No one can question of the power of Barack Obama’s public addresses. After nearly a decade with a president who can barely manage the English language, Obama is like a caffeine hit to an American public starved of the kind of inspirational rhetoric that sparks self belief.
What can we in sales learn from a junior Senator who has all but talked his way into the most powerful job in the world?
In her excellent article ‘The new Cicero’, published in the Guardian, Charlotte Higgins expounds the classical origins of Obama’s power.
Wait, wait, wait I hear you shout (that’s Anaphora by the way!) I don’t care about the Greeks and the Romans, I just want to sell!
Steady there Brutus; down Gladius for a moment and let’s see what’s in it for us productive sellers.
We are all about inspiring, right? And not just in managing our team, or dealing with colleagues; we inspire customers to buy our solutions. Sure, we engage with the prospect in a lot of ways, probing, uncovering pains and developing relationships, but at some point we have to present our product or service to the prospect’s decision-making unit: this may be a low-key affair, or it may be a full on, stand-up presentation with PowerPoint and a projector.
This is where our sales rhetoric comes into play. It’s not something we think about, not really. We may have been on presentation skills’ courses and learned about body language and not reading from our slides, but very few of us have bothered to look into the true art of rhetoric.
Here are a few classical pointers to get you started:
1. Know your prospect organisation: its structure, its objectives, its pains and what it requires from your solution. As Charlotte reminds us “In his book ‘On The Orator’, [Cicero] argues that real eloquence can be acquired only if the speaker has attained the highest state of knowledge – “otherwise what he says is just an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage”.”
- Does someone else in your organisation have experience of your prospect’s sector? Leverage their knowledge. Test your presentation on them. You might even want to take them to the presentation with you.
2. Know your solution: An extension of point 1. It sounds obvious, but I have encountered so many (unproductive) sellers who have a poor knowledge of their product and/or sector.
- If you can’t talk around the subject take someone with you who can: an engineer, a consultant, anyone professional in outlook and appearance, who can lend the weight of knowledge to your assault.
3. Remember, prospects are human too and humans have emotions. Aristotle taught us how to appeal to the prospect using pathos, logos and ethos. What this means for you, the productive seller, is that you need to:
- demonstrate to the prospect that both you and your company are qualified to speak on the subject (Ethos) (see points 1 and 2).
- call upon the prospect’s pains, which you should have uncovered earlier in the sales cycle, to tap into their emotional responses and then link to this emotional response to the value of your solution (Pathos). If you struggle to find pains, check out a leading sales methodology like Keith Eades excellent The New Solution Selling
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- have a strong Return on Investment case ready for your solution, supported by substantive facts and figures, all of which are to hand during your presentation. This switch to logic (Logos) serves the double function of both adding to your credibility as a speaker and underpinning your emotional argument with substance.
4. Add power to your openings and endings with Tricolons. Caesar did it with “Veni, vidi, vici.” (I came, I saw, I conquered); Obama with “I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.”
5. Add even more power to openings and endings with Anaphora and Epiphora. This is the use of repetition at the start (Anaphora) or end (Epiphora) of a sentence in order to empahise a point. In the video (above) you can see a famous Obama example.
- e.g. “When they heard what we were planning, they said the market wasn’t ready, they said the technology wasn’t stable, they said we were crazy. They were wrong. Ladies and gentlemen…”
6. Use Praeteritio, “mentioning by not mentioning” when you have to refer to a negative. Obama does it with: “Tonight we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the heights of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy…” He distances himself from imperialist sentiments while making the audience feel empowered by the very thing he is claiming to reject!
- e.g. I think what is important is not to focus on the difficulties that your existing system is causing, or the cost to date, but rather the short term financial and business gains that we can work together to achieve through…” (that’s a Tricolon too!).
This is just a short introduction to what is a complex, ancient and very powerful subject that definitely has relevance for productive sales. But like anything, if you take the time to learn about it and assimilate it into your style, you and your selling will only be richer and more productive for it.
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