Normally, as the seller, we are getting told “no” in sales, rather than the other way around. When salespeople become desperate to hit their numbers, they start to do crazy things. They start telling lies to the buyer, they exaggerate the scope of the solution, they savagely discount the price, they overpromise on the follow-up, they agree to horrendous delivery dates, they become visibly agitated during the sales call. All bad.

When we meet the client, our brain has to get into a specific gear. That means we are focused on how can we contribute to build the client’s business? What can we do that will grow the buyer’s revenues, cut costs or expand market share? That mental gear is entirely different to questions such as “how will I make my monthly sales quota?”, “how will I stop being fired?”, etc. The latter are solely focused on you and not the buyer and this impacts what comes out of your mouth.

If we are doing a proper job of prospecting we will always have alternatives. When the pipeline is too thin, desperation sets in. The existing clients get worked over, to try and squeeze blood from a stone, because there are no other options. It is easy to talk to an existing client than go and find a new one, which is so why salespeople hate prospecting – it is hard and tough work. Nevertheless, prospecting and building pipeline are the keys to positioning ourselves as sellers.

When we have a strong pipeline, we are not dependent on any one sale. When we are doing the questioning phase of the sale’s call we start to understand what the client needs. We may realise that what we have isn’t really a fit. When we don’t have pipeline, we start to think how we can make it fit anyway. This is desperate thinking and ultimately very damaging to our trust, brand and reorder possibilities. We are thinking single order, rather than the start of many orders.

We may know that to take on this project is going to put a lot of pressure on the back office or the supply chain within our organisation. We have to keep in mind the opportunity cost that this deal represents, not just the income it will generate. We are impinging on other better quality work to do this deal. If the pricing for doing it was at a premium, it might be justifiable but that is usually quite rare. Or if the scale of the work is considerable and sustained over a long period of time, it might be viable. In fact, usually, a bad deal more often than not comes with other ugly lumpy bits attached to it that are not very attractive.

We are better to say “no”. When deals come that are outside of our usual scope and therefore require a lot of work, the price needs to be high, to warrant doing it. If it is not, then get back to being busy building pipeline and let that deal flow to a competitor, who is either better suited to handle it or more stupid than we are. It hurts to give business away to a competitor, but that is the better choice than damaging your own operation.

A deal came to me though LinkedIn and the buyer was a substantial company in Singapore, with a strong brand name. The details of what they wanted to do in Japan though, had potential grief written all over it for me. It was somewhat related to what we do, but just that bit off to the side, where we would have to do a lot of work to make the project work. The money mentioned was so, so and really didn’t cover the extra work that would be needed. I introduced the deal to a “frenemy” rival company and asked if they were interested. They said yes and so I connected them with the seller.

I heard later, that they got hammered on the pricing, when they came to deal with the lower level operations people inside the company. A typical Singaporean business play where they are very tough on pricing, often known as the “squeeze all the juice out of the deal for the buyer” play. The “frenemy” took the pricing offered, rather than saying no or demanding more money and got smashed. It turned out to be a huge amount of work, sucked up a lot of their time and burned some of their contacts. This is exactly what I thought it would do to me too. I was glad I missed that bullet. Saying “no” was a very, very good choice on my part. It was also a one off deal, so there was no hope of repeat business. This made it less attractive, because I couldn’t see any return on the investment of time and effort.

I didn't take it because I had pipeline, alternatives, other potential business. Say “no” to a bad or marginal deal and keep working on building pipeline to find better deals. You will spend the same amount of time, but the rewards are vastly different.

It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time. It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees. After lunch, you might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign. The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him. He was knowledgeable on his subject having worked in this area for a number of years. He was speaking about what his firm does everyday, so he is living the topic. So what went wrong?

Thinking back to the talk, I wondered whether his structure was the issue? When a speech doesn’t flow well, the audience has to work hard. Actually, they choose not to work hard and instead just drop out and escape from you. This was one of those cases.

If we think about giving a speech, we have to plan it well. In his case, he had prepared slides, but the style of the lunch and the venue meant it was a no slide deck presentation. He had some side notes written down on his laptop screen to follow. That is fine for the speaker, because it aids navigation through the topics. The problem was that the points were not ordered or structured well. This made it hard to follow, as it tended to jump around, rather than flow.

We design our talks from the idea spark. In one sentence, we need to isolate out what is the key point we want to make to our audience. This is not easy, but the act of refining the topic gives us clarity. We create the opening last, because its role is to break into the brains of the audience and capture their full attention for what is coming.

The middle bits between opening and closing is where the design part comes in. Think of the sections like chapters in a book. The chapters need to be in a logical order that is easy to follow. They need to link to each other so that the whole thing flows. To create the chapters we take our central conclusion and ask why is that true? The answers will come from the points of evidence or our experiences. We need to get these down and then get them in order.

It might be a simple structure like “ this is what happened in the past, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future”. We could use a macro-micro split. This is the big picture and here are the details of the components. It could be advantage-disadvantage. We investigate the plusses and minuses of what we are proposing. It could be taking the key points of evidence and breaking them down to make each a chapter in its own right.

The key is in the sequencing. What is the logical flow here to move from one chapter to the next? We need a bridge between chapters to set up what is coming next and to tell our audience we are changing the focus. We need to constantly loop each chapter back to what is the central point. We can’t just put out evidence and leave it there, expecting the listener to work it out themselves. We have to tell them why this is important, what it means for them and how they can use it.

Visuals on screen do assist in this process. It does make it easier to follow because we are hitting more points of stimulus with our audience. When we don’t have slides, we need to use word pictures to draw the audience into our topic. I am struggling to recall any stories he told about the topic, which is the best place to create those word pictures.

So break the talk up before you go anywhere near the slide construction. What is the point you want to make? What are the reasons for that and turn them into chapter headings. Check that the flow of the chapters is logical and easy to follow. Then create a blockbuster opening to grab attention. If our speaker had spent more time on the design then the talk would have been more accessible to the audience. Get that wrong in this Age Of Distraction and you have lost them immediately.