "elements with linking arrows" graphic to explain his idea, instead the idea was build in the collective minds of his audience, one slide at a time.

Watch Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone 
 

An advertising revalation

I've been blogging about marketing and advertising for years but just had a revelation...advertising is more fun when it is for a product you are personally involved with! So it is with the White Paper, "The Coming Change in Social Media Business" which I researched and wrote for Social Media Today. The White Paper sponsor, NeuStar, liked the project enough to also sponsor an ad campaign to get the word out. Included are ads on LinkedIn and Facebook, the Lucid Media and Federated Media ad networks, as well as ads on the Smart Brief, IT Toolbox, and LifeHacker.com web sites.

Download the white paper for FREE 

Advertising is fun!!!

Free Videos: How to sell through a recession

Josh Gordon, is interviewed by Susanna Pollack, Sr.VP at BBC worldwide.

In three interviews on recession selling Gordon reveals how to rethink your selling mission, reorganize your sales territories, and develop persuasion strategies.  

 

Part 1(Time 10:46)

A recession is more than just selling in a slow time of sales, it is a highly strategic time where sellers who understand the patterns can gain advantage.  

 

Part 2 (Time 10:38)

Reorganizing and refocusing for recession selling

 

See all the training videos

 

Part 3: (Time 15:46) Persuasion in a time of recession. Also, download Josh's award-winning report, "What is Your Recession Sales Strategy"

The series is part of the "Access to the Experts" video series produced by The Customer Collective and sponsored by Oracle. Other sessions available through the series include interviews with the great Jill Konrath, CEO of of Selling to Big Companies, on keeping customers loyal in a recession, and Richard Nacht, CEO of Respond Media, on using social media in the sales process. FREE registration for the Customer Collective, a social network for sales and marketing professionals, gains access to all the programs.  

Go to the site.

New study on where social media is going

Social media is currently most often used as a general communications tool in public relations and marketing,  but there is a major shift underway.  In my research for the new white paper The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications, I found that companies are now viewing social media as a primary tool of customer engagement, enabling lead generation, immediate customer contact, and customer interaction.

This study is the first to measure a coming shift in how companies will use social media.
There are several factors driving this trend.

First, with more people spending time on online social media sites, companies are realizing a lot of their customers can be found there.

Second, the shift to online communications has made it easier for potential customers to dodge traditional lead generation and sales strategies. Social media can help break the ice.

Finally, a recession is causing every company to rethink its customer engagement strategy.

The report offers a overview of the shift toward uses in social media as well as measurements specific to Twitter and social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Along the way, I had to good fortune to interview social media gurus Brian Solis, Shel Holtz, Dan Schnabel, Ari Herzog, and Dan McCarthy.

If you are involved in the business side of social media this could be an extremely important trend to get in front of.

I am excited to have worked with Robin Carey and the Social Media Today team to be the first to share these findings.

Download the study here.  No registration required. 

Free sales training videos!!

Wow. The folks at the social media site, "The Customer Collective" have out done themselves. 

They gathered three sales trainers (me among them) to share wisdom for FREE. The incomparable Jill Konrath (from "Selling to Big Companies") shows how to keep customers loyal in a recession. Social Media wizard Richard Nacht talks about using social media in sales, and I talk about strategic selling in a recession.  

To access all the FREE videos all you have to register for a FREE membership in "The Customer Collective," something you should do anyways.

All the session were produced by The Customer Collective and sponsored by Oracle. Great FREE stuff!

View the FREE videos

    

We have nothing to fear but fear of the recession itself

Scared clients don’t buy. As salespeople in a recession we need to fight the fear. Economic fear is a group thing. When the stock market tumbles, as everyone watches, panic and fear spread. Now that signs of economic recovery are in the air, our job is to see that a new message spreads.

