of the need to sell through the buyer's emotional drivers, a well-prepared elevator pitch, and a masterful sales presentation. The object of the sales pitch is to obtain permission to run a focus group to assess, validate, and scope the proposed initiative.
Learn to Sell by Using the Emotional Drivers of the Buyer
It is through your audience's emotional drivers, and not through logic, that a story is sold. Failure to appreciate this has undermined many an accountant's pitch to the board.
All major projects need a public relations machine behind them. No presentation, email, memo, or paper related to a major change should go out unless it has been vetted by your PR expert. Do not get offended when they rewrite most of your content. Just admire their genius and claim the credit when the PR process works – that's what everybody else does.
SELLING BY EMOTIONAL DRIVERS: HOW A CAR SALE IS MADE
Three customers arrive on the same day to look at a car that has been featured in the local newspaper. The first person is a young IT professional, generation Y, and wearing latest designer clothing. The salesperson slowly walks up and assesses the emotional drivers of this potential buyer. Having ascertained that the young man is an IT guru, working for a major search engine organization, the salesperson says, “I hope you have some track racing experience. You need to be a Lewis Hamilton to handle this beast. This car has 320 BHP, a twin turbo, and corners like it's on railway tracks. Only a top driver can handle this beast. It's a real driver's car.” SOLD.
The second person could be me, with my gray hair visible. The salesperson might say, “This car is five-star rated for safety, with eight air bags, enough power to get you out of trouble, unbelievable braking when you have to avoid the idiots on the road, and tires that will never fail you.” SOLD.
The third person is wearing stylish clothing and is impeccably well groomed. The opening sales line might be, “This car has won many awards for its design. Sit in the driver's seat and see the quality of the finish. Everything is in the right place. You look a million dollars in that outfit you are wearing and every time you drive this car you will feel like a million dollars!” SOLD.
The Elevator Speech
Having now understood why prior initiatives have failed through poor selling let us now look at how we get the SMT motivated. The key is to have a 30-second elevator speech that is designed to capture their attention. It must be ready so that when we next bump into the decision makers, we are practiced and ready.
The 30-second elevator speech is designed to capture their attention. The term came about in management books describing how you need to be able to get a point across in an elevator ride, as sometimes this is the only chance you may have to have a one on one with the decision maker. The aim is, as they walk away, that they ask you to come to their office in the next few days to discuss this further.
An elevator interaction might go like this.
In answer to the question, “How are you?” you might say, “I am troubled.” “Why is that?” being the natural response from the CEO. To which you reply, “I have just been looking at _______________and I have estimated that over the next 10 years, we will be spending $__M and $__M on this if we do nothing. I have been researching a new approach, tried and tested elsewhere, that would save much of this cost. I just need 15 minutes of your time to explain this.”
The key is to fine-tune the elevator speech so that it is compelling. I recommend you practice your elevator speech at least 10 times so that it is focused and no longer than 30 seconds. As Kotter, says we need to create a sense of urgency and connect both intellectually and emotionally.
Deliver a Compelling Burning Platform Presentation
Assuming the elevator speech has given us an audience, we need to prepare and deliver a presentation that will get the senior management team to agree to holding a focus group workshop with the organization's “oracles.”
A sales pitch to the senior management team and the board should go as follows:
● Make sure you have a good proposal and one with a sound focus on the emotional drivers that will matter to your audience.
● Focus on selling to the thought leader on the senior management team and board before presenting your proposal. This may take weeks of informal meetings, sending copies of articles, telling better practice stories, and so on, to awaken interest. Remember that the thought leader may not be the CEO or board chairperson.
● Make sure you prime the thought leader to speak first after your presentation has been delivered. This gives your proposal the best chance of a positive vote.
● Go for an easy next step, the running of a one day focus group with the organization's oracles.16 You state, “If I can convince the oracles that this project will work, and get their involvement in the project plan, I will be able to present to you a project that has a greater chance of success.”
It's important to get this presentation right, because you will probably not get a second chance. Thus one needs to embrace the better practices around delivering “killer” presentations. I have recently read The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo.17 It is a compelling read. I have incorporated his work along with the work of Nancy Duarte's Slide: ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations18 and Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery19 in creating a list of the top tips to deliver compelling presentations. This checklist is included in Appendix B.
THE POWER OF THE FOCUS GROUP
I have found holding a one-day focus group meeting is a superb way to get a coalition of oracles behind the project. This focus group meeting would be attended by a cross section of 15 to 30 experienced staff, covering the business units, teams, area offices, and head office, and covering the different roles from administrators to senior management team members.
This focus group meeting should discuss the existing issues with performance measures, expose the attendees to the new thinking, outline the intended approach, and seek their advice to decide if the project is viable, and if so what lessons could be learned from past projects.
The aim of this workshop is to get the green light and secure the full support of the attendees. The next step is to develop a robust blueprint that sets out the direction and the requirements, using some of the oracles who have attended the focus group workshop.
I have prepared agendas for the focus group workshops to re-engineer month-end reporting, annual planning, and the annual accounts. These are available in the PDF download.
PDF DOWNLOAD
To assist the finance team on the journey, templates, checklists, and book reviews have been provided. The reader can access, free of charge, a PDF of the following material from www.davidparmenter.com/The_Financial_Controller_and_CFO's_Toolkit.
The PDF download for this chapter includes:
● A book review of The Three Laws of Performance
●
The organization's “oracles” being those “go to” individuals everyone refers you to when you need to get something done.
Carmine Gallo,
Nancy Duarte,
Garr Reynolds,
