RHETORIC IS ALIVE AND WELL

It has been a good week for rhetoric. It started with Stephen Fry on BBC Radio 4, with his English Delight series, hosting an entertaining and informative programme under the heading ‘Rhetoric Rehabilitated.’ This reminded us that despite the popular dismissal of rhetoric as political spin, it is in fact alive and well and underpins most persuasive communication, whether we realise it or not.

It has been a good week because several public figures have demonstrated rhetoric at its best, not least of course Martin Luther King in various anniversary programmes. In different ways they have brought to life the art of rhetoric, built around the five canons or parts; invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. All are as relevant to developing the political address as they are to the professional business pitch. Continue reading →

THE FRONT COVER JUDGEMENT.

As the idiom goes, “Don’t Judge a Book by its Front Cover.” The reality of course is that most of us do just that. The look of the cover alone is a big factor in the buying decision and even influences our enjoyment of the read.

We ‘should’ be judging on intrinsic values such as the writing, the story and the characters but in the main we respond to the visual clues around style, genre and subject. The look alone is a significant communication. It acts powerfully to raise our expectations and to influence our enjoyment, and experience, of the real thing. Continue reading →

LESSONS FROM THE GENERALS

They may not be wars but pitches are battles. To win you have to succeed on two fronts. You must beat your rivals and you must win-over the hearts and minds of the prospect. Not surprisingly the world’s great military strategists are worth listening to.

“In war, three quarters turns on personal character and relations; the balance of manpower and materials counts only for the remaining quarter.” Napoleon.

Your content, size and clever solution may meet the rational brief, but the people and chemistry, the relationship building and the emotional connection count for the three quarters. He also said “A a picture is worth a thousand words.” Continue reading →

THE KILLER PITCH

In the June edition of Harvard Business Review one of the most popular articles is the excellent How to give a Killer Presentation. It is written by TED curator, Chris Anderson who describes the process developed, in over 30 years of TALKS, for helping inexperienced presenters “frame, practice and deliver talks that people enjoy watching….cycles of devising (and revising) a script, repeated rehearsals, and plenty of fine tuning.”

On the basis of this experience, he is convinced that “giving a good talk is highly coachable. In a matter of hours a speaker’s content and delivery can be transformed from muddled to mesmerising.,.and that the lessons learned are surely useful to other presenters,including anyone pitching”. He is right and the article is a must-read guide to creating the killer pitch.

frame 3 Frame Your Story

There are differences, of course, between a talk where your audience is judging you as a speaker-engaging, entertaining, thought provoking -and a pitch, where your audience is judging you as a team in direct competition with other teams. In both cases however it is the emotional response that counts and his most valuable lesson is all to do with how you frame your story.

“There’s no way you can give a good talk unless you have something worth talking about. Conceptualising and framing what you want to say is the most vital part of a presentation. The most engaging speakers do a superb job of very quickly introducing the topic, explaining why they care so deeply about it, and convincing the audience members that they should too”.

In more mundane pitch speak, this is the ‘tell’em what you are gonna tell’em’ phase of the presentation. It is potentially the most telling,and compelling part of your argument told when your audience is most alert and most receptive to the well framed promise you are making. Think like the chess masters who plot the killer opening to gain early advantage. Capturing the emotional high ground at the outset will raise the level of engagement throughout.

This is where story telling scores. “Many of the best talks have a narrative structure that loosely follows a detective story. The speaker starts out by presenting a problem and then describes the search for a solution.” In the pitch, as in the talk, bring things to life with examples. Lots of them.

Plan an opening salvo! “Ideas and stories fascinate us. (Organisations bore us-they’re much harder to relate to. Business people especially take note: Don’t boast about your company; rather tell us about the problem you’re solving)”.

“If a talk fails. it’s almost always because the speaker didn’t frame it correctly, misjudged the audience’s level of interest, or neglected to tell a story.”

PROPAGANDA Power and Persuasion.

This British Library exhibition is well worth a visit for anyone interested in communication. It traces the history of propaganda, ‘thousands of years old’, but focuses mainly on the period it came of age, the 20th century. It defines propaganda this way:

“it is the deliberate attempt to influence the opinion of an audience, through the transmission of ideas and values, for a specific persuasive purpose that has been consciously thought out and designed to serve the self-interest of the propagandist, either directly or indirectly”.

This is as good a way as any as defining a pitch and while the exhibition concentrates on the popular view of propaganda, political, it has plenty of creative ideas and concepts that are relevant to anyone pitching today.

06-01-2013 08 47 34PM (2) For example, how about some thought-leadership style corporate advertising which can serve to raise the prospects’ expectations before they cross your door. This is how Hitler tried to soften Britain up before attacking, a reasoned long copy ad dropped in leaflet form. Very similar in look, if not in content, to the brilliant ad run by the Saatchi brothers to launch their brand new agency to an unsuspecting marketing community. The headline was “Why it’s time for a new kind of advertising agency”. It worked, capturing interest and attention. Clients seemed to queue up to recieve a pitch and rival agencies were left standing.

Pitches are meant to be memorable, otherwise how will a prospect, viewing upto say six of them, separate yours from the rest, particularly when, as in many cases, there is little to choose between the technical solutions put forward, or indeed between firms.

In propaganda the use of a single powerful visual with a theme or title, not a clever advertising headline, is commonplace and expected. In many pitches, perfectly reasonable but not exceptional, there will be a comprehensive document well translated into a presentation, with a clear proposition and with three supporting arguments (rule of three) and some nicely designed charts, but with one vital missing ingredient, memorability. There are of course many ways of achieving this- a great idea, clever theatre, outstanding people performances – but all too often overlooked is the deliberate use of a single powerful poster style image that is repeated, and displayed prominently, in a way that guarantees your pitch will be remembered. It will signal your determination, WE WANT YOU AS A CLIENT.

Throughout the exhibition there are many examples of ‘power and persuasion’ in action with communication that makes its point with an emotional sell. Great propaganda, like the great pitch, makes an emotional connection.

Arguably, Goebbels understood this better than anyone else : “…….if you examine propaganda’s most secret causes, you will come to different conclusions: then there will be no more doubting that the propagandist must be the man with the greatest knowledge of souls. I cannot convince a single person of the necessity of something unless I get to know the soul of that person, unless I understand how to pluck the string in the harp of his soul that must be made to sound”.