9 Things to Say to Ruin a Sales Pitch

9 Things to Say to Ruin a Sales Pitch

These lead-in phrases are a certain sign that your well-prepared sales pitch is about to fall flat.

1. I apologize in advance for...

Never start a presentation with an apology. Regardless of the reasoning behind it, an apology says that you're a loser who feels the need to lower the audience's expectations.

For example, suppose your luggage got lost and you're wearing your grungy travel clothes. Rather than apologize, adapt to circumstances, remain self-confident and give your best.  

2. Our mission/vision statement is as follows...

You may think your company's stated intentions are impressive, but everyone knows that most mission and vision statements are honored in the breach rather than the observance.  

Even if true, mission and vision statements are generally full of trite promises that everyone's heard a thousand times. Boring your audience with biz-blab and corporate speak blunts everything that you subsequently say.

3. Our product has the following comprehensive list of features...

Clueless salespeople use feature lists in the hopes that something will "stick" and match a real customer need.  Clueless marketers trot out feature lists in the forlorn hope that customers will be impressed by their sheer magnitude. 

These "spray and pray" sales pitches force customers to mentally map what you're selling into something that they might need.  Do your research!  Figure out what the customer really needs and pitch that... and only that!

4. Our product will increase revenue and reduce costs...

There are millions of business-to-business products and services and ALL of them make these exact same promises. In sales, the challenge is to differentiate yourself from the competition. Such statements fail utterly to accomplish this.

5. Our product will save you time and money...

Time and money are fungible so saving one is the same as saving another, right? Beyond that, though, what business-to-business product or service doesn't save time and money? Boring...

6. We have the highest quality product and best customer service...

According to whom? It never ceases to amaze me that some salespeople and marketers continue to mistakenly believe that expressing their own positive opinion about themselves is an effective sales tactic.

If you can't prove it, don't promise it.

7. I'll go through the next few slides quickly because we're getting short on time...

Rushing through your slides makes you sound like a babbling idiot or, at best, identifies you as somebody who can't follow a train of thought without using the slides as reminders. 

Prune your slides down to 1 per minute, maximum.  I.e. only 40 slides for a 40-minute pitch, 10 slides for a 10-minute pitch, etc.

8. That's an interesting question but I'd like to hold it until the end of the presentation...

In other words, you don't want to answer the question and you're hoping that the asker will forget that she asked.  The problem with this classic sales dodge is that it leaves the asker fuming.

If a customer asks a question in the middle of a pitch, it's much wiser to give at least a partial answer immediately.  Dodging just makes you seem, well, dodgy.

9. Now that you've decided to buy, here's another feature you didn't know about...

This is known as "selling after the close." Once you've made the sale, it's time to shut up and take the order. Raising additional features can easily raise issues that the customer wasn't considering and even snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

When I was very new to sales, I once went into a sales meeting thinking I'd need to offer a discount in order to close. When the customer unexpectedly closed the sale for me ("let's do this"), it surprised me so much I offered the discount anyway.

When I told my friend (a long-time sales pro) about this blunder, his remark was: "There's a lake in upstate New York named after you. It's named 'Lake Schmuck.'"  True story.

Rather than end this post on that note of self-stupidity, here's a clip from my favorite sales-focused movie that illustrates the "no apology" concept discussed above.  Enjoy!

Thank you to Geoffrey James for writing this article.

3 Ways To Make Communication More Appetizing

3 Ways To Make Communication More Appetizing
Don't overwhelm your audience with too much information

What's the most effective thing you can do to improve any communication? Trim your message so audience members can easily and quickly consume it.

