Tricky area in sales, showmanship. The word has a certain odor about it that reeks of fake, duplicity, con game, spruker, carnival barker, etc. Yet, like storytelling, this is an important part of the sales professional’s repertoire. Clients are card carrying members of the Great Guild Of Skeptics. They are highly doubtful about salespeople’s claims. We need to bring some powerful persuasion techniques to the fore.

This isn’t making up information to snow the buyer or doing a bait and switch, between what they think they are getting and what we actually deliver. This means using our communication skills to highlight the key points that will persuade the buyer, that what we are offering will help them and is in their best interests. What we say has to be true, but we don’t need to say it in a flat, lifeless, mundane or boring way.

Showmanship would involve using persuasive word pictures to draw out the scene.A favourite example of showmanship is the car tyre puncture repair story. This is used to illustrate to salespeople the importance of showmanship, when explaining choices of action versus no-action to clients. Having a need to buy and buying are not always well paired together in the mind of the client. The example of the gas stand is used, where the service attendant notices the front left hand tyre of the car has a slow leak and offers to fix the puncture in 10 minutes. The client refuses the offer, because they are in a hurry and drive off.

The same scenario is used again, but this time the attendant employs some word pictures and showmanship.

So the attendant says:

“Mr. Customer, I notice your front left hand tyre has a slow leak. We can repair that puncture in 10 minutes”.

The client refuses, because they are too busy to spend the ten minutes repairing the leaking tyre. At this point the attendant doesn’t simply let the buyer leave, but says instead:

“Previously, we had another customer here with the same issue – a slow leak in their tyre. Unfortunately they were also too busy to fix it. We saw a report later on the nightly news about a terrible accident.

Apparently that same car tyre blew out while they were on the highway. It caused the car to flip and roll over three times. We saw the tangled mess of what was left of the car from the television station’s helicopter video. It was total tragedy.

The television reporter said the whole family of four, including the two young kids, died in that accident. When we heard that, we all felt really bad, because we didn’t get them to fix the leak when we had the chance.

We could have prevented that accident…. It will take us ten minutes to fix your puncture, let’s do it now, so we will all feel a lot better and safer”

Notice the use of very emotive language to drive home the cost of no action. The tone is subdued but still powerful. We need to be looking for ways in which we can contrast the plus of using our solution, against the minus of doing nothing or using our competitor’s solution.

Think about what you sell and what are some ways you can illustrate to the buyer that there are opportunity costs to not buying from you and buying now. Look for powerful word pictures to draw this out for the buyer. This is showmanship and we must become masters of communicating value to the client.

In our lives, we have harvested a lot of experiences, which we can use in our presentations. If we were better organized, we might have had the forethought to keep notes, so it would be easier to refer to them when we are looking for material. Well there is a hint right there – keep notes from now on. You can just jot down in your Evernote or something similar, the key points you will want to recall later in a talk.

Storytelling is not some Hollywood script writer level requirement for speakers. It is just telling our stories from real life and the lives of people we have observed. We can also share and acknowledge incidents from authors who have captured their experiences on paper, but in our own words. We just have to be observant and be able to see a good connection between a point we are making in our presentation and an example where we can relate it as a story.

We know with planning our talk we should start with the conclusion of our talk first, boiled down to its essence. We then pick up the main points we are going to use to illustrate why our viewpoint or our conclusion is correct. We then design the opening to grab people’s attention, amidst the mad world they live in, which seems to permanently distract them.

Now when we are fleshing out the key points we want to make, in the main body of the presentation, we are searching for evidence to back up our claims. This comes in the form of data, expert authority and stories to make the point come to life. This is the time to drop into the vault of our collection of stories and find good matches between the point and the story.

This may seem hard at first, but when you reflect on why you think something, about an issue there is usually a good reason for it. Something happened which you witnessed or were aware of, which influenced your take on the matter. There will be a story in there somewhere. Usually these are either successes or failures.

