Meghan called.  She was a high school senior, my daughter’s friend and highschool classmate.  She had a summer job selling for the CutCo Knife Company, and wanted to make a presentation to us in our home. 

I said, “Yes,” although my wife was uncomfortable that she might have to say, “No,” to Meghan.  So she arranged to be out of the house when Meghan arrived.

On the appointed evening, Meghan carried her hefty sales case through the front door and set up on the dining room table.   While she was unpacking her wares, she asked me if I would please get her a glass of water.  I did, and when I returned to the dining room and sat down, she asked me to get the knives we currently used and bring them in.

I went back to the kitchen and returned with the knives.  When she was all set up, she asked me, “How would you describe your current knives?”

“Old, dull and inadequate,” I said.

“Why do you say that?” she asked.  I described how hard it was to keep them sharp, how some of the blades were so old they were worn thin, and how some of the blades wobbled in their handles.

 She pulled a length of rope from her case, and asked me to cut it with my sharpest knife.

“My sharpest?  That’s not saying much,” I said, taking my grandfathers old carving knife that was probably a good 70 years old.  It had a hardwood handle.

Meghan held the rope down on a cutting board that she pulled from her bag.  “Count the movements back and forth,” she said. 

 I began to saw.  It took fourteen saws.

“Now hold it down for me,” she said.  She picked up one of her new knives from a wooden block.  I grabbed one of the lengths and held it down.  “You’re stronger than I am, but count the saws it takes me with this knife,” she said.

 It took her four.

“Let me try that,” I teased her, as if she had done something slick.  I took the knife from her while she held the rope down on the cutting board.  Expecting it to be difficult, I pressed hard with the new knife and sawed through the rope in two strokes.

 I was impressed.

Meghan asked me to bring my best pair of kitchen scissors to the table.  They were also old, and could not make a dent on the rope.  She got out her CutCo scissors, and not only cut through the rope with ease, she also cut a penny in half.

I was pretty much sold.  She gave me information about the steel and the handles.  She showed me the different sets I could buy.  My wife came home and I called her in to the dining room.  She sat down reluctantly, and I asked Meghan to do the rope trick.  She had my wife count the strokes, etc. etc. and I saw my wife change from skeptic to true believer in a matter of seconds.

“Do the scissor trick,” I said.  Meghan cut the rope and the penny.  I saw Sharon’s eyes wander over to the full set of kitchen knives displayed on the table in a butcher block case.

We ended up buying all the kitchen knives and a set of 12 steak knives.  They remain in their butcher block on the kitchen counter seven years later.
                                                         ______

Selling by telling is what most of us do.  But selling by doing is more powerful because it’s active and experiential.  You could say that conversation is also experiential (in that we experience it) but words are more likely to get caught in the filters of the mind and not reach the muscles.  

I know of one law firm that goes to major corporations who are shopping for a new legal advisor, and begins by saying, “We can do the March of a Thousand Slides, or we can have a discussion about your issues so you can get a feel for what it’s like to work with us.” 

More often than not, the clients look at each other and choose to have the discussion.   

An active audience is more likely to be moved than a passive.  Hitler knew this, unfortunately, and had his followers do their “Sieg heils,” throughout his speeches. 

Meghan was trained by a very successful company.  She got me to do things—bring water, bring knives.  She got me to say things, “Old, dull and inadequate.”  She had me cut rope, and compare the old with the new.  It was sensational—literally sensational—in that it gave me a sensation, like driving a new car after you’ve been driving your old one for 10 years.

Plus, she was Meghan, my daughter’s friend, and the daughter of my friend Merrill.  She was in a strong position to win my business. 

According to Robert Cialdini and others, there are at least 25 proven Principles of Persuasion.  Meghan may have invoked 7 in her brief visit to our dining room. 

What can we as business speakers, and as sales professionals, learn from this exchange?  Stay tuned for more. 

You will have noticed, if you’ve read through these postings, that I am a fan of Henry Ward Beecher, one of the greatest speakers in American history.  Even Lincoln looked up to him.

Here is a description of Beecher written by Milton MacKaye and published in The New Yorker.

Henry Ward Beecher had a genius for bringing the most somnolent audience to life.  One July morning he rode into a West Virginia town which was widely known in lecture circles as “Death Valley”–for the reason that any speaker unfortunate enough to have an engagement to lecture there wilted and curled up when he faced the town’s stupid and indifferent audience.

Beecher was duly warned.  That afternoon, when he was being introduced, half the audience was already dozing.  Beecher rose from his chair and, wiping his brow with a large handkerchief, strode to the front of the platform.

“It’s a God-damned hot day,” the clergyman began.

A thousand pairs of eyes goggled and an electrical shock straightened the crowd erect.  Beecher paused and then, raising a finger of solemn reproof, went on, “That’s what I heard a man say here this afternoon!”

He proceeded into a stirring condemnation of blasphemy–and took his audience with him.

This is a good reminder: the first job of a speaker is to get attention.  The second is to keep it.

In a piece originally written in the late 1860’s, but published in The Atlantic many years later, Henry James Sr., the father of Henry James the novelist and William James the philosopher-psychologist, sought to explain just what it was about Emerson’s unassuming personality that carried such magnetism.