New York Times has provided us with a FREE 25 page study we can use to help us convince clients not to be scared. The study is actually about President Obama’s performance ratings, but will ignore the politics and focus on the results of just three questions that tell our story:

First, while the recession fearing mob may be paralyzed, that same mob TODAY believes it is better off economically than their parents were in their day. Recession and all, 33% of Americans say they are much better, and 25% say somewhat better off than than their parents were at their age. Put in this perspective, maybe things are not that bad after all.
Second, people are actually much more worried about their jobs than the economy. While there are gloomy economic stories in the media, they are not what is driving the fear. If you want to know about fear, think about the job market and ignore the headlines. Currently, 44% of of Americans are "Very" concerned about job loss.   
Finally, the American people are far more confident that things are on the right track, and by a huge margin. In January 2009 only 15% of Americans thought the country was on the right track, 79% wrong track. As of April; 38% right track, 53% wrong track. Still not great numbers but a huge increase in just a few months.    

Show your client the data. Do not get into the politics. Sharing these numbers is about showing that confidence is being restored. If you get into issues of gloating Democrats or defensive Republicans the point will be missed.  

After you share the numbers, then ask a simple question, "Could the mob fear of the recession be fading?"

Download the whole study for free:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/images/nytint/docs/new-york-times-cbs-news-poll-on-the-approval-ratings-of-president-barack-obama/original.pdf

Change recession tactics; become an agent of optimism

 It's time to start talking about recession end game strategies for your clients. Now that there are encouraging economic signs, your job is to share documentation of them, share optimism, and then ask the killer question, "What will your company be like when the recession is over?

Here is something to share: 

 Last weeks often contrarian Economist made a cautiously optimistic case that the US Economy is improving. The article ticked through housing, economic data, and stocks to find positive signs in each. I recommend printing out and sharing this article with all your clients. There has been plenty of bad economic news, as sales professionals our mission must be to bring forward the positive. 

Here are highlights from those three areas: 

The housing bubble:

 "The current recession has broken many of the rules of business cycles, but not this one: when something gets cheap enough, buyers emerge.

America’s housing bubble seems mostly deflated. According to the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city index, house prices through January were down 29% from their all-time peak. Relative to incomes, houses are now 10% undervalued, and relative to rents they are fairly valued, thinks Paul Dales of Capital Economics, a consultancy... "

A variety of financial statistics: 

"In March factory purchasing managers were their least gloomy about new orders since last August. Vehicle sales rose 8% in March from February. New claims for unemployment insurance have stopped rising. Gross domestic product, which shrank at a 6.3% annual rate in the fourth quarter, probably shrank at a similar rate in the first, but the composition of the drop was more encouraging; it was driven not by the collapse in consumer spending, but by sinking output as businesses sought to bring inventories into line with lower sales. Second-quarter growth “has a good chance of being positive”, according to Ian Morris and Ryan Wang, economists at HSBC, though “the risks…are still huge.”

The stock market:

"As investors have shifted their economic outlook from catastrophic to merely grim, the stock market has shot higher, by 19% on April 1st from its 12-year low on March 9th. Like houses, stocks look cheap."

Read the entire article, "A faint sound of applause,"from last week's Economist.

The Customer Collective rules Germany for a week, again

ZDNet.com boasts the "Web's largest library of free technical white papers" has a system that rates the popularity of white papers and by editorial category and posts the rankings through their German portal.

  All last week, the white paper/research study I researched and wrote for The Customer Collective, "What Is Your Recession Sales Strategy?" was the top ranked white paper in the "Finanzmamagement" (English: "Finance management) category, no small feat considering there were over 190 white papers in that category at the time.  

In addition the white paper was carried on most major business publication web sites, including Forbes, Business Week, Entrepreneur, Inc, Fast Company, Sales & Marketing Management, Internet Week, Information Age, Sales Management 2.0, and Smart BIZ .

In April 2009, The Customer Collective was approached by Kraft Foods, asking permission to use this study for the sales training of their sales directors in 64 countries.

6/8/09 UPDATE: Got legs! Today, "What Is Your Recession Sales Strategy?" bounced up and is ranked #1 again, beating out new crop of current white papers posted into this category (see frame grab).     

Download the white paper for FREE on the Customer Collective Website

See a list of over 100 other sites where "Where Is Your Recession Sales Strategy" is posted. 

See the white paper listed on the"Finance management" list on the ZDNet.de site