At a recent conference workshop for business leaders hosted by Aha! Leadership: Connecting & Engaging with an Audience & the Customer– Techniques of the Masters, we covered the top 10 ways to fascinate, captivate & influence based on the books, seminars, blogs and communication from the most successful communicators, leaders & salespeople of all time. The workshop focused on effectively communicating with customers and potential customers by focusing on connecting with & engaging them versus interaction that focuses on selling.
Business leaders are most often focused on results: sales volume, revenue, & margin, so it is easy to expect the sales team to be most focused on this as well. The problem with making results the top priority, is that can overlook the most important variable in the sales equation – what the customer needs and why they buy.
The goal of the workshop was for each participant to choose 3 techniques they could adopt to immediately communicate more effectively by connecting with & engaging their customers, teams, partners & investors. We want to share one of the most game-changing techniques based on the feedback from the leaders in the workshop.
TECHNIQUE: MAKE NUMBERS MEANINGFUL
Numbers, metrics and statistics can be very powerful when building a case for what you are trying to communicate. The first thing is to be sure they are impressive numbers that tell a compelling story. If what you are trying to show is remarkable, exciting or inspiring – then it is essential that you help people understand them in real terms. Provide an analogy that makes the point & tells the story all on its own. One of the best examples of this technique is from a great book Presentation Secrets of Steven Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo. When introducing the iPod, Apple needed to convey how extraordinary the iPod’s memory capabilities were at a time when many consumers were not yet familiar with what measurements like megabytes and gigabytes really meant. So instead of telling people that it had “12 gigabytes of memory”, because they knew most people wouldn’t really understand the significance of it – what Steven Jobs said instead was, “it has enough space to listen to new music to the moon and back.” WOW! That’s a lot of memory, and when put into those terms everyone from 5 to 95 years old understands.
If you would like your sales team & other team members to learn more techniques about how to effectively connect with and engage customers and those they communicate with internally, we would love to help! Please contact us to find out how we can design a workshop especially for your team.