I must admit that I cringe when I see people taking the first path, coming over all fake and desperate. Apparently I’m not alone, since most people I know opt for the second path. Authenticity provides a comforting moral high ground as well as an excuse for not going out there and doing anything really scary.

Part of me is pretty sure that we need to do scary things, though. I had a chance recently to talk to Rob Adams about the dilemma. His advice is summed up in the title of this post. He loves the New Zealand culture, and wants us to stay true to it. But being understated and phlegmatic doesn’t mean we have to be cowards. So make that call you’re afraid to make. Walk right up to that guy who could open a massive door for you. Tell that lady what you think a fair price is for your product, and why. There’s no need to be a dick about it, though. What’s required is bravery, the courage to put yourself out there. And it should be you who’s out there, not some dick version of you.

It’s a pretty simple formula and, once I understood it, I started seeing it all over the place (thanks Lance, Rowan, Nicole, Pel…). I’m trying my best to put it into practice. I’ve got a ways to go, but definitely recommend you try it.

Every good sales guy knows that if he can get the prospect nodding, the deal is just about done. That’s why good salesmen nod so much when they’re talking to you – it’s infectious.

Your sales material should also be moving you closer to a deal. Question: How much reading does it take before a prospective customer (or partner, or investor) is nodding? I call this ‘time to nod’, or TTN (because all metrics must be abbreviated). If your TTN is more than 10 seconds, you’re in trouble.

There are lots of ways to get a nod. It doesn’t have to be a communication of your complete value proposition. Empathetic statements work well. “Most business owners find moving poor staff on to be a huge challenge.” You can do old-school questions: “Does the time required to resolve bugs in this environment exceed three days?” A great diagram that sums up the customer’s current situation is another good technique.

What you’re doing is demonstrating your familiarity with their situation, and also your expertise.

Get them nodding with points like these, and you make it easier to get a nod when you show them how your service takes the pain away.

You knew all of this already, right? Even so, go look at your website and brochures and measure your TTN. Then start editing.

Sometimes this is doable. A well designed website or webinar can reduce the number of meetings required, cutting out cost and time.

But sometimes there’s not much you can do to speed up a client’s decision-making process: it’s about them, not about you. That was the case for Mike Carden of Sonar6, faced with a stubborn 9 month sales cycle. At the ICE Ideas conference last Friday, Mike explained how Sonar6 responded to this fact of life.

They use provocative, viral messages to get more possible leads into the sales funnel. And once they’re in the funnel? Mike described his strategy in this way: Be likable. People will engage in ongoing conversations with people they like. And they will tell refer friends to people they like.

So being likable is an essential part of keeping prospects on the hook while a new customer is gestating. Check out how they do it, or the way MailChimp or Dropbox do it. Would making ‘likability’ your top criterion change your digital approach to customers?

To follow and participate in the initiatives coming out of ICE Ideas, check out www.3000.org.nz

Elevator lines
By now we all know about elevator pitches. (If you’re just back from the monastery, that’s your proposition delivered in 30 seconds to the CEO/VC/Prime Minister whom you meet serendipitously in the elevator. It used to be 60 seconds, but lifts have gotten faster, and attention spans shorter.)

People refer to the elevator pitch as the thing that earns you the right to present a more detailed proposal. I’d like you to think about the first 5 seconds of the elevator pitch as the thing that earns the audience’s attention for the next 25 seconds, and ensures that those 25 seconds are productive. I call those first 5 seconds the “elevator line”. To do justice to them, you need to unlearn some things.

You’ll be told by experts that sales is mostly about benefits (WHY you need my product) and a bit about features (HOW it will help you). But to anchor these in their brain, your customer needs the WHAT. Let me explain.

“Gets you there faster” is a Why point. “Uses patented collision detection” is a How point. But I don’t want to hear any of that until I know What the heck you’re selling, be it cars, drugs, or hang-gliders.

Elevator lines work when you have a specific audience in mind. Every time my wife tells a friend that I run a ‘business to business design agency’ she gets a blank stare. When a prospective customer hears that line, though, they are usually very interested. They know what a design agency is, and they know that their B2B sales proposition is more complicated then that of their B2C mates. Features and benefits of our service slot neatly into that introduction.

Elevator lines are useful on websites, right at the top in a nice big font. They earn the right for people to spend precious seconds of their time browsing your content.

