Rhymes with Cars

I took a class on Samurai Selling recently. Samurai Selling, as the book says, is the ancient art of service in sales. The premise of the course is that the Samurai or "one who serves" is not just someone who conducts a transaction and splits (Ninja Selling???), but over a long term, serves a client. Not really a novel way of thinking about sales in 2007, but hang with me for a second. The course that I took specifically dealt in the area of presenting the Samurai way. I guess I was expecting more John Belushi style samurai, because I left feeling that this was the same stuff that anyone else who gives a decent presentation would tell you, just with more kitsch.

It was a good class, don't get me wrong. They stressed what I've stressed a bunch of times in previous posts: everyone gives PowerPoint demos with 6 bullets per page and most average sales reps simply stand up and read the bullets verbatim. It's boring and unmemorable. If you can deliver more than that, you will be well ahead of your competition. Samurai Selling suggests making your presentations memorable and attempts to get people to step out of their comfort zone to do so. It encourages the use of props as a metaphor for your product or service. "These binoculars help you to see what is on the horizon just like our reporting tools do." The idea being that emotion sells and stats, bullets and crappy clip art don't. It was a very fun class, but again, it was a bit kitschy. I don't know how comfortable I'd feel walking into a CIO's office with a bunch of Play D'oh to claymate network infrastructure. In the end, I thought that Samurai Selling was a good use of time, however, the instructors didn't seem any more comfortable using black yarn as a metaphor for dark fiber than I'd be actually presenting this to a client. It just isn't my style. That isn't to say that I don't love to leverage pictures, video and other factors to differentiate my presenations from the other bozos out there. I'm just saying that spending a couple of hours reading Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki or Cliff Atkinson and incorporating their suggestions into a presenation will go equally as far as this class on presentation does. The course did offer some good suggestions about how to get emotion out of potential buyers. One that I really liked, and use in my discussions with clients, is to write down three points that you love about your product or service and why. Now, "how can you dramatically generate that type of excitement out of your prospects?" The course suggests writing them down as follows:

Reason - - - - - - - - - - - - - - How to dramatize it? 1. 2. 3.

For example, using Hyperion Financial Management:

The Reason: It gets me excited because our solution gives publicly traded companies a single version of the truth when it comes to reporting finanical results to the SEC, their shareholders and employees. How to dramatize that: Version A: Show headlines of Worldcom, Enron, Adelphia, etc. Version B: Show video of the employees and shareholders at these companies that lost everything. Version C: Show pictures of Jeff Skilling going to jail.

If you are a CFO of a publically traded company, which of these will resonate the most with you? That's it. It's not comfortable, but it's not rocket science either. Plus, once you can convey why you love your products so much, and dramatize it like a daytime soap writer, you will be able to relay a message to your clients that is powerful and meaningful to them. And you will close more business.