After all, we've become a grab-and-go society:

• Food is increasingly served in small portions. Amuse bouche, I'm looking at you. And snacks you find in the grocery store are getting thinner. Explains James Russo, senior VP of global consumer insights at Nielsen, "We are becoming a nation of grazing snackers as we shift away from the traditional meal times. Here is where the two trends collide-when it comes to snacking, consumers want both indulgent and healthy options."
• Information is processed on the go. More than half of emails are read on mobile devices, for instance. And we're more likely to consume news, video, photos and everything else on a small screen not sitting on a chair, but while standing, walking and even running.
• Even games have been downsized. As The Wall Street Journal reports, toymakers are making kids' playthings more compact and faster to complete (30 minutes? Ain't nobody got time for that.) The Journal quotes Richard Gottlieb, a toy-industry consultant in New York. "We snack on a lot of things in life," he says. "It's the rhythm of the age."

What does that mean to creating communication for customers, employees and everyone else? Here are 3 suggestions:

1. Keep it short. Fifty words are better than 100. Writing a tweet is better than composing an essay.
2. Focus on the key point. Decide on the one thing you want people to know, and emphasize that, above all.
3. Make it skimmable. Reading is so last century. Your audience wants to glance at your message and immediately get the point. That means conveying information visually and carefully choosing the most impactful words.

Your audience members don't have the appetite for a full meal of information. So give them a snack--or even just a bite--instead.

Thank you to Alison Davis for writing this article.

Jack Welch Reveals the One Quality Every Great Leader Possesses
Skills, talent, and experience are important, but the generosity gene creates the foundation for great leadership.

There are many things you can say about Jack Welch, and this is one of them: Jack definitely knows how to develop great leaders.

That was true when he was the CEO of General Electric, and it remains true today. For example, the Jack Welch Management Institute online MBA program has been named the most influential education brand on LinkedIn and was named a 2016 business school to watch by Poets and Quants.

Since the JWMI recently held its commencement service in Washington, D.C. for approximately 200 graduates, it seemed like the perfect time to talk to Jack about the education, leadership, and the one quality every leader needs most.

With all the different avenues for learning, why is an MBA still relevant?

In the right school you'll learn how to motivate, how to manage, how to fire... you won't do a lot of theory. If you want to teach, theory is fine. In the real world skills are everything.

In our school, we have working adults. To be accepted they have to have a job. Our premise is they they learn on Monday, practice on Tuesday, and put what they learn to work right away.

Say I'm already an entrepreneur. How would an MBA be useful to me?

You see so many startups where the founder doesn't carry the company all the way through its growth. In fact that's one of the most common phenomena; they don't enjoy managing or they simply can't manage.

Of course if I'm stating a venture I'm not going to take two years off to get an MBA. I'll go to work every day and get my MBA. That's where we come in. We take people who have a handle on their career or their aspirations -- they know where they want to go.

Our last graduation was the most beautiful thing in the world to see. There were all these working adults from all over the U.S. and the world lined up for the processional. It was breathtaking. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.

The mission of the school is to change the trajectory of your life, and that holds true whether you run your own business or work for someone else. We teach people how to get out of the trenches by building great teams.

You talk about teams a lot.

Success is based on people first and strategy second. Build a great team and you will accomplish things beyond your wildest dreams. You grow from the reflected glory of your people.

When your team delivers, you enjoy the fruit.

What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were 20 years old?

I wish I had then had a better definition of what I now call the "generosity gene." For a long time I never quite identified that ingredient.

If a leader didn't desperately want to give his or her employer raises, to promote people, if they didn't get as much satisfaction from other people's success as they did from their own... I didn't see that as well as I should have.

I have never seen a great leader that didn't have the generosity gene. Take care of your people, let them know where they stand, cheer them, never take credit for what they do... and they'll go to the moon for you.

I wish I'd identified the generosity gene as a clear requirement. I never would have made as many mistakes picking people as I did.

Once you're in charge of people, it's no longer about you -- it's about your team. Any leader who still thinks it's about him is destined to fail.

Thank you to: Jeff Haden for this article

How to Increase Sales and Make Money With Instagram

How to Increase Sales and Make Money With Instagram
See how Instagram can help drive business and generate income for your company.