Taglines (aka straplines)
Sometimes your elevator line is a descriptive statement of something extraordinary. For example, our client Aquaflow’s elevator line is “Our technology harvests wild algae from wastewater, providing the raw material for carbon neutral fuel while leaving behind purer water.”

Although such a statement might sum up why you get out of bed each morning, it may not get a rise out of customers.

A tagline conveys your elevator line in a way that is more creative and inspiring. Aquaflow’s tagline is “Clean water. Green energy.”

As a final thought, keep in mind that taglines are not for everyone. If your brand has become well known to your target customers, and really stands for something, then a tagline is redundant.

We can all put that on our list of aspirations: one day I won’t need a tagline.

Your tailor knows that some of your ideas aren’t going to work. She’s seen them tried before, and saw the outcomes. She also has box full of tricks to accentuate your positives and…well you know the rest. Their independent outlook on these things is useful. No matter how good your own dress sense, you only see yourself in the mirror, and never get to see yourself for the first time.

Lesson 1: Trust your designer. Sometimes you’re so familiar with your business that you just can’t see it as your customers and partners will.

On the other hand, you’re the best person to decide if you feel good in your clothes. If you’re going to feel tense, or not yourself, then you won’t make a good impression – no matter how good you look in the tailor’s studio. Furthermore, your tailor’s got a good knowledge of what people are wearing at many events – but you may actually know more than she does about how to dress appropriately for certain functions. Sometimes what is cool and what makes you look like a dick is quite specific to a given community.

Lesson 2: Trust yourself. Sometimes your gut feel trumps your designer’s.

The two lessons can come into conflict. When they do, the most important thing is courage. Don’t go with the designer’s expert opinion just to avoid responsibility. But don’t use your gut feel as a trump card to avoid changes that you know (deep down in places that you don’t like to talk about on Facebook) are needed.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the definition of ‘Expert’ is ‘Someone who knows how to use technical terms in the right places in a conversation, to the satisfaction of other experts’.

Notice that, on this definition, so-called experts don’t necessarily have to have a deep understanding of what they’re talking about. In my experience, that turns out to be true in most cases.

Sometimes that makes it hard to sell things to experts. You need them to actually understand what’s going on in their world to see the value of your product. But you can’t patronise these guys. If you act as if they don’t know what’s going on, you’re sunk (especially if it’s true… which it probably is).

One way out of this dilemma is to use a variation of the following: “You guys get this, of course, but it’s going to be hard to convince the dummies and laypeople out there. Here’s the simplified version we use for them.” No one loses face, everyone now has a better understanding, and the ideas can spread more effectively via word of mouth. Including expert-to-expert word of mouth.

A lot of your customers, or at least a lot of the people who influence your customers, do not enjoy their day at work. Giving them ‘the three reasons our product can help you’ isn’t necessarily going to provide a ray of sunshine.

There are all kinds of ways to make your messages more entertaining. We’ve done mockumentaries, songs, online games…even an old fashioned wordfind puzzle on the back of a postcard. The key, though, is to be sure that you’re talking to bored people. Else you risk trivialising what could be a serious matter.

If you’re not sure if your customers are bored or not, then you don’t know them well enough. Or they’re really polite.

Repeat business from loyal clients underpins a successful business. And these fans are also a key source of referrals (polygamy is all good in business).

A focus on the long term has several implications. One of them is the importance of truthfulness. Getting someone to believe impressive falsehoods might be just fine if you’re after a one-night stand, but the inevitable disillusionment is the kiss of death for a long term relationship.

If you’re the arty kid who can make them laugh, pitching yourself as yet another captain of the First XV who loves animals is just dumb (feel free to psychoanalyse that metaphor). And yet a surprising number of new clients come to us with a belief that branding is the science of covering up their flaws. “At heart our people are unconfident, so we need you to make us look bold.” “Word on the street is we’re a bit slack at times – so make us sound ultra reliable.” This is a doomed enterprise. It only adds ‘bull$hitter’ to your list of brand attributes.

The real task is to design and tell the most compelling true story anyone has ever heard about you.

If there’s nothing special about you and your business, no designer can help you. If you’ve got something unique to offer, but are struggling to communicate it, we most certainly can.

My client had consulted with customers and conducted research before designing the new offer, so to see it go down in flames was pretty shocking.