We can all become careful observers of things going on in our business lives, which we can sew into the fabric of what we will be saying in our talk. There is no shortage of actors and characters out there in businessland from which we can draw. Let’s start our collection today if we don’t have one and keep adding to it, if we do. Some of this stuff you couldn’t make up by the way, which is always exciting. The point is to capture it and employ it.

Imagine my surprise, as an expert in sales training, when I meet salespeople who have not spent even one second trying to master the bridging of the gap between value and cost. Sitting in the audience at a speaker event, next to a thirtyish Japanese sale’s guy, we talked about how he does his sales.

He told me he contacts a lead, gets an appointment, shows up and explains the service and submits a quote. Really? On the blank side of meal menu, I mapped out the elements of the sales process for him. Prepare for the meeting and focus your intention on one thing – getting the re-order, not just the solitary sale. Build trust through establishing rapport. Create interest by asking extremely well designed questions to understand the client’s needs. Now tell the client whether we can help them or not and if we can, explain the how of our solution. There may be points of insufficient clarity, concerns, hesitations or downright objections to what we are proposing. We need to deal with those before we proceed to ask for the order, and then we do the follow up to deliver the service or good.

I then asked him what does he do when the buyer says, “too expensive”. His answer had me reeling. With a cherubic mien, he told me he offered to “drop the price”. Incredulous, I asked “by how much do you usually drop it?”. He quoted 20% as the number. There were four other sales people in his team and if that is how they roll over there, then that is an expensive first response to client pushback on pricing.

Here is the snapper – do you know what is happening inside your team? Are they also dropping the price immediately as their first counter to an objection on the money?

He should have said, “why do you say that” when told it was too expensive? Was the price objection genuine, a ruse, sport negotiation, time bound, or irrelevant because they haven’t seen enough value yet to understand the price point? There will be one highest priority element in the too expensive objection. It might be the actual volume of cash involved, budget allocation timings, internal competing project competition concerns, etc. Which one is it – we need to know.

The moral of this story is to take a very detailed look at what your salespeople are doing. Don’t confuse seven years of sales experience with one year of experience seven times. Also, don’t imagine that they have a process, that they know how to explain the value or to deal with objections. Based on what we see in our sales training classes and talking with clients, in Japan, the chances of that being the case are very, very, very low.

Japan loves rote learning and parents will pay cram schools to get their kids fully tuned up and on to the education escalator. Rote learning and exam technique is the standard educational approach in Japan right through to starting University classes. At University, unless you are trying for very specific careers like medicine, the elite bureaucracy or some job that requires you to pass a national exam, then the next four years are a type of Club Med for undergraduates.

In the internet and AI age, when anything you want to know can be found through a search engine, how relevant is rote learning and exam technique for the future? We all know we need more innovation and creativity in companies. Where is this going to come from? If we think about the work skills, knowledge and abilities we will demand of our employees in the next twenty years, we can be absolutely sure the current Japanese system of education won’t be producing it.

With lifetime employment, investing in training people made economic sense because you would reap the rewards. With greater job mobility on the horizon however, this social contract between staff and company will be broken. Young people, who will be in short supply due to demographic changes, will become like baseball free agents. They will rapidly discover they are able to swap teams for a better deal.

So where are we up to? The companies aren’t training their staff as comprehensively as they once did. The staff themselves will find themselves being lured by recruiters to move on to greener pastures.

I believe the educational construct in Japan basically has its ladder up against the wrong wall. What will become of this country? What will we need to do to prepare ourselves for this brave new world? Are we thinking about these prospects? If we haven’t spared a thought for this grim future of work, then now is a good time to take another look at assumptions, strategies, plans and targets. Those preparing now, will win in this coming war for talent. Game on!

Normally when we give presentations, they tend to be pretty dry affairs. We marshal the facts, relate what happened, tell stories perhaps but in a one dimensional way. We are relating what happened, but are not making any attempt to bring it alive. However, what do we seek when we are looking for entertainment or education – we are looking for dialogue. Our television dramas, movies, novels, biographies are all using dialogue to good effect.