How to Make Money with Instagram: 5 Steps Any Business Can Manage

Instagram has proven an incredibly powerful sales driver for large brands who have mastered the platform. The potential for getting thousands or even millions of eyes on your content is there--over 500 million people are now using Instagram on a regular basis!

How can you best use Instagram to drive sales and generate revenue? Start here:

1. Post regularly. 

Feast or famine won't keep your fans interested in your content. If you can only post twice a week, make sure you post twice every week. Ideally, you're going to want to work your way up to posting several times per day.

If you have an event or news that creates a ton of great Instagram content, spread out your post over a period of time so you don't use up all of your awesomeness at once.

2. Use creative, relevant hashtags.

 Use a service like #TagsforLikes to help generate a list of the most popular, on topic hashtags for each of your posts. If you aren't using the right hashtags, you're missing out on a huge opportunity to be discovered by potential customers and other people interested in the things you're posting about!

3. Don't just use hashtags. 

Tagging is a smart way of categorizing images, but don't skip over the description! Your picture says a thousand words, but the description you write can be used to expand on the story and dive deeper into the engagement you're building with potential customers. National Geographic is a pro at this, using their descriptions to complement the visual story being told in each posted image. Perfect this tactic and you'll keep fans on your posts longer, and eager to see what you're going to say next!

4. Find your Instagram "voice." 

In business blogging, it was all about developing a brand voice. Now, in this highly visual new world, you need to find your company's own unique Instagram style. I wrote an article recently about companies that are killing it on Instagram and Audi was one of the brands I featured, thanks to their distinct image style. Simply adding your logo won't cut it (and will actually turn people off)--your branding has to be defined by your image composition, colors, topical relevance and more. It's worth investing in getting your Instagram style right.

5. Include a clear call to action.

 This is critical if you want your company to make money with Instagram. What good is all the engagement in the world if you aren't following through and using it to drive traffic to your site?

Use that clickable link in your profile to drive traffic to different landing pages and include a CTA to visit your profile from your posts. Always give your fans a next step to take.

Instagram is an important part of a smart content marketing strategy for any business today, big or small. Developing systems and processes for more impactful posting are going to be critical as Instagram moves further into algorithmically selecting which content its users will see, rather than displaying content chronologically.

Are you ready for the Instagram opportunity?

Thank you to Larry Kim for writing this article.

5 Common Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

5 Common Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Doing content marketing right can 10x your reach and impact

1. Guessing about your audience instead of getting to know them.

It's not enough to assume you know what your audience is interested in or that if something is interesting to you, then it will also engage your audience. Instead, it's crucial to conduct customer research to understand the needs, wants, concerns, preferred content platforms, and buying triggers of the people you're trying to reach.

Using tools such as Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner is a good place to start; even better if you're able to connect directly with your customers via email surveys or personal interviews. Developing a comprehensive customer avatar is a goldmine when it comes to crafting content that resonates with your target audience.

2. Not allotting enough time for title generation.

This is one of the easiest traps to fall into. You've dedicated hours upon hours to crafting a piece of content, and your brain is pretty fried. So you slap a relevant-enough title on the copy and call it a day.

But here's the rub: Your content's headline is just as important (and perhaps even more so) than all of the body copy combined. That's because a lot of people may read the title--but significantly fewer people are going to click into the content and read it from start to finish if the title doesn't draw them in.

A good rule of thumb is to allocate around half as much time for generating a great title as it took you to write the piece. If that sounds like a ludicrous amount of time, that's a good sign that you need to devote more attention to titling.

3. Emphasizing quantity over quality.

This one's also easy to do: You get so caught up in generating SEO-optimized content (and lots of it) that you start designing your content around keywords instead of focusing on providing high-quality information to your target audience. This can backfire in a number of ways.

For starters, Google's algorithms increasingly prioritize high-quality content over copy that's stuffed with key words. Additionally, churning out low-quality content is going to degrade your audience's trust, thereby diminishing your content's conversions over time.