Capturing the feedback on video is a really useful discipline in these sorts of cases. When we looked and listened closely, it became clear that how the offer was being phrased was more of an issue than the offer itself. It wasn’t that the language was difficult. The issue was that they were talking to customers the way managers at a company talk to each other, or talk to the government. We changed the vocab to match the audience, and tested the same offer with further groups. The results were now favourable.

Spin doctors are experts at using phrasing to manipulate perceptions. You never want to go near spin – but language often does need a doctor. If you’ve got something special to offer, you want your customers to know the truth about you. So it’s both arrogant and stupid to pitch to them in Latin when they speak Italian.

Spend more time listening to the way your customers speak. The coolest part is discovering the Italian phrases that describe their world so much more richly than our Latin ever did.

One group of people saw a video of a car crash and were asked how fast they thought the car was going when it “smashed into” another car. A second group saw the same video and were asked how fast the car was going when it “contacted” the other car.

On average the group that heard the word “smashed” had an estimate of the speed 33% higher than the group who heard “contacted”.

I don’t like the idea that words can change our perception of things to such a degree. But given that’s how our brains work, we need to play the game well. ‘Strategists’ seem more insightful than ‘account managers’. And a ‘studio’ seems more creative than an ‘office’. Just saying.

The game plan here is to sell something new using concepts that people are already familiar with.

This is an important tactic for Kiwi firms who are trying to market a bleeding edge product. How many global customers want to take a risk on the New Zealand firm doing things in a way that nobody else is? Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM and all that.

You can still be completely unique without using any unique words.

“We are the only point of sale software that operates on a software-as-a-service model, but also works offline” is wordy but intelligible. “POS – reinvented” is punchy but scary.

The moral is that an idea that once upon a time was a stroke of genius may not have cut-through today. The first person to say, “Hey, we don’t sell services, we sell solutions” was a genius. Describing your offering as a “solution” today does not set you apart. Yesterday I saw a dented tradesman’s van with the tagline “Solutions for Every Industry”.

Somewhere in the world, someone is coming up with the idea to call their services “solutions”. They’ve never heard the term used before. They too are a genius. But it’s still not going to have cut-through.

That’s why research, especially competitor research, is so important. Without it, you or your creative team could be re-inventing (at great expense) an idea that was once shiny, but is now dull from overuse.

If the client who is turned off is paying for the design out of his or her own pocket, you might expect a 100% rejection rate. At LTW our experience is very different.

In fact, one of the reasons we enjoy working with business owners is precisely that they’re paying us with their own money. Owners have the strongest possible incentive to decide if what we’re suggesting will pay off. That makes for an open mind and very productive debates.

If you’re commissioning design work, ask yourself: “What would I do if it was my money?”

You want your audience to remember you and your message, not your slides. Gorgeous visuals can therefore be your biggest enemy in a presentation.

When I find my audience distracted by my visuals instead of listening to me, I walk over and hit the ‘B’ key. Check out what happens.

It has the dramatic effect of shifting all attention in the room to you. It gives you a chance to demonstrate how well you know your message. And it tells people that you personally want to share the idea with them, because it matters that much to you.

The toughest part is not finding the people. The toughest part is getting them to be real. When marketing advice is just a blog away, most people you “test” your design with will put on a marketing hat and try to say what an expert would say. That’s of little use to you.

You need them to act like your customers would act. Don’t ask, “What do you think of this?” Set the scene properly. “You’re a really busy engineer. What would you do if one of your staff put this on your desk?” Or “What would you click on next?”

Jakob Nielsen says that testing with five people will reveal 85% of the usability problems in your design. He means five real people.

Here’s the full table, simplified and adapted from conversations with the experts at RogenSi.

If you weren’t aware of models like this, now you are. There are many more. http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes1.htm

If you’ve known about these tools for some time, ask yourself: “How often do I apply them in my interactions with clients and prospects?”

Most sales people revert to their own style. Analytical thinkers will provide lots of detail and focus on process – even if they are boring their Expressive client to death.

Just as common are so-called “experts” who will tell you to lose the detail and cut down the word count in all situations. If your audience in an Analytical one (like a majority of lawyers, systems analysts and financial controllers) you’ve just sunk your battleship.

Another interesting trick is to talk to all the styles at once on the same piece of paper. I’ll leave that for another post.