Kick in the Career: Why did Donald Duck call the electric company?

Humor is one of my favorite subjects and the ability to use it well can be a powerful business tool. But as I’ve mentioned in the past, humor, or attempts at humor, are frequently overused or misused because basic principles of humor are incorrectly understood.

I’ve often been struck by the fact that movie audiences will laugh at comedies even when nothing funny is happening. They laugh because they want to laugh, or even need to laugh. They go to comedies for the same reason they go to a restaurant. Laughing, like eating, is a hardwired requirement of their existence. In order to use humor effectively, you just have to connect a listener’s built-in desire to laugh, and fulfill that desire at a serviceable level.

Being a “funny person” is not an essential requirement. What is essential is a desire to be funny, and the ability to communicate that desire to your listeners. If you can show a listener that you at least want them to laugh, they’re certain to go along with you – because remember: laughter is something they want and need.

People fail with humor when they fail to make their humorous intentions clear. If they know they’ve bought a ticket to a comedy, they’ll act the way they’re supposed to act at a comedy. But if they’re not sure what kind of a show they’re seeing, they won’t be in their “funny gear.” And if they’re not in their funny gear, they’re not going to laugh – because they’re not sure that’s what they’re supposed to do.

When listeners are in “funny gear,” they’ll accept your humor in a playful way and enjoy it. But if they’re in “serious gear,” nothing will make them laugh. Either they won’t understand what they’re supposed to do, or they’ll resent the fact that they’re now being asked to laugh by somebody that they don’t think is funny.

So why did Donald Duck call the electric company? Because he wanted to talk about his bill! Now that’s funny! 

Your Inner CEO: "Run that by me one more time...."

Your purpose in business is always to assist your clients in solving their problems. A great deal of research now suggests that clients want to buy products and services, not be sold to. So, initially, a prospective client will want to know your answers to the following questions: “Do you fully understand the problems I have? And do you have a solution to these problems?”

As soon as you’ve established what a client’s problem really is, your next task is linking those issues to the solutions you offer. But there may be times when you aren’t able to do that. You may not have solutions. If that’s the case, simply apologize for not being able to help and mention alternative sources that might be able to do so.

But assuming you do see an opportunity to assist, you need to be very thorough with your questioning in order to elicit detailed answers: “Tell me how you’d like me to help you solve this problem? What other problems have you experienced?” Try to entice some emotion from the client as well as pure information. Clients will appreciate the time you're taking to understand their needs. They’ll be grateful to you for qualifying them so carefully.

Once this is done, you’re ready to begin a conversation about the benefits you offer. Offer clients key benefits that will address the specific problems you’ve discussed. If clients ask for more information, that’s of course an extremely positive sign. It shows they’re interested in what you've said and shown so far.

Never forget that clients want to get out of hell much more than they want to get into heaven. How can you determine if you’re the right person to help them do that? Summing up, here are the important points you can keep in mind:

Always ask open-ended questions to make sure you understand what clients need. “Let’s keep talking….”

If you believe that you can't provide a solution to clients’ needs, 
just move on. You owe it to both them and yourself not to waste time. This is nothing for anyone to be offended about. It’s just a reality of doing business.  
 
Describe how you've been able to assist other clients with similar
needs. Try to have testimonials from specific individuals to support this. If it becomes clear that there is not a good fit with a prospective client, try to provide a referral to someone else that might be able to help. “What goes around comes around.” Yes, it really does. 

Perfect Pitch: This Is Madness

If you’ve watched Mad Men on AMC, you know that some of the show’s most dramatic moments take place during presentations and pitch meetings with ad agency clients. That’s when Don Draper, the lead character, waxes poetic about products including laxatives, baked beans, and cigarettes.

But is that realism, or fantasy? What really makes an effective pitch session?

Here’s one essential principle. A great business presentation is captivating when it makes us forget about the speaker and become absorbed in the talk. To make that happen, you’ve got to edit out anything that deflects your listeners’ focus. Practice your delivery over and over until you remove the distractions including nervous tics and uncomfortable pauses. Pay particular attention to your body language. Is it non-existent or excessive? Good presenters seem natural but energized. That’s what you want to strive for.

Don’t try to be funny unless you really are funny. Humor is too often misused and over-used. (Don Draper never makes jokes!) Presenters often feel tempted to deliver the stand up comedy version of their product or service. Your listeners aren’t there to laugh. What they care about is your ability to help them deal with challenges and opportunities in their business. Show that you’re familiar with their problems, and that you’re there to solve them.  

Only give a presentation after you understand the client’s unique motivation to buy your product or service. Before you can credibly provide solutions to the client’s problems, you need to understand specifically what those problems are. That seems obvious, but prescribing the remedy before making the diagnosis is a very common mistake.