That's why it's critical to make sure all the content you publish is unique, accurate, and truly useful for your target audience. For examples, check out the blogs on Moz,SnoringHQ, and Lush Cosmetics and the video tutorials on BirchBox.

What each of these demonstrates is that content doesn't necessarily need to be jam-packed with fancy graphics and visuals (although it can be)--and you don't need to update your blog six times a day. What matters most is delivering information that is truly relevant and helpful to your specific audience. (Again, this is where it pays to really understand your customers.)

4. Failing to market your content.

The highest quality content in the world is unlikely to gain traction if you don't put as much (if not more) effort into marketing your content as you put into creating it in the first place.

That means leveraging strategies such as social media marketing, influencer shares, AdWords campaigns, email marketing, and native advertising. While you should be deliberate about the platforms you choose, odds are good that any marketing is better than none.

5. Not tracking your results.

You'll be much better equipped to make informed choices about how to market your content if you know which types of content resonate with our audience, which platforms generate the most attention for your content, and so on.

While it may feel tedious, tracking analytics such as click-through rates, unique visitors, time on page, bounce rate, and conversions--and then analyzing that data on a regular basis--is critical for learning what works (and what doesn't) and refining your marketing strategy over time.

Content marketing is not, in itself, a miracle cure for a struggling business. But it can be a great way to establish your brand and present your business as a trusted, helpful "friend" to your target customers. Avoid these common content marketing mistakes, and you'll be well on your way to developing content that effectively markets your business.

Thank you to Kenny Kline for writing this article.

The Best Interview Question Ever

The Best Interview Question Ever

There is a single question that you can use to assess whether a candidate understands the job and if they are an A or a C player.

The secret to hiring your next great employee might just come down to how they answer a single question. And it's not asking them what kind of tree they would be or their Meyers-Briggs profile. It all comes down to measuring performance. Let me explain.

The authors of the book, "Who", suggest that you can immediately begin to distinguish A players from B and C players beginning with your initial phone screen. You do that by telling a candidate exactly how you will be measuring how they perform in the job you want to hire them for.

How the candidate reacts to that will tell you plenty about them. C players, for example, probably can't hang up the phone fast enough since they don't want any part of being measured. A players, on the other hand, will take your bait and get excited for the chance to excel. They might even up the ante by asking you what's in it for them if they really crush it and exceed your expectations.

It turns out there's an even better question you can ask candidates to help assess if they are a true A player or not once you have them in for an interview. I learned about this magic question from Joel Trammel, the CEO of software company Khorus, who I wrote about in my book Great CEOs Are Lazy.

Joel is a big believer in the fact that CEOs can't delegate hiring decisions to someone else like HR. He perfected his hiring method by interviewing every single one of the hundreds of employee who joined his company.

And based on all of those interviews, Joel found that there was a single question that helped him assess whether a candidate understood the job they were applying for and what they needed to do to excel in it.

"If I was to hire you, how would I know if you were doing a good job?"

The reason this is such a great question is that it forces the candidate to put themselves into the job and be thoughtful about how they might be measured by you, their boss. The answer you get in return will tell you a lot about the candidate's maturity and comfort level with having their performance measured.

If you ask a C player this question, for instance, you might get some stammering followed by some non-critical metrics like maybe how they will show up for work on time and not take extended lunch hours.

A players, on the other hand, will give you exactly what you're looking for. Let's say you are hiring a software engineer. When you ask them the magic question, they might respond by saying that you will know they are doing a good job based on three metrics: the total volume of software code they will produce on a weekly or monthly basis; the quality of the code based on a limited number of bugs; and their on-time delivery rate where they hit the targets they said they would.

This would be a great answer because each of the metrics is measurable and quantifiable. You know that if you had a group of engineers who all were willing to be measured on those metrics, you'd have a high performing team.