Why not do the same thing in our talks, to make our key point stronger? Let me give an example of something that happened to me in 2010 in Miami. I was attending my first Dale Carnegie International Convention and hardly knew anyone there. In the evenings there would be various parties to attend and on this particular occasion I had the honour of meeting Dale Carnegie’s daughter Donna Dale Carnegie and she introduced me to Mike.

Now Mike stood out in that crowd of Dale Carnegie people, because he had a long ponytail and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. It turned out that Mike was the contractor who did all the stage audio sound etc., for the Convention and had been doing it for years.

“I always finish my year with the Dale Carnegie convention because you hold it in early December”, he told me. He also got me attention when he said, “I really like your organisation”. Being new to the Dale Carnegie world I was curious, so I asked him why he said that. He whispered to me in a conspiratorial fashion, “The things that people are saying out in front of stage and what they are doing behind the stage are the same”.

I asked what he meant by that. He continued, “Well I do a lot of these same types of events and we are all hooked up on the mics, so we can hear what is going on behind stage, as well as out on stage. There are plenty of folks who say one thing to the audience, but carry on quite the opposite off stage. I found in years of dealing with Dale Carnegie people they are genuine and they live the principles they espouse and I like that”.

I could say all of the same things and relate that story, just telling the details of what happened. However, when I include the dialogue, it brings the whole thing to life. People in the audience can picture a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, with a long ponytail, whispering this information to me. I can even cup my ear, as if I was listening to him, when he told me that secret part. They can hear his voice as I relate the story, which makes it more credible.

“I would be able to sell a lot more except for all the external factors over which I have zero control”. Actually, you have never heard this line of argument before from a salesperson. This is because this statement is an honest appraisal of what they see as the problem, but they don’t express it that way. Instead they bitch about the boss, the market, industry changes, currency movements, the sales materials, the pricing and everything else but their pathetic sales ability.

Are they accessing all the good information available to become better? No. They are not bothering, because they don’t see any correlation between their lack of an internal motivation to study to become better and their non-realization of sales success.

People wind up in sales by accident. The turnover of salespeople is very high because it is a metrics based game. The numbers tell against you when you are failing and in short order you disappear. The companies invest nothing, preferring the law of the jungle to sort out who stays and who goes.

Salespeople have more than enough resources to self-educate themselves about the finer points of sales. Here is how complicated this is: learn how to ask the client questions about what they need; listen carefully to the answers; tell them you either have a relevant solution or that you don’t; if you do, provide explanations that justify the trade off between the value you bring and the price you charge; supply it and follow up.

This is what they do instead: tell the client all the details about the product or service without having any clue as to whether this is what they need or not; if they don’t have what the buyer needs, then try to force the square peg into the round hole and give them what you have any way, even if it doesn’t really fit; burn that client and move on to the next buyer.

Let’s study, apply the knowledge, keep studying, keep applying, without pause. There has never been a better time to be in sales, because there is so much rich education material available about how to become a true professional. No more excuses baby, get to it.

Sometimes you see a confident leader really bomb their presentation. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, the contrast is vast. If they are totally hopeless and they bomb, well that is understandable. But a competent leader shouldn’t bomb their presentation. He did and I was wondering why that happened? It was only at the end, when it was too late to do anything about it, that he realised he had bombed completely. The tepid applause reaction was a give away. The lack of questions a more immediate one.

The issues were a misreading of the audience and an arrogance. The audience had been lured to the venue with bold promises of goodness and light. The content wasn’t good enough to back up the advertising and the audience spotted the gap straight away.

The arrogance was an assumption about the leader’s credibility being sufficient to justify the content of the presentation. When we emphasise our years in business, we are aiming for increased credibility, linked back to our stupendous track record. Our speaker had not properly prepared the presentation. He was a good speaker and a competent presenter. He thought his track record stood for itself. The only problem was the content of the talk was rubbish.