So ask lots of questions and pay close attention to the answers. But don’t turn the encounter into a therapy session. Translate issues into dollars and cents. Find out what a problem is costing the client. Also determine the bottom line benefits that will materialize when that problem is solved.

The more relevant your presentation is to a client’s bottom line, the greater their interest will be. Forget the rest. Your prospect won’t be listening. If you give a standard, one size fits all presentation – hoping that something you say will ring a bell -- chances are that bell is not going to ring.

Finally, make sure you’re presenting to people with the authority to buy. Putting together an effective presentation is a lot of work. You don’t want to have to do it again for the real decision makers, so get those decision makers into the room the first time around.

Perfect Pitch: Fear of Flopping

If you’re afraid of cold calling, or speaking before a group, or making a presentation to a client, what is it you’re really afraid of? Unless you’re addressing a hostile audience in some very dangerous region of the world, you probably don’t have to worry about physical violence. And even if you were to suddenly draw a complete blank, it’s unlikely that anyone will laugh out loud at you. On the contrary, everyone knows that making a presentation is a challenge -- so your listeners would probably be very sympathetic.

With this in mind, let’s consider what people are really afraid of, and how to deal with that fear.

It’s not totally blowing it that we fear. It’s being anything less than perfect. Nervous speakers aren’t afraid of striking out. They’re afraid of not hitting a grand slam home run. They’re also afraid that they’ll be recognized as being afraid, which only makes the fear worse. For some reason, perfectionism seems to be built into the concept of business communication, yet perfectionism is just the opposite of what a good communicator should be feeling. This is true not only emotionally, but physically as well.

You’ve probably heard of the so-called fight or flight response. It’s the primal yes or no question that your brain asks when you’re faced with a stress inducing situation. It’s the hardwired prehistoric choice that still exists in our minds, even in the 21^st century. Are we going to confront this threat like a good caveman or cavewoman? Or are we going to run to the back of the cave and hide from it? Never mind that what we’re confronting is not a dinosaur, but the weekly meeting of the PTA. At the deepest level, the human brain doesn’t make those kinds of distinctions. When you’re feeling stressed by an unfamiliar circumstance, your brain thinks everything is on the line.

The fight or flight response leads to some very well documented physical reactions – and a couple of them are very unfortunate with respect to public speaking. It doesn’t really matter that the pupils of your eyes dilate, or that your digestive system begins to shut down. But the fight or flight response also causes a very powerful inhibition of the vocal cords. At the neurobiological level, the ability to talk is blocked. You capability to speak is actually paralyzed. 

As if that weren’t enough, your facial muscles can also freeze up. So you’re not able to say anything, and you’re not even able to grin and bear it. The fight or flight response has turned you into a cigar store Indian. This is exactly what you were afraid of, right? And that’s exactly why it happened: because you were afraid!

The truth is, even many highly accomplished public speakers continue to experience a certain level of stage fright, regardless of how many talks they’ve given. They accept it as a fact of life. They don’t have to completely erase the fear in order to bring it under control. They’re pragmatists rather than perfectionists. Stage fright may come and go, but it usually does not vanish permanently. The key to success is just putting into the right perspective. 

Your Inner CEO: Generosity

More than two hundred years ago the economic philosopher Adam Smith made a statement that’s still being discussed and argued about. Smith said that society works best when people act in their own self-interest. But what exactly does that mean? Is self-interest the same as selfishness? Actually, self-interest is the opposite of selfishness. Let’s take a look at why that’s true.

At first glance, it’s easy to see why people do selfish things. A man finds a wallet on a bus. The wallet has money in it, so he pockets the money from the wallet and throws the wallet in the trash. Whatever this means from an ethical perspective, there’s a clear logic to it. The man wants more money than he has, and he acts accordingly.

Yet sometimes, and more often than you might think, the man will return the money. But why? Keeping it for himself can be explained in one sentence, but returning it takes a little insight. Why do people do generous things? Human beings sell goods and services in order to get money, but generosity means providing something without the clear expectation of a definite return.

Actually generosity and self-interest aren’t really so different. It all depends on how we define self-interest. Is it just the satisfaction of short-term desire for material gain? Or is self-interest more than that? The fact is, most people have long terms goals beyond just making a quick profit, or even beyond making money at all. They may still be acting out of self-interest, but not in material terms.