It is now a full thirty years ago that I made Mr. Emerson’s acquaintance.  He had come at the time to New York to read a course of lectures.  These I diligently attended, and I saw much of him also in private.  He at once captivated my imagination, and I have been ever since his loving bondman. I tried assiduously during the early days of our intimacy to solve intellectually the mystery of his immense fascination; but I did not succeed.  I could very well see what the charm was not.  It did not the least consist, for example, in any intellectual mastery he exhibited; for what he mainly held to be true I could not help regarding as false, and what he mainly held to be false I regarded as true.

Still less did any conventional graces or accomplishments account for the spell he wrought; for no man was more austere than he in manners, or less addicted to the arts of pleasing . . . But what the magic actually was, I could not at all divine, save that it was intensely personal, attaching much more to what he was in himself, or by nature, than to what he was in aspiration, or by culture.  I often found myself, in fact, thinking:  if this man were only a woman, I should be sure to fall in love with him . . .

It was utterly impossible to listen to Mr. Emerson’s lectures, without being perpetually haunted as to your intellect by the subtlest and most searching aroma of personality . . . His demeanor on the platform. . . was modesty itself:  not the mere absence of display, but the presence of a positive personal grace.  His deferential entrance upon the scene, his look of inquiry at the desk and the chair, his resolute rummaging among his embarrassed papers, the air of sudden recollection with which he would plunge into his pockets for what he must have known had never been put there, his uncertainty and irresolution as he rose to speak, his deep, relieved inspiration as he got well from under the burning-glass of his auditors’ eyes, and addressed himself at length to their docile ears instead:  no maiden ever appealed more potently to your enamored and admiring sympathy.

And then when he looked over the heads of his audience into the dim mysterious distance, and his weird monotone began to reverberate in your bosom’s depths, and his words flowed on, now with a river’ volume, grand, majestic, free, and anon diminished themselves to the fitful cadence of a brook, impeded in its course, and returning in melodious coquetry upon itself, and you saw the clear eye eloquent with nature’s purity, and beheld the musing countenance turned within, as it were, and hearkening to the rumour of a far-off but oncoming world:  how intensely personal, how exquisitely characteristic, it all was! . . .

I find in no man, especially no man equally famous, anything like the exquisite, unaffected, perfectly unconscious deference he pays to every other man’s freedom . . .  He seems to me absolutely void of covetousness; entertains no clandestine designs upon any one; would not if he could impose his sway upon you; is destitute of all persuasive arts; has no resources either of flattery or command; is so ignorant, indeed, of all our accustomed devices in this sort, and so estranged from our ordinary corrupt manners in general, as to appear to most people utterly inexpansive; and yet he draws all men unto him, and is sure of their spontaneous homage.

The Atlantic,Vol. 94, No. 566, pp. 740-745

I know audiences don’t exactly jump for joy when attending presentations, but speakers are often puking in the bathroom minutes before they go on.

I am interested in cures, or coping strategies, for intense speaker anxieties.  We need to put our heads together to figure out a smorgasbord of techniques to calm us down.

I’ll go first.  These are the ones that I use.

1.  Work on the content until I’m convinced that it will do the job and hold the interest of the listeners.

2.  Rehearse aloud so that I can deliver the talk in my sleep.

3.  Practice making big, whole-body gestures during rehearsal and just before I go on.  This helps me break through the physical tension and “holding” that may constrict my expressiveness.

4.  Memorize the beginning and the ending.

5.  Remind myself that I am a pretty good showman when I make up my mind to be one.

6.  Remind myself that the audience wants to be entertained, even if they’re at a funeral.

That’s the first half dozen.  I welcome your home remedies, and any research that you know of.  Let’s build a stockpile of cures that lead to courage, presence, and expressiveness.

I just spent a few days with several scientists from the pharmaceutical industry.  Their company wanted them to be more persuasive when presenting their research to business decision makers.

To prepare for the assignment, I conducted a series of interviews to determine what they thought they needed, and what the decision makers thought they needed.  The two groups had very different points of view, and they were both right.

The scientists said their top concerns were voice, getting to the point, and capturing attention.  The bosses on the decision-making panel said that the scientific presenters tended to think that their data was the presentation.  The bosses wanted the data interpreted.  They wanted to know what the researchers thought about the data, and what the company should do given the results.

I think they were both right.  They were just coming at it from different perspectives.  The scientists were nervous, spoke very softly, and had an attitude about speaking persuasively–that it was smarmy and unprofessional.

The bosses were tired of being dragged through endless PowerPoint slides of data when all they really wanted to know was, “Should we continue to invest in this research project or not?  And why?”

I’m happy to report that progress was made on all fronts.

I just bought the DVD course from The Teaching Company called Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning, which is taught by Professor David Zarefsky of Northwestern University. If you want to take a deep dive into presentation skills, take this one.

These lectures make you realize that human beings have been trying to figure out what makes one person more persuasive than others for at least 2000 years.

Presentation skills count the most where there is uncertainty–where there is no mathematical certainty that the speaker’s idea is the right one.

For instance, when a brand director introduces her new marketing plan, there is no guarantee that it will work.  She has to convince her audience that there is a reasonable degree of certainty that it will work.  She’s got to give reasons to do this.

When a pharmaceutical company needs to partner with another company, it will consider the presentations of the various candidates and make a decision.  There is no certainty in such a decision.  They will listen to the reasons presented and make their decision through dialogue and discussion.

Professor Zarefsky says that argumentation is the process of “giving reasons” and that the goal of argumentation is better decisions through collaborative dialogue.

And for arguments to be effective, the speaker must be open to being persuaded in addition to being eager to persuade.