6 new pitches for selling your product, your idea, or yourself
One of my favorite chapters in To Sell is Human is Chapter 7 — titled “Pitch.” In those pages, I describe research from Kimberly Elsbach of the University of California-Davis and Roderick Kramer of Stanford University that reshaped my notion of what pitches are actually for. Then I harvest additional social science to describe 6 new pitches that can be more effective than the threadbare 20th century elevator pitch.
My friends at Radical Media have put together what amounts to a 4-minute video summary of this chapter. You can watch it below. Remember: If your mouse doesn’t click, the message won’t stick.
February 11th, 2013
Anything you can do, I can do meta.
A passage in Al Gore’s new book, pointed out to me by Julio Ottino, caught my eye and got me thinking.In discussing the automation of work, the former Vice President* writes:
And robosourcing is beginning to have an impact on journalism. Narrative Science, a robot reporting company founded by two directors of Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Laboratory, is now producing articles for newspapers and magazines with algorithms that analyze statistical data from sporting events, financial reports, and government studies. One of the cofounders, Kristian Hammond, who is also a professor at the Medill School of Journalism, told me that the business is expanding rapidly into many new fields of journalism. The CEO, Stuart Frankel, said the few human writers who work for the company have become “meta-journalists” who design the templates, frames, and angles into which the algorithm inserts the data.Are we all destined to become meta-journalists, meta-physicians, and meta-teachers? And is this a good thing, a bad thing, or more likely, just a thing?
(*Disclosure: I worked for him for a few years in the 1990s, but had no involvement with this book.)
February 1st, 2013
Should phone calls have subject lines?
From the Department of Why the Heck Didn’t I Think of That? comes SayWhat, a new Android app that “lets you introduce the subject of your call, set the mood and check the availability of the person you’re calling before or while placing the call.”Check out the 1-minute video below. Then spend at least 3 minutes afterwards kicking yourself with regret at not being as swift and creative as these Israeli entrepreneurs.
(HT: Springwise. Of course.)
January 30th, 2013
Why it pays to be an ambivert. (And why you probably are one.)
This is my favorite chart from To Sell is Human, one that I explain in greater detail in a new Washington Post column.
Here’s what it means and why it matters.
This summer Adam Grant, the youngest tenured professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a study that explodes the myth of the extraverted sales star. He examined a software company with a large sales staff, assessed where each salesperson stood on a 1 to 7 introversion/extraversion scale, and then charted how much they sold over the next three months.
His findings: The strong introverts (the people represented on the left of the chart’s horizontal axis, around 1 and 2) weren’t very effective salespeople. No surprise there. But the strong extraverts (those over to the right, around 6 and 7) weren’t much better. As you can see from the chart, the folks who fared the best — by a wide margin — were the in the modulated middle. They’re called “ambiverts,” a term that has been in the literature since the 1920s. They’re not overly extraverted. They’re not overly introverted. They’re a little of both.
In sales, leadership, and perhaps other endeavors, ambiverts have an advantage. And as I spell out in the Post, the odds are pretty good that you’re an ambivert yourself. Intrigued? Test your own ambiversion here and read more about how to develop this quality in Chapter 4 of the book.
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