Themes are Big Ideas. That’s part of it, but only part of it–because ideas can get too big, and, like a balloon so large it cannot be inflated, they will never find their definition, nor serve their purpose.

‘Stardom’ is a Big Idea. So is ‘Food.’ They are not themes. They are un-inflatable balloons, weighted down with so much meaning we can never get them off the ground. What makes a Big Idea buoyant? What gives it definition and gets it off the ground? Explorability.

The Big Idea must be Explorable (by at least two people at any one time). When a theme is Explorable, we can map to it. It can help guide us, and give us our bearings. At any given time, we can assess our position with regards to it. Themes, by virtue of their Explorability, suggest action. We can do something about them, through them, with them.

‘Reality Show Stardom’ is a theme. ‘Food of Love’ is a theme. (’Love of Food’ is another theme altogether.) When a Big Idea is Explorable, we can tell, and others can tell, objectively, whether we are engaged with the Big Idea or not. If we are studying dance at Sarah Lawrence, we are, in all probability, not exploring the theme of ‘Reality Show Stardom.’ It’s easy, by contrast, to imagine a hundred moves that do explore that theme. If we propose marriage over dinner, we’re sailing in the ‘Food of Love’ balloon. If we’re eating Cheerios and checking the box scores from last night’s game, we’re in a different balloon. Explorability gives Big Idea shape and definition, and carries us into new territory.

Which brings us to the business purpose of a theme:

The exploration of a Theme transports us. That, by itself, would be enough to make the exploration of a theme a valuable exercise. The buoyancy inherent in a Big Explorable Idea gives wings to our actions and adds to our sense of purpose. If a theme is strong, rather than get lost in the exploration of an idea,we have the potential to discover ourselves it it.

There’s a second big reason that Themes are important to business and brands: Themes are the glue that bind your brand to your customers. They are common ground that you explore together. Social media are the mechanisms, a garage full of vehicles, so to speak. Themes define the conceptual, physical and virtual territory you and your customers can explore together.

The narrative belongs to the customer. By exploring Themes that are authentic to your brand and relevant to your customers, you increase the probability that your product will play a meaningful role in their lives.

All photos in this post are from http://www.slc.edu/graduate/programs/dance/

Arvai’s presenation rambled all over the place.  He seemed to have no one particular point he was driving at.  Frequently, he’d turn his back to the audience, look up at his Prezi projected on a large screen, scratch his head, and navigate around the Prezi until he found the next thing he wanted to talk about. Sometimes he got a little lost as to where in the Prezi he could find what he was looking for.

On top of the seeming incoherence of his story, Arvai, as a Scandanavian by upbringing, isn’t what you’d call an animated personality type.  His voice has a pleasant, sing-songy quality, like small waves lapping at a dock on a lake. His performance style doesn’t have that build-build-build-bada-bing! quality that TV packages into bites like Nabisco packages cookies.

Afterward, outside the room, I heard people panning the presentation.  “Boring.” “You’d think he’d have it more together.”  “I can’t believe that guy’s the CEO!”

The people who were disappointed were looking for a particular form or style from Arvai, and probably looking to be entertained for an hour by a showman, a pitchman, a visionary, a clown, or a pundit.  None of that materialized, so waaaah!  They were like children who didn’t get the toys they wanted for their birthdays.

These people, I think, missed the gift Arvai gave them:  He showed himself learning! It was one of the most interesting and disarming games I’ve ever seen a CEO play in a presentation.  To show the audience how one uses Prezi, he was willing to get himself lost in it.

In a totally unforced and improvisational way, Arvai showed how putting Prezi to best use means working with themes, chipping away and shaping them to a narrative, purposefully getting lost in the material so that you can find meaning in it, as if the information you put on the Prezi screen is a stone and your narrative is a sculpture.

I thought it was brilliant.  Another thing I liked about his presentation is that it was conversational, which was good for the relatively small room we were in.  Arvai showed that ‘always-on’ doesn’t have to mean always being the center of attention.  You can be ‘always on’ if you step onto the stage as if a conversation were taking place before you got there and you’re joining it.  That way of ‘always performing’ is more genuine and easier on the life of your batteries than if you have to crank up the voltage every time you step in front of a group of people to talk about your product.

