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Sell Your Point
When I worked in the editorial department of a magazine for kids, the company’s president decided to have a slick sales trainer teach the basics of closing a deal to our entire staff. He wasn’t Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, but he was close.
Those of us in editorial thought this was an incredible waste of our time—after all, we thought, sales was the focus of our marketing and advertising staff, not the concern of writers and editors.
But, now looking back, I see the president was right. We were all in the business of selling—some of us were selling ad space; others were selling something even more valuable: ideas.
Good ideas, in the form of points, deserve to be sold, not just shared. So how can you make sure you’re truly selling your points instead of sharing them? Read on.
Avoid the Book Report
Too many speakers don’t deliver speeches; they deliver book reports. Book reports simply describe who, what, where, and sometimes how and why. These are rarely actual points, yet often treated as if they were. They also don’t necessarily convey the speaker’s stake in the subject, the subject’s relevance to the audience, or the subject’s potential impact.
The difference between delivering a book report and conveying a point is similar to the difference between recounting a movie’s plot and convincing someone to see it with you. Or between a nonfiction book’s table of contents and its blurb on the inside cover. In both cases, the first is a share, the second a sell.
These book reports can take many forms in a workplace, from status reports to Town Hall presentations to sales pitches. In each one, information is explained, but nothing is proposed. There’s no “I believe,” only an information dump.
I can usually tell a “sharer” from a seller right off the bat. A sharer will often say:
Today, I want to talk a little about X.
Is this person selling anything? Seems not, by that introduction. It seems all he wants to do is throw out a few words and mix them with others’ words in the hope some of them stick together and magically produce an action step. After all, he only wants to “talk about it.”
Compare that to the seller:
Today, I’m going to explain why doing X will lead to Y.
Here are two in-depth examples from my workshops:
Example One:
A former client of mine was in the business of selling branded merchandise, including hats, brochures, signs, and pins, all featuring a client’s logo. I asked her to give me her best sales pitch. She laid out all of her products and began to describe each one:
See this hat? This hat will never collapse, is fully adjustable, and can feature your logo permanently stitched to the front. See this pin? It can feature a three-color logo and has a magnetic backing so it won’t ruin a shirt or jacket. This banner is made from special material that will resist liquids and wrinkles, and your logo can be printed all over it. . . .
She went on like that until she had no more items to describe, then stopped.
I told her she did a great job describing these products (think: book report), but there was one thing I never heard her say:
If you use my services, more people will be exposed to your brand, bringing more people to your product and earning you more money.
Another client of mine worked for a major nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting impoverished women in developing nations across the world. Her job was to convince her bosses to green-light a book idea. This is how she pitched it:
This book represents our mission perfectly—it tells detailed stories of these brave women, combining rich prose and their own words. Each story features pictures taken by award-winning photographers, and there’s a topic index in the back you can use to find issues you care about. It will look beautiful in anyone’s home and make a meaningful holiday gift.
Another book report. She described every relevant detail about the book, but she didn’t sell the point. Given the mission of her nonprofit, a stronger sell might have sounded like this:
This book will expose our mission to key audiences and donors, helping us raise funds that will assist more families in peril.
Making the leap from sharing to selling doesn’t require another college degree, just sharp awareness of your strongest point and its highest value proposition.
In a recent public speaking workshop, I wrote the word SELL in big letters on a large piece of paper and held it up when I felt my students weren’t selling their ideas. The students made profound changes in tone, body language, volume, and word choice, and the audience immediately felt the impact. These students came in as describers; they left as salespeople.
Use Selling Language
To ensure my clients do more selling than sharing, I encourage them to adopt these point-forcing power phrases:
I propose . . .
I recommend . . .
I suggest . . .
The brilliance of these simple phrases is that—similar to “I believe”—they force the creation of a true point, and typically a value proposition as well. As a result, people who use these power phrases are often seen as leaders . . . and eventually become them.
Try to insert these phrases when you communicate in any format with both employees and supervisors. You’ll find your meetings ending with not just action steps, but true momentum.