Steve Yastrow

What do you want to talk about?

Selling and marketing will be tougher next year.  We are in a period of economic uncertainty unrivaled for more than 70 years, and your customers, no matter who they are and what you sell, will buy differently.

Here’s a very important question for you:  What conversations do you want to have with your customers?  What do you want to talk about?

To answer this question, ask yourself this:  What do your customers want to talk about?

This is a healthy place to start, because you quickly realize that your customers don’t want to talk about you.  They are much more interested in talking about themselves than they are in talking about you.

So, the first thing we know about your 2009 customer conversations is that they need to be about your customer, not about you.  (Yes, that means that the features and benefits of your product are only indirectly important in this conversation.)

If your customers are businesses, what they really care about is improving the state of their businesses, or of their personal jobs within those businesses. If your customers are consumers, they are interested in improving the state of their lives, whether those improvements are quotidian and mundane or profound and life-changing. The point is still the same: Don’t talk about yourself.

After recognizing this, you are now free of the constraints of feature-dumps, chest-beating, advertising promises and elevator pitches.  You have enabled yourself to think about what your customer really wants to talk about, and center your conversation there.

Once your customer is engaged in a conversation with you, it will not be hard for the conversation to evolve and include elements of you, your products and services.  (Unless, of course, your products and services can’t really help your customer.)  Once the conversation is focused on what your customer cares about, you will find a natural way to migrate the conversation to where you want it to be.  A flock of birds takes off in one direction as they assemble into formation.  Once they are all flying together they can turn in the direction of their destination.

I’ll write more in the future about how to change the conversation you are having with your customer. For now, I encourage you to focus on this fundamental question: What do we want to talk about?

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There is always a well of intelligence

I have facilitated workshops for the past five days in a row, from Sunday through yesterday, Thursday.  Each forum enabled me to engage the audience in the exchange of ideas.

This is one of the most rewarding parts of my work.  I show up for the workshop, well-prepared, and with a clear idea of the content I want to cover.  But, at the start, I do not know what will happen in the workshop, because I have not yet heard the participants’ contributions.

When I meet people as they come in the room, they are always friendly, but all I can learn about them as we greet each other is what is written on their name tag and in the few words we can exchange.  But, with each person, I am am confident that there is a depth that I have not yet uncovered.

Once a workshop starts, I begin to solicit contributions from the attendees.  As I provoke them and prod them, ideas begin to surface.  One person’s thoughts encourage another to speak, sometimes to agree, sometimes to amend, often to debate.

As I stand in front of a group, the vision I have is that there is a well of intelligence seated before me, and my job is tap into that well, using my ideas and concepts to bring forth new, stimulating thoughts.  Every group I work with is different, because each well of intelligence has its own strengths and personality.

Presentations are not about presenting.  They are about being present enough to engage a group of people, in a way that creates new ideas that none of us could have created without the collaboration of each other.

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Our Daily Comedy of Errors

I’ve seen every Shakespeare production produced by the Chicago Shakespeare Theater since 1990. Over the years, as they choose plays from the repertory, I’ve had the treat of seeing new interpretations of plays I’ve attended at Chicago Shakespeare before. Last night, I saw the third version of Comedy of Errors they’ve done. It was a very creative, interesting production, setting the play on a 1940 British movie set, where a team is making a film of Comedy of Errors while the Nazis are dropping bombs. It really worked; click to read a Chicago Tribune review. (I think the review sells the play short)

Comedy of Errors, like Twelfth Night, starts out with a shipwreck that separates siblings and leads to cases of mistaken identity. In Comedy of Errors, two sets of identical twins are separated as infants. Shakespeare sets the stage for farce by giving identical brothers the same names: Antipholus of Ephesus grows up with his servant Dromio, and Antipholus of Syracuse grows up with his servant Dromio. When, as adults, the pair from Ephesus end up in Syracuse, chaos ensues. People think they are having conversations with the Antipholus they know or the Dromio they know, but they are not speaking with the person they think they are. Wife confuses husband, merchant confuses customer, master confuses servant, lover confuses beloved, etc.