Our friend Barbara Groth, CEO of the design company, Big Buddha Baba, put something on her Facebook profile earlier today that seems to applie to Arvai’s prezi:

“Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”
— Haruki Murakami

It does, however, get a lot more complex, and in a hurry.  Here’s why:

In selling scenes, the customer plays two roles:  Audience and Scene Partner.  You, as a seller, co-create your selling scene with your customer as your scene partner.   He or she will then, stepping into the role of your audience, pass judgment on your performance.  Thumbs up or thumbs down?  Worth the price of admission or not?  Good collaboration or rocky relationship?  Will you generate positive word of mouth or negative reviews?  Your earnings depend on how your performance is received.

There’s no script for these scenes–at least not one your customer is going to be memorizing and reciting verbatim anytime soon.  You’re going to be improvising.  And this is a fact:  The best salespeople are the best improvisers.

Here are some ways in which good salespeople collaborate with customers on scenes that get a thumbs-up from those same customers:

They keep their scenes lively. They keep the dialogue moving along at a productive tempo.  They yes-and promptly.  They heighten by upping the tempo, the emotional pitch, or both.  They add useful information.  They perform with the awareness that a ‘dead spot’ in the scene now will be judged harshly by the customer-as-audience later.

They make their customer the hero of the scene. An improvisational salesperson is a Sherpa to the customer with some kind of allegorical mountain to climb.  The sales Sherpa has useful knowledge.  Charts a practical course to the summit.   Reads the weather.  Calculates the odds.  Comes well-equipped.  The sales Sherpa gives the gift of support, and in doing so, makes the customer look good.  The role of the sales Sherpa is not the same as playing a second-banana, a sidekick, a best friend, a wing man, a femme fatale or a fall guy.  These are Hollywood movie roles.   The sales Sherpa is exactly what the name defines: a Sherpa.  It’s a Himalayan thing.

They listen. Wow, do improvisers listen.  They hear things the casual listener doesn’t.  They remember the nuances, and use the throw-aways.  They know that the most important conversation of the day may happen on an elevator ride between the first and sixth floors before a sales presentation begins.  They listen with more than their ears.  They observe with all the senses.   And then, maybe then…they speak.   They understand that being silent and being mute are two completely different things, and that sometimes one sees more with one’s eyes closed than with them open.

They respect environment. In selling scenes, you, the seller, are usually a visiting performer in someone else’s theater.  In many ways, the ‘theater’ of a customer’s company is like any other theater.  Theaters have traditions and history that must be respected.  They are influenced by politics and patronage and star players with competing agendas.  They are invariably facing some kind of financial threat.  They are only as good as their last hit, and they have ridiculously high hopes for the next project.  They can be half-looney with romantic intrigue.  The improvisational salesperson sees and respects the arena in which the customer operates.  When performing at the Apollo, touch the Tree of Hope.  When visiting Ireland, kiss the Blarney Stone.

They build relationships. Relationships are the basis of all improvisation.  The relationships between players, between players and environment, and between players and audience, are all intertwined.  The best way to move toward a sale, to generate positive outcomes regardless of the circumstances, is to build and nurture these relationships.   Relationships will see you through the kinds of adversity, and capitalize on the opportunities, that no scripted sales program can predict or anticipate.

In selling scenes, the networked customer is a more potent player than ever.  He or she often knows as much about your product as you do.  Relationships with customers are frequently more sensitive, more fluid and more demanding than they were in the Industrial Age.  Customers use social media to converse frequently amongst themselves in scenes to which you, the seller, are not invited.  You can no longer impose your narrative on the customer, you’ve got to earn an invitation to participate in the customer’s narrative.

So be a Sherpa.  Know the mountain, and your customer will see that the climb is impossible without you.

A friend of ours who works in sales gets honored often as a leading performer at his company, a large and established organization which is one of the 87 current members of the S&P 500 that have been members since its inception in 1957. The honoring happens at lavish banquets attended by the company’s top managers and featuring a pricey speaker.

Understand that our friend is a madman, who rides his three-wheeled Piaggio motorcycle with the governor of the state where he lives, has 28 tattoos— including one on his (hairy) chest of a man pushing a lawnmower, next to which he shaves a smooth swatch as if the tattooed lawnmower has mowed his chest; and as a hobby he spent a couple of years performing standup comedy as a Catholic priest (he’s Jewish).  None of the tattoos is visible outside our friend’s business suit. Nobody at his company knows he does stand-up under a stage name while wearing a Roman collar.   He plays the company game, but it is far from the only game he plays.

