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We were having some wine the other night with a friend who had just come from a private jet show in Geneva, Switzerland (sounds like fun!). He was telling us about what a great job one of the exclusive, high-end private jet companies had done to wow their potential customers.
He said that they gave a new iPad to each invited guest in which they had loaded all the specs for their various jets, including apps that let the prospects choose the plane they were interested and create a custom interior from all their choices – woods, carpeting, leathers, etc . . . They could see what their new plane would look like right there on the spot. Brilliant!
Everyone seemed extremely impressed with this high-tech marketing tool, until it was handed to someone my friend recognized immediately – Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft.
His words? Something like, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Someone had failed to think about how the Founder of Microsoft would react to being handed an Apple product to use in the process of a potential sale. It’s a small detail, you may think, but you really have to know your audience. What may seem like a small detail to you could end up being huge to your potential customer and could make or break the deal!
Have you witnessed a situation where someone didn’t think about their audience and blew an opportunity? If so, please share it here–I’d really like to hear about it. Thanks!
Peter Guber, Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, has a powerful new book coming out on March 1st called Tell To Win.
This book is not only an extremely interesting read, it is also an important resource for networkers in every part of the world. Peter is a master storyteller and, with this book, he teaches readers how to achieve success in business and life by connecting with people and engaging them on an emotional level through the power of stories.
I met Peter at one of his storytelling symposiums which he conducted in preparation for this very book and, I can assure you that if there is one person in the world with the expertise to teach others how to change lives through the power of stories, it’s Peter. Tell To Win offers dynamic storytelling techniques that are greatly beneficial in a face-to-face networking setting. Below I have pasted an excerpt of Peter’s words, specifically discussing the importance of telling your story in a face-to-face environment. If you find this material useful, which I have no doubt you will, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of Peter’s new book. Learning how to connect with others through storytelling is an ability that will continue to serve you well throughout your entire lifetime. It is an invaluable skill that you will be endlessly grateful for obtaining and, as you can tell from Peter’s words below, he is the ultimate teacher.
The highest and best use for telling purposeful stories in the room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading each other’s micro-expressions–something you can’t do in any other medium. In writing my new book, Tell To Win, I conversed with the foremost folks in technology–people like Chris Kemp, chief information officer at NASA Ames Research Center, Phil McKinney, the chief technology officer at Hewlett Packard, Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, and many others–and asked them if digital or state-of-the-art technology could replace what I call state-of-the-heart technology. Their response was an overwhelmingly consistent “not at this time.” In fact, Arianna said it best when she asserted in front of one of my masters UCLA classes (I’ve been a professor at UCLA for over 30 years), that the more time we spend in front of screens, the more we crave the intimate in-person interactions where we tell our stories to realize our dreams. And, she didn’t stop there! She exhorted my students that if there’s something incredibly important upon which everything depends, you always want to be in the room.
You can’t yet duplicate the same effects of telling oral stories in the same room, breathing the same air, pressing the flesh. However, many of the critical elements of telling purposeful stories work in other mediums. Always motivation comes first which starts with you–your intention. This authenticity must shine through. The trick is not to try to be interesting, but to be interested–know what your audience is interested in and deliver what’s in it for them. All good telling of stories has a goal–the action you want your listener to take. Don’t hide it. Interactively engage your listener, your audience, so it’s not a monologue, but a dialogue. It is a conversation in which the telling becomes a “we” experience rather than a “me” experience. A critical marker is the willingness of the teller to surrender proprietorship over the story so the listener can own it and viral market it as her own. The story content is lurking everywhere–first person experience is best, but equally powerful is an observed event, a movie/book/artifact, or even a metaphor or analogy.
