Compelling Case + Irresistible Influence = Success
Published October 2, 2011 | 
Recently, a colleague asked for some help to sell a bureaucracy on making a change for him. Complicating matters was the fact that several other people had made similar requests before and all had been refused, in part because change would have meant promoting customer needs over the needs of his staff. We developed our presentation/negotiating approach, executed it and succeeded. He then suggested we share the process we took with everyone, so others can do the same. Great idea… so here goes.
- ADAP: Adopt the Audience-Driven, Authentic Presentation philosophy. The audience is a senior executive who has three main concerns: Promoting the excellence of his brand, protecting his staff and pleasing customers. Therefore, the presentation must address these concerns, in that order! Second, to help him resolve the conflict between customer and staff needs, we need to bring both the logical and emotional issues to bear.
- Create a Bond: People buy from people they like, people with whom they identify. You do that by demonstrating that you share similar values, background or history. In this case, I began the conversation by demonstrating my personal interest in his area of specialization and commonalities about our backgrounds.
- Create Trust: Knowing that he has to make a tough decision, I shared with the buyer my understanding of the conflicting values he must weigh, and made sure to focus on the super ordinate goal – that in order to promote the excellence of his brand, pleasing the customer was more important than ruffling the feathers of some staff members. Building a bond and trust, enables you to create irresistible influence – the emotional element in decision-making.
- Compelling Case: Since we like to make decisions based on logic, the key is to present a persuasive fact-pattern. As a leader, his #1 responsibility is to promote it, authentically. Choosing to protect his staff rather than the brand’s values would undermine the brand. In this case, excellence in education means creating an atmosphere in which we encourage people to invest time, creativity and energy learning the subject; ultimately, the goal is to inspire people to want to learn more. Anything less diminishes brand value. The leader needed to remember these were his authentic values and that only one course of action would promote them.
- Feel like a Hero: We all want to feel we make good decisions, which is why we should end with a positive conclusion that eliminates the possibility of “buyer’s remorse”. Knowing that the client might experience some negative feedback from staff, we concluded by addressing his emotional need that he made a good decision. With this decision, he would promote his brand value to customers and reinforce his self-image as an authentic leader who does the right thing.
In sum, we combined the power of Irresistible Influence and Compelling Case to succeed:
- Feel like a Hero: We all want to feel we make good decisions, which is why we should end with a positive conclusion that eliminates the possibility of “buyer’s remorse”. Knowing that the client might experience some negative feedback from staff, we concluded by addressing his emotional need that he made a good decision. With this decision, he would promote his brand value to customers and reinforce his self-image as an authentic leader who does the right thing.
- Irresistible Influence: Creation of a bond and trust for the emotional framework for the buying decision we wanted, and
- Compelling Case – A logical argument to take one course of action really promotes brand value in this case.
In your future presentations and negotiations, use the both of them to succeed!
Do Whatever It Takes!
Published June 5, 2011 | Last year, SUNY was hosting a special program for Colombian government officials. At the last minute, they had a cancellation and asked me if I could fill in and do a presentation on Leadership Challenges in the 21st Century. They agreed to have a translator present to convert my English into Spanish for the audience. I agreed. Then, I followed the Number One Rule that I teach in all our presentation workshops and coaching – BE AUDIENCE DRIVEN.
- I developed content to be valuable for the audience
- I created an organizational structure and style that would allow for interaction, even if there was a language barrier.
- I decided to have the slides translated into Spanish, so while people wait to hear my English translated, they could at least read the words in their language.
- Before I started, I “met my audience”. I knew Spanish was their first language and expected many to also speak some English, allowing them to get something from my speech, if I spoke more slowly, and get the rest from the translator. I discovered that virtually no-one spoke English.
- Recognizing that if the audience and I had to wait for each and every sentence to be translated, that would significantly reduce the impact of the presentation. Since I had learned Spanish many years ago, I asked the audience if they would let me try to present in Spanish, with the translator filling in when I was stuck. Knowing that the technical words were in Spanish on the slides, I figured I could probably cover about half the presentation in a broken and often grammatically incorrect Spanish. The audience overwhelmingly told me “ Go for it”, and I did.
- Turns out I presented almost 90% of the presentation myself – and built a terrific rapport with the audience (and received compliments later).
At Presentation Excellence, and all the other companies with which I’m involved, our approach is to do “whatever it takes” to meet the client’s needs if possible. A partner once gave a client a fresh shirt he happened to be carrying for an afternoon investor meeting when an accident spoiled the one he was wearing. Good thing I took all those years of Spanish many years ago!
May all your presentations be excellent!
Are You Perfect?
Published May 9, 2011 | If you’re like most people I know, you’re not perfect – and therefore susceptible to the common causes of failure.
In business strategy and leadership courses, we often focus on Best Practices to help guide students. Some courses now also focus on the flip-side: why leaders commit key errors. For instance, Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right, includes a chapter on “The Six Habits of Highly Unrealistic Leaders”. I thought I’d share it with you.
According to Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan there are six common causes of failure to confront changing realities. I add a seventh:
- Filtered information. Given the increasing complexity of life and the overwhelming amount of information available, filters help us avoid overload. But in doing so, key information challenging basic assumptions may not get through.
- Selective hearing. As humans, we do the same thing: we filter the information to which we attend and often seek information to corroborate our initial decisions
- Wishful thinking. In a world of complexity, doubt and uncertainty, people sometimes resort to wishful thinking. The Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1962 is an example.
- Fear. Facing uncertainty and the unknown, Kahneman and his fellow Nobel prize economists proved that people prefer to avoid losses than seek out gains.
- Emotional overinvestment. Adopting new behaviors and attitudes means giving up older ones; when people are emotionally overinvested, they downgrade the logic of the argument in order to resist change.
- Unrealistic expectations of capital markets. Capital markets focus on quarterly changes, even though true changes, such as a product branding or business development effort can take much longer.
- Inertia. Human nature, like the real-world, resists change. Once we’re comfortable with what exists, it’s hard to recognize that change may be essential. Think of all the companies that were successfully making a nice profit on products (e.g., floppy disk, buggy-whips and netbooks) while other companies were building new products (flash-memory, cars and ipads).
One of the reasons I agreed to chair a CEO group for Vistage, is that the 12+ members of a typical group know that their job is to provide each other with:
- Objective perceptions when a member is falling into one of these traps
- Creative new solutions to overcome business challenges
- Accountability for taking steps necessary to get quality information, avoiding these psychological traps.
My CEO group, which calls itself the Game Changers, is especially focused on avoiding these causes of failure and facilitating adoption of best practices. If you’re in NYC and want to join, feel free to contact me.