Our friend told us that the speaker at a recent banquet where he was honored as his division’s Salesperson of the Year gave a speech about ‘Finishing First.’ About how nothing else would do. About how a person has a choice between finishing first and being a loser. How in sales, there is no prize for second place, first place is the only place that matters. You either make the sale or you don’t.

Our friend approached the speaker after his speech and struck up a conversation that went like this.

FRIEND: Nice speech.
SPEAKER: Thank you.
FRIEND: What’d you get for it? Forty thousand dollars?  Am I close?
SPEAKER: Uh..that’s in the ballpark.
FRIEND: You know, our first choice for a speaker was Colin Powell, but he wanted two-hundred thousand dollars and we couldn’t afford it.  So it looks like finishing second worked out pretty well for you, didn’t it?

“When I saw the look on his face I felt bad for saying it,” says our friend. “But I couldn’t resist.  It was such an obviously lame premise.  There are all kinds of situations where finishing first has nothing to do with your success.”

So you’re waiting in line for the iPhone or the Twilight.  Cool.  It’s a happening.  A social event.  Remember, though, that meaningful transactions happen in the line, with other people, not at the end of it, with an apparatus or an apparition.

Enjoy the ride and you won’t ever have to worry about whether you’ll be the first to arrive.

Understanding How and Why B2B ‘Buyers Are Liars’ …

Every good story has conflict, and the accusation in the headline implied this element in Needles’ post.  The quotation marks round the accusation suggested that Needles would be offering context.  And besides that, who can resist a good rhyme?  I dove in, and I’m glad I did.  Quotes from the post:

“…buyers regularly enter data that is not wholly accurate because it serves their purposes at that moment in time.”

“…it’s something they do both intentionally and unintentionally to better manage the dynamics of their interactions with vendors.”

“…more than ever buyers often don’t really have accurate, explicit answers to BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs, Timing) questions, so we have to figure out when/where they’re moving forward on an implicit basis.”

“…the B2B buying process is less formalized than ever before.  “More than 8 in 10 respondents said the buying process did not follow a traditional path…”

“B2B buyer organizations are becoming more agile and making more decisions on a non-planned basis.”

“Don’t expect to learn everything about a prospective buyer through online or automated interactions.”

It turns out that what Needles has to say, headline aside, is NOT that buyers are liars, it is this:  The dynamic between buyers and sellers is changing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s B2B or B2C, the changing dynamic is the same.  Sellers cannot take for granted that the selling process will follow predictable narratives.  Every selling scenario has the potential for uniqueness. Unless you’re willing to address and support this potential, you’re going to get stuck somewhere in the funnel.

Here is the fundamental shift, as described by our friend John Callahan of GE’s Intelligent Platforms division:  “What happens when there’s that much money at stake – one of our systems might cost a couple hundred million dollars – the customer knows your product as well as you do. There’s nothing you can tell them about what you’re selling that they don’t already know. So the question becomes ‘What do you talk about?’ Well, you talk about the relationship between your company and theirs, and between the people involved in making the system work.”

Callahan sums it up perfectly.  The old dynamic between a Seller who holds all the cards and a Buyer who has to show his or her own cards to get in the game has changed.  Reversed, in fact.  So learn your selling script, then toss it aside.  Implement your automated queries, but don’t use them as a crutch.  They won’t get you to your destination.

“You cannot stick to a script,” says Callahan.  “In a long sales cycle, if you try to stick to the script, you’ll run out of things to say. You have to improvise by working with what your customers give you in the way of information about themselves.”

You work with what your scene partners give you in the way of information about themselves. That is the essence of improvisation.

Big Note:  The customer judges his or her performance, not yours, in the context of the scene you co-create.

The implications of this are huge.  Here are a few:

1.  Learn the script, then throw it away. The single biggest mistake salespeople make is trying to follow a script.  The customer doesn’t know your script!  In trying to stick to a script known only to you, you’re putting your customer in the worst possible position–that of a performer who doesn’t know his or her lines.  The playwright Christopher Durang built an entire play, The Actor’s Nightmare, around this premise.  You following your script and trying to get your scene partner to play along with it is The Customer’s Nightmare.

1A.  Don’t show your script to the customer. If the customer does know your script, because, let’s say, you’ve sent them your PowerPoint deck in advance of your presentation, you cause a whole other set of problems.  For one, you’re not giving them anything new.  You are, in essence, asking them to play a role you have written for them, which fosters a kind of built-in resentment.  Another problem with showing your hand ahead of time is that it burdens the audience with expectations.  By knowing ahead of time where you’re going, they will be measuring the scene against what they imagine it will be–good or bad.  Thanks to the internet, the customer already has access to plenty of data about your product.  Save something for your sales scene!