We tread a fine line with the longevity thing. Track record, sustained over many, many years is a credible thing for the audience. The only concerns are that the whole affair may be perceived as dated. When we talk about the good old days we like it because we were there, but the audience only cares about what is the relevance for them. We have to be skilled to make it fresh, new and connected to their current business reality. Our speaker failed in that regard.

Our pride in our track record can make us blind to the fact that people don’t really care all that much. We like strolling down memory lane, but so what. We arrogantly assume that what we did was important. Where is the link to the audience’s current problem right now?

This is the skillset needed in the leader presentation. Getting the audience need properly understood, suspending what we like to talk about and instead focusing on what the audience is keen to know about is our task.

I am getting older too, so I took copious notes from this speech on what not to do, if I am ever tempted to talk at length about my good old days. I think we all should avoid that temptation too.

I have often thought there are so many lessons from the martial arts for our businesses. Here are my musings after 53 years of training in traditional Karate.

Stepping on to the floor

The dojo is the ultimate equalizer. Whether you arrived by chauffeur driven Roller or took Shanks’s mare, once you step on to that dojo floor only your ability and character separates you from everyone else.

In business we forget this and allow people to accrue titles, status and power unattributed to their abilities. We need to see beyond the spin and politics and ensure that people’s real abilities are recognized and rewarded.

Starting

The class begins with a short meditation interval. This is designed to focus the mind and separate the day from what will now come. Next everyone is bowing toward the front. The front of the class represents all who came before us. We are not here today based solely on what we have done. Others were here before us building the art and the organization. By bowing we acknowledge the continuum and our responsibility to keep it going. Now we bow to the teachers, respecting their knowledge and their devotion. Finally we bow to each other expressing our solidarity as fellow travellers on a journey of self-discovery.

How do we start the work day? Is there a chorei or morning gathering of the work group, to get everyone aligned and focused on the WHY we are there.

Stretching

We warm-up our minds and our bodies by going through a set routine to stretch our muscles to be able to operate at a very high level of performance.

If you are a sales team, are you beginning your day with role play practice or are you just practicising on the client?

Basics

We repeat the same drills over and over, every class. We are seeking purity of form and perfection of execution. We are preparing ourselves for a Zen state where we can react without pre-thought.

A large amount of our work is routine, but can we improve the systems, the execution to bring in greater efficiencies and achieve higher productivity?

Sparring

Free sparring is 100% spontaneous, ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of move and counter move. At a high level, this is like playing a full chess match in one minute, but using our techniques with full body commitment.

When we compete in the marketplace are we a speedboat or an oil tanker? Are we nimble, adaptive, on purpose and aware of market changes? Are we thinking steps ahead of the opposition, anticipating their moves and constantly outflanking them, applying our brains over their brawn?

Kata

These are full power set pieces, representing a battle against multiple opponents. The forms are fixed and the aim is perfection. The form is set and so Zen like releases the mind to go beyond the form.

Are we able to keep reproducing execution pieces of our work that are perfected? Can we refine our actions for the maximum effectiveness? Can we eliminate mistakes, defects and rework entirely at all levels in the organisation?

Strengthening and warming down

Strength training is there to build the physical power and our mental perseverance. We do a final stretch to reduce stiffness and muscle pain by reducing lactic acid build up in the muscles.

Are our training methodologies making us stronger than our rivals in the marketplace? Are we allocating sufficient time to grow our people? Are we seeing outcomes from the training time invested?

Finish

We repeat the bowing and this time we add the Creed. Voicing carefully chosen words which represent the value system of that dojo, (e.g. Effort, Patience, Moderation, Respect) so that these are the last things setting into our minds, before we go back to our usual routines of life.

How do we end the workday? Do we set up for the next day by reviewing what we did today, what we achieved and what we need to work on tomorrow? Do we reflect on the quality of our performance and think about ways to do better?