Similarly, if you were hiring a sales person, you might want to hear them answer the magic question by saying that you could tell they were doing a good job if they were: exceeding their quota, selling profitable business, and their customer satisfaction rating was off the charts.

A key point here is that while you might know what you want to hear from a candidate, leave some wiggle room to be surprised and to learn something new about the position from an A player--someone who might think of a metric you never considered before.

The beauty of asking the magic question is also that, after the candidate gives you their answer, you pause for a second and say: "Let me write these down because, if I hire you, this is exactly how I will measure you after you start your new job."

In other words, you can use the answer to the magic question as a great onboarding tool where you have eliminated any chance that your new hire will be surprised about what is expected of them after they start their new job.

How magical is that?

Thank you to Jim Schlesker for writing this article.

5 Pieces of Wisdom That Will Make You Even Smarter

5 Pieces of Wisdom That Will Make You Even Smarter
Here's one: If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.

1. They Acquire Knowledge

Sure, books help, but they stretch their knowledge beyond intellectual pursuits. A wise and prudent leader soaks up the wisdom of others, acknowledging that they don't know it all. Remember this quote?

If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.

Being wise means you'll go searching for a room, enter it, have conversations, and come out of the room wiser than when you went in.

Metaphorically, a wise leader will view herself as a small fish in the great big pond of life. She will seek out connections and appointments to learn to do great new things.

2. They Find a Reverse Mentor

For years, we have thought of mentors as older and more experienced sages. And that's entirely appropriate, and there will always be a role for that type of mentorship.

But in this social era, wise leaders are catching on to the advantage of learning from reverse mentors. They can be younger and less experienced, or same age-range peers who hold expertise in unfamiliar terrain.

What's the purpose of a reverse mentoring relationship? That's really up to you. In one survey, 41 percent selected "to gain technical expertise" and 25 percent selected "to gain a younger perspective."

If the latter, wise leaders see Millennials as viewing the world differently, beings savvy with technology, and having a skillset that can help all of us survive.

Wise leaders are open to new ideas, and they leverage reverse-mentor relationships as an employee engagement strategy. When bosses seek out and listen to their Millennialmentors to get fresh perspective, they will love and respect you. 

3. They Are Star Struck, Not the Star

Wise leaders don't want the perception that they are "rock stars." Why? Rock stars always have the spotlight shining on them. Wise leaders will instead show interest in the other person by shining the spotlight on them.

This is what initiates the best conversations -- learning about what they do, how they do it, why they do it. People love to talk about themselves, and wise leaders let them!

Don't get me wrong, wise leaders have plenty of chances to shine as well, but they don't meet someone for the first time like they're on center stage for a performance.

They are instead the person that shows up with the humble gesture of "I want to learn from you." They are star struck.

4. They Are Persuasive

In case anyone got an allergic reaction from reading the last two points, as if wise leaders aspire to drain the life forces of the younger and more savvy, or are intellectually-incapacitated drones, know that they are actually looked-up to for their persuasiveness.

Persuasiveness is really about how you communicate and influence someone throughhow you communicate. It may be to change someone's mind about something, perhaps pointing the person in the right direction or to make a tough decision.

If you can't influence thinking and change another person's mind, you're not persuading.

A wise leader will persuade by developing trust, never manipulating. She will be "understanding", and have keen insight (or discernment) into an issue that nobody else is able to see. She is ten steps ahead of the game, therefore, persuasive.

5. They Watch Their Words When They Speak

There's an old saying from a wise leader that goes like this:

Words satisfy the mind as much as fruit does the stomach; good talk is as gratifying as a good harvest.

So much conflict, confusion and misunderstanding comes from our words and what we communicate.

Wise leaders are careful about what they speak, give good and sound advice, don't talk out of both sides of your mouth, and have the other person's best interest in mind. When they do, they get a lot more in return.

What's your experience with wisdom? How has it helped in your own leadership journey?