Suppose a traveler runs out of gas on a dark country road. Just then a farmer comes by in a jeep. The farmer happens to have a can of gas. He stops and puts the gas in the car of the stranded driver. When the driver offers money to the farmer, the farmer shakes his head. “I know what it’s like to be stuck on a dark road,” he says, “so here’s the only payment I ask. Someday you’ll see somebody stranded just like you were. When that happens, I want you to stop and help, just like I stopped for you now.”

Was the farmer acting like a completely irrational person? Would it have been more reasonable to say, “All right, that’ll cost you ten bucks.” Not at all, because all of us benefit from living in a society where we help each other. People act generously partly because generosity may someday be extended to them. A young man giving his seat on a bus to an older woman provides a model for that woman, and in fact for everyone on the bus. Hopefully, the woman will remember the generosity she received -- and someday she’ll help someone else. It will be like repaying a debt.

And what about if you don’t repay the debt? Someone who benefits from generosity but doesn’t extend it is a kind of free-loader. They’ve taken but they haven’t given. Indeed, people like that are not uncommon in the world. Do they feel badly about themselves? Not always -- because there’s a simple way to justify their behavior. They say, “Nobody ever gave me anything, so I don’t have to give anything back. I haven’t received Appreciation, so I don’t have to offer it.”

But that’s absolutely false. How can anyone who gets out of bed every morning into a new day assert that they’ve never received anything? How can people who can see with their eyes and hear with their ears believe that they’ve never received something for nothing? They’re alive, aren’t they? And that life didn’t cost them a dime. 

Perfect Pitch: Seeking commitment

The single need shared by all clients and customers is to feel relief from some form of pain. Truly, relief from pain – which may be mild or severe – is what every buyer wants. Eliminating the negative experience of pain is a much stronger incentive to action than upside opportunities. It’s just human nature.  

But the pain of waiting a few minutes for your computer to boot up is very different from the pain of trying to get health insurance coverage for a chronic illness. While relief from pain is always a client's dominant buying motive, the nature and intensity of that pain covers a wide range of experiences. But regardless of the specific nature of your client's pain, your ongoing task is to highlight the relief you can provide. Make sure this primary benefit is understood. Be absolutely certain that the solution you’re selling is clear.  

You can do this using this two step process. First, clarify the discomfort that your client is now experiencing. Then make it equally clear that you have a solution to that specific discomfort.  

Both of these steps are very important. But what makes them really effective are the bridging devices that need to be placed between the steps. We can refer to those bridges as commitments. 

A commitment is any agreement on the part of the client to take another step forward toward finalizing a business relationship. In other words, a commitment moves us nearer to the close, but it is not the close itself. Very often a commitment is simply a very basic statement like, "Let's keep talking."

Trying to move into the close too soon -- without ever asking for the commitments that make the close feasible -- is a very common mistake. Again, you must first remind the client of the difficulty that he or she currently has to live with. Then you must make it clear that you have a product or service to change that situation for the better.  

Once you have identified and clarified for the client that he or she is enduring a certain amount of pain, you then request agreement about that fact. You ask the buyer to agree with you that there is indeed a problem. That agreement is a commitment, albeit a limited one. All you have to do is invite the client to acknowledge that there is indeed a problem. Once you’ve done that, you’ve gotten a commitment that authorizes you to keep talking. Sometimes (or often) that's enough for one day!

Perfect Pitch: What's so funny?

Humor is a powerful tool for communication – but it’s not just a laughing matter. It should be used carefully, and there are times when it shouldn’t be used at all. Generally speaking, if you can convey your message in an amusing and entertaining manner – that’s great. But if humor is used awkwardly or distastefully, you can seriously damage your cause.

The problem is, it’s not always easy to know when humor is appropriate and when it isn’t – because this seems to be one subject on which everyone considers himself an expert. More specifically, it’s very rare to hear someone say, “I just don’t have a good sense of humor.” And in fact it’s very difficult to prove them wrong, because humor is a totally subjective quality.

If you say that you can beat the Wimbledon champion in a tennis game, there is an objective way of proving whether that’s true or not. The proof will appear on the scoreboard. But if you say that there’s nothing funny about the latest comedy TV show, it’s completely a matter of opinion. Even if everyone else in the room is laughing, you can shrug your shoulders and say they’re wrong. They just don’t have good taste in humor, and you do.

In a business presentation, it doesn’t really matter whether you think something is funny. What matters is what the listeners think. So while in theory every presentation can benefit from a humorous element, in practice this depends on several variables: are you funny or aren’t you? Can you use humor effectively or not?

You’ve probably met people who could not tell a joke if their lives depended on it. Yet those people might actually be very funny individuals, precisely because they’re so inept at being funny. If any general statement can be made about humor, it might be this: everyone can use humor effectively, once they find the type of humor that firs their personality and their speaking style. It all comes back to that good old axiom from ancient Greece: Know thyself.