2.  Your number-one concern is getting your customer to feel good about your scene. You do this by helping them look good.  You help them look good by ‘giving gifts,’ to use the parlance of improvisation. There are unlimited ways to give gifts in a sales scene, ranging from sharing a dinner at a great restaurant to enlightening a customer with knowledge, to conferring status on them by having them enlighten you with knowledge.  Whether they ‘applaud’ your scene by making a down-payment on a timeshare, driving off your lot in a new car, or by clicking to buy a better mousetrap, chances are they’ll be doing it because they felt good about the interaction with your and your brand.

3.  A scene is not a soliloquy. You are sharing the stage with the customer.  It’s a dialogue.  Give and take.  OgilvyOne recently announced a contest to find the World’s Greatest Salesperson.  They’re asking contestants to ’sell’ a commonplace item, a red brick, using YouTube.  The winning video will not be the best soliloquy, but the one that’s best at generating and sustaining a dialogue with its audience–via YouTube comments, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

4.  Begin by listening. As with longform improvisation, a good way to get things rolling is to take a ’suggestion from the audience.’  When you begin your scene by listening instead of speaking, you give your audience/customer the opportunity to invest themselves in the scene.  Their satisfaction at seeing an idea they’ve given you turn into action will earn their applause.

5.  Build and heighten.  A scene should be designed to expand, its energy elevate, its theme evolve.  Surpass where you started.  Never end up back where you began.  Don’t be afraid to start your scene with the seed of an idea and let it grow.  Be afraid of starting with a grand vision that diminishes during the course of the scene.

6.  Agree on the game. What you’re looking for in your scene is quick identification and agreement on what we call ‘the underlying game.’  We define a game as:  Roles, Rules, Environment and Objective.  The sooner you can define these, the sooner you can agree on them, and the sooner you agree on them, the more likely you are to close the sale.  ‘Yes-anding’ the customer is the single best sales technique there is.

6A. The customer’s objective is not a sale. The customer isn’t in the scene to help you hit your quota or earn a commission.  A sale may be your objective but it’s not theirs.  Theirs may be to prove their love, earn the respect of their peers, look good to a boss, save money, gain status with their neighbors, or ensure the birth of a healthy baby.  Your objective is to help them achieve their objective.

CONTACT US TODAY TO BOOK A ‘GAMECHANGERS FOR SALES’ SESSION FOR YOUR TEAM!

I only had to glance at the feed headlines this morning to see that ‘Cyber Monday’ is getting pushed as the big online holiday shopping day by the mainstream media like some kind of suspicious-smelling Santa whose lap our parents are insisting we sit on.

Well, peeps, here’s what The Ol’ GameChanger has to say about that…

First of all, Monday will unfold as it gets performed for the first time ever, not according to a script written by someone we’ve never met, into which we have had zero input. It is going to be a day you and I create together, collaboratively.  We do not have to shop today to make today a success.  And if we do shop today, will that be the measure of our success?  Today there are a lot of people trying to convince the marketplace that the metric of our success is one particular number or set of parameters they expect to be generated over a designated 24-hour period.  Maybe this is true for you, maybe it’s not.  Chances are, it’s not.  So the idea of marking to market on a so-called Cyber-Monday is, in fact, pure fabrication.  It’s a one-way ticket on the train to Crazy Town.  Whether the headlines tomorrow about Cyber Monday are good or bad, they will most assuredly be bullshit.

Second, asking the cyberculture to shop on Monday is ludicrous, because a netizen has the ability to shop anytime, anywhere.  We can shop (or work or communicate or whatever) when we’re in line for coffee, we can shop on Cape Cod while we’re sunning ourselves in Capri, we can shop for Lakers-Celtics tickets while we’re at a Spurs-Mavericks game, we can even shop while we’re taking a piss, an experience for which there is no brick-and-mortar equivalent, except maybe for the super-rich.  You can probably get a cappucino  in the restrooms at Goldman Sachs.  I wouldn’t know.  What I do know is that asking a netizen to transact on Monday is kind of like asking a fish to swim.  We transact every day.  When the fish swims, it’s news because..?