The heart of the comedy in Comedy of Errors is that people often think they are having successful communication with another person, when, in fact, the other person is understanding the conversation in a completely different way. As the audience, we can see both sides of the misunderstanding, but each of the characters in the conversation can only hear the part of the conversation they are prepared to hear. As the audience we laugh. But what happens when we return to daily life?

Work life, especially the part that includes interactions with customers, is filled with misinterpreted conversations. We live a daily comedy of errors where sales claims and elevator pitches are misconstrued, where technical explanations are misunderstood, and where nods of understanding are really signals of disinterest. And, as in Comedy of Errors, when we advertise we really never know who we’re talking to. We may think we know, but we really don’t. And we certainly don’t know how we’ll they’ve understood us.

Communication isn’t about saying what you want to say. It’s about being understood. As Harold Bloom wrote, Shakespeare invents characters that are more human than real people. Even in a farce like Comedy of Errors, first performed 416 years ago, Shakespeare’s multiple Antipholuses and Dromios can teach us lessons about communicating in our modern work life. When you converse with a customer, don’t just assume you are understood, make sure you are. And, believe it or not, make sure you really understand who it is you are communicating with. It may be a different character.

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The finger pointing at the moon

Sit in most business meetings, and you will hear opinions flying left, right, up, down and sideways. Corporate conversations are so frequently battles of opinion, and these opinions are often confused with the truth.

In reality, truth is elusive, and is always harder to find when obscured by opinions. It’s not that truth can’t be found, it’s just that we often confuse someone’s opinion for the underlying truth.

There is a Buddhist saying, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.”

Be careful not to confuse someone’s description of an issue with the essence of the underlying issue. See the moon, not the finger pointing at it.

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Stop talking to yourself

One of the most important components of a relationship-building encounter is conversation, based on genuine dialogue. As Martin Buber wrote in his 1930 essay, Dialogue, what often passes for conversation is nothing more than “monologue disguised as dialogue.”

Conversation, and the difference between monologue and dialogue, has recently been a frequent topic of discussion with my clients and workshop participants. This opportunity to spend so much time conversing about conversation has clarified things for me, and here’s what I think:

In genuine dialogue, neither person is hiding an inner monologue. You are not talking to yourself in the background. You are talking with each other, and only with each other.

It’s not that you can’t be thinking while you are talking. Of course you are. But are your thoughts directed into the conversation, or are they part of a competing, plotting, inner monologue? Does the other person have a second voice in his head, hidden from you yet obscuring the true meaning of what you hear him say?

This is the intersection between being fully present and conversation. If you are talking to yourself, you can’t be in true dialogue with another person.

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Why I don’t believe in the “Elevator Pitch”

The concept of the “elevator pitch” has become popular in recent years. An elevator pitch is what you would say if you were lucky enough to find yourself in an elevator for 30 seconds with the CEO of a prospective client company.

The biggest problem with an elevator pitch is that you may actually tell it to someone.

Why do I say this?

The Next 30 Seconds

I am much less interested in the 30 seconds you are in an elevator with a CEO than I am interested in the next 30 seconds, after you say goodbye in the building’s lobby. What happens during this subsequent 30 seconds? Is the CEO totally mesmerized by his encounter with you, unable to stop thinking about this incredible person he just met, or does he grab his cell phone and make a call, as the memory of you quickly fades away?

Monologue vs. Dialogue

If you want to create a memorable encounter with someone, don’t expect a 30-second monologue to do the trick, no matter how well it is crafted. You will have much better success if you focus, instead, on creating a 30-second dialogue.

The worst thing we all learned about marketing that it is mostly based on one-way communication … “getting the word out,” “telling your story,” “making your pitch,” “cutting through the clutter,” and, my personal (un)favorite, “capturing eyeballs.”

Humans don’t connect with monologues the way they connect with dialogues in which they are engaged. If you want to communicate with someone, don’t talk at them. Talk with them.

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