Humor is too serious to be taken lightly – but it can also be an extremely valuable personal attribute. So give humor some serious thought. You’ll see that humor is more than just a way to add entertainment value to a conversation. It fulfills a very basic need in human beings. People don’t just want to laugh – they need to laugh. If you can help them do that, it’s as if you’ve given food to a hungry person. You’ve not only made their lives easier. You actually helped them survive. And they’ll be very receptive to your message as a result.

So did you hear about the duck who complained to the electric company? He was angry about his bill. (Yuk yuk!) 

Perfect Pitch: Give it to me straight...

By asking frank, direct, and diplomatic questions, you can quickly determine the potential for working together with a new contact. I like to ask open-ended, action-based questions that are grounded in the “let’s keep talking” principle. Some good questions of that kind might be, “Have you ever worked with an executive recruiter before? What was your experience? What would you like your experience to be?”

When you ask those kind of questions, you encourage clients in a non-threatening way to share relevant stories from their own experience. Those stories will put you in a much better position to gauge the possibilities for a mutually beneficial relationship.

When speaking with a new contact, focus on simple questions that illuminate what the client actually does. Skip the fluff. If you’re afraid of seeming too inquisitive, that fear can cost you many more clients than an overly aggressive style. We all want to be liked but that desire shouldn’t get in the way of solid business practices. Sometimes it seems more comfortable in the short run to start a friendly relationship than to gain information that can build a solid business partnership. Don’t let that happen.

People in my line of work face a lot of rejection so they tend to be very open to praise and positive feedback from prospective clients. And for the clients, the early phases of a relationship can be like having a free consultation about their favorite subject, which is themselves. All this provides frequent strokes for both sides. If this early relationship seems so good, it may seem natural to assume that the relationship should go forward.

But if the client is not legitimately qualified, it’s only a matter of time before both parties realize that this isn’t a fit. But by then you may have wasted valuable time. Yes, “let’s keep talking”…but not forever and not with everyone.

Perfect Pitch: "The hell you're in right now...."

When you engage a new client during the earliest stages of a business relationship, you’re not doing this just for the experience of human bonding. This is a business connection. It will be wonderful if your new client eventually develops into a lifelong friend, but that’s not something you can focus on now. Let’s be frank. For the time being it’s about money. You want to make money for yourself, and you want to that you can make money for your news client as well. That’s how things can move forward.

Toward that end, you’ll want to ask your client some qualifying questions to make sure there’s a possibility for a productive and profitable relationship. Qualifying questions are a well-established element in emergent business relationships and many of the most common ones haven’t changed since at least the middle of the 20^th century.

Here’s a typical qualifying question: “Would you like some information about our company and what we do?”

Here’s another one: "If you felt that our program could help your company improve efficiency, reduce overhead and at the same time, improve quality, is this something that you would want to know more about?" This tries to be more proactive, but is it really just more long-winded?

A long-standing sales myth has grown up around these types of questions. The myth is that they enable salespeople to build rapport with the prospects they encounter on the phone or in person. They’re also supposed to provide valuable tactical information.

But they don’t. Questions like those turn potential clients off and shut down lines of communication. If you doubt this, ask yourself how you would respond to those questions from someone who had just called you on the telephone or had come in to meet you for the first time.

Would you open up? Would you say: “Yes, please share as much information as possible about your company, because I can’t wait to hear it?”

Would you say: “I’m so glad you’re here? I was hoping a total stranger would get in touch with me this morning to discuss the one aspect of my current arrangement that I would change. It’s shipping. We have a real problem with on-time delivery from our current vendor.”

No, you wouldn’t say any of those things. You’d probably say something neutral or vaguely polite – or, if you were having a hard day, you might even end the conversation then and there. But you wouldn’t be likely to share all the information about your situation that you knew and that the salesperson doesn’t know.

That’s because these kinds of elaborate “qualifying” questions are not really based on what the buyer wants. They’re based on what you want, which is to find out if this guy is worth your time and, if so, how can you get him to keep talking. But clients aren’t interested in doing those things for you. They’re interested in their own situation.

So how do you connect yourself with that interest? How do you find out what the client really needs, and also make yourself indispensable to fulfilling those needs?

Here’s what you say. Whether these will be your exact words will be is up to you, but this is the essence of what you want to get across to a potential client as soon as possible.

First you say, “I can show you how to get into heaven, but that’s not the best thing I can do for you.”

Then you say, “Even better than showing you how you can get into heaven tomorrow, I can show you how to get out of the hell you’re in right now.”

Does that sound radical? I hope so. I’ll have more to say about this in my next post.