My friend Tricky Kid, one of the most on-the-pulse people I know, tweeted me Thanksgiving evening from his car after driving past a store where people were camping out overnight so they could get in there the instant it opened on Friday morning. “Pathetic,” wrote Tricky.   The reason Tricky Kid found the overnight line pathetic is that the whole concept of the line — and the linear in general — is an Industrial Age design, and we are living in a non-linear world.  Always have been, really.

The architects of Cyber Monday might as well push headlines that say ‘Online Merchants Promote Cyber Whatever’ or ‘Fish Expected to Swim on Monday’.

A GameChanger names the day after the fact, by what has been created on that day, not ahead of time, as advertising for whatever he or she is expected to consume.

The words ‘yes’ and ‘and’ do not have to be spoken literally, of course. It is the spirit of the phrase that matters. A common improv exericise invokes this spirit by having players begin every exchange of dialogue with those two powerful words, spoken literally.

If we are in a scene together and are ‘yes-anding’ one another, by the third line of the scene, it will not be about your reality, or my reality, it will be about our reality. Now we have the ability to work together toward an objective. It is the ‘and’ that makes all the difference. Anyone can say ‘yes’. It might get me a reputation as a being a positive person around the office, but it will not necessarily make me a productive player.

Let’s put it this way: ‘Yes’ is agreeing to a marriage proposal. ‘Yes and’ is agreeing to a life together.

Pay attention to the people in your network who are skilled communicators. Analyze your scenes with successful entrepreneurs and top salespeople. They never deny their scene partners’ reality. They add to it. They augment it. They build on it.

‘And’ is the catalyst, the propellant, the push. What are you going to add to the scene that will advance it toward its objective? It’s not always as easy as it sounds. Business scenes can turn into a battle for control of the narrative. They can fall victim to players who play ’status games’ designed, for example, to give the top-ranking player in the scene the last word. They can get derailed by players who insist on being the naysayer (or the ‘Yes but’ ter), and conversely by players whose flights of fantasy (’Yes and it’s where Israeli girls can go to meet Palestinian dudes’ ) hijack the team for a trip to Crazy Town.

Some tips for ‘Yes-anding’ in your scenes:

1) First listen. If you don’t hear what your scene partner is saying, your ‘and’ won’t mean much.

2) Add in increments. The ‘and’ does not necessarily have to be some earth-shattering addition to the scene. It does not have to have the drama of a marriage proposal. It can be simple. Small. A show of support. In improv theater, this is known as ‘playing slow’. It takes skilled, disciplined, patient players to play slow. Slow and steady progress toward the objective is preferable to lots of dramatic, news-making behavior that ultimately lands you right back where you started.

3) Agree to the underlying game. If you and your scene partners are at cross purposes–you’re in it to learn more about a problem, and they are in it to eliminate the problem–no amount of yes-anding can turn it into a productive scene. First agree to ‘why’ you’re in the scene, then you can deal with ‘what’ the scene is meant to accomplish.

4) Deal in objective reality. There are times when unfettered bouts of brainstorming are helpful. At the beginning of a project, I usually invoke the ‘No Bad Ideas’ Rule, in which any idea, no matter how far-fetched, extravagant or unlikely, can be put into play. But business gets transacted, for the most part, in the Real World. What do I have, how much am I asking, how much are you willing to pay? That’s reality. The yes-anding should acknowledge reality and work with it as the raw material of a scene the way a sculptor works with clay.

These ads, created by The Martin Agency of Richmond, VA – who also created the Geico Gekko and the brand’s ‘Caveman’ spots — are a genre of improv exercises originally devised by Viola Spolin in which one player states information, and a second player translates that information into a different mode or pitch. For example, the second player may deliver the information with heightened emotion, or a different emotion, or without using spoken language. The first player may speak in gibberish and the second player interpret the gibberish, or vice versa. The game might be for the second player, as in the Geico spots, to dramatize the information. (Peter Graves’ “So I put on some tangerine lip gloss and answered the door” ranks among the most memorable ad copy lines of the past ten years.) The variations are endless.

The beauty of these spots, in terms of business learning, is how they highlight different levels of human communication. What the Geico customer states – flat data — is on the Cosmetic level. What the celebrities bring are the Emotional (personal) and Meta (iconic fame) levels. This heightening makes the customers’ information ’stick’ by giving the audience a couple of powerful ways to connect to it.

In GameChangers workshops, we do what we call ‘Geico Exercises’. These are a lot of fun, and they always provide participants with insight into the difference between shallow/forgettable and deep/ meaningful communication.