Dance With Strangers

Folks have been discussing recently how important it is for speakers to monitor the live chatter during a presentation, in order to make shifts that will help the audience. This is the wrong approach because it makes the speaker/panelist pull their attention from the people who have devoted their time to listening, leading to a much poorer presentation. Ultimately I created a personal principle I would follow when speaking:

Thou shalt not check social networks during a presentation or as a member of a panel!

However, I had started wondering if we all felt forced to be checking our own laptops because the audience wasn’t looking at the speakers any longer, instead their own heads were buried in laptops and smart phones. Having just gotten home from speaking at the DMA’s NCDM show, my hypothesis was seemingly affirmed and I now add a corollary to the list of speaking principles:

Audience, thou shalt put away the laptops and the smart phones and listen to thy speakers!

The best part? The rule became apparent to me because the vast majority of the audience (I was fortunate enough to present with my good friend Aaron Strout, more on that tomorrow) did not have laptops, or at least didn’t take them out during the session. Smart phones, or even dumb phones, were also kept in their pockets for the most part. This lasted the entire session…150 MINUTES!

Part of my brain is dying to say it was due to the riveting content, but I think that was only part of the equation. Instead, I think this audience was  trying to learn and engage with us during the session. To get the most out of our time they had committed to listening, asking questions and making comments throughout. Rather than worry about broadcasting their thoughts about our session to social networks, they instead were telling us directly. It, I hope, made for a great session for the audience, but it also created a much more enjoyable experience for Aaron and myself.

The presentation and conversation between speakers and audience was the most important element during our time together. There was a visual commitment from both parties to put away the laptops (and phones) in order to listen and learn from each other. Thank you to everyone who attended the NCDM session, you provided a valuable lesson.

Tomorrow I’m going to post the slides and some additional thoughts on our session, “B2B Social Media Marketing Techniques: Measuring the Impact from Creation to Closed Deal”.

This past Friday at around 9am I was sitting in the passenger seat of our car while my wife did her best Mario Andretti through the curvy roads of the Texas Hill Country. Our mission was to reach the ER since I had suddenly come down with a very bad allergic reaction to antibiotics I was on and it felt as if my throat was constricting along with the rest of my body. Fortunately for me nothing serious did happen and once they stuck that Epi into my left arm and filled my IV up with a bunch of steroids I was on my way back to normal. By the time we were driving back home, this time obeying the speed limits, I was just annoyed at how I had lost most of my day and the fact that my mind was so cloudy that doing work in the afternoon seemed impossible.

The latter part proved to be true. The mix of anti-histamine, epinephrine and steroids created this odd sense of being tired, but every time you close your eyes all you see is bright flashing lights. Thus sleep was not an option and I sat downstairs in my new favorite chair while my wife worked out of her home office upstairs. Little did I know she was about to give me a terrific reminder of how our jobs have shifted in marketing.

Phone call after phone call I listened to her tell folks about a job opportunity within her company. The details don’t truly matter, rather it’s the fact that the people who do this job perform it basically at no pay, have to look after teenage students from foreign countries and deal with host parents. Sounds really great huh? Well after you listen to my wife tell the story of this position you might be submitting an application immediately.

Marketing, and selling, is about telling a story. It is not about regurgitating a messaging platform or a tagline (although those serve as building blocks). They story you tell about your product or service must be entertaining, personalized, seemingly original everytime and easily weave in the paing points you are feeling every minute of every day. Sitting downstairs I must have heard my wife make eight phone calls, each one had a different yet similar story, but there were always some common traits:

1. A measured cadence.
2. Inserting key pain points throughout the story, not simply at the beginning.
3. No reliance on a script.
4. Ability to recognize when to stop talking and start listening.
5. You tell the story from your own perspective, not the company’s.
6. Sound bites throughout which are ideal for the audience to write down for later review.
7. Confidence in each and every word.
8. Accurate use of analogies in order to ensure your story is understood.
9. Admitting when you don’t know the answer, but assuring the person they will have that answer immediately after the story is done.
10. Ending the story by leaving them wanting more of the story.

Great marketers and sales personnel, no matter the industry, are good at their jobs because they most likely had all of the skills listed above, plus more. As a B2B marketer you need to be an even better story teller than the sales force, since your job is to generate leads for the sales force. By the time you pass the lead into the funnel they have bought into the story, now they want to get into the product details and negotiation.

Have you listened to different people inside your company tell the story? Besides other marketers? Besides sales? No?

Get up and go talk to the engineers that designed the product, your CTO who co-founded the company, the CEO who has to tell the story each quarter to the Board, the COO, accounting and more. Each of these folks have been told what the tagline and the value proposition is for the company, but how do they actually tell the story? You’ll be surprised how much you will learn and how must stronger a storyteller it will make you.