Good for saving the day in landing cynical new customers, selling hostile prospects, getting compliance from rebellious offspring, and adapting to changing audiences.
You were figuring out ways to screw your courage to the sticking place so you can push back hard and flip the script on someone who resists your powers. Most of the time it’s great to refuse to take no for an answer, but there comes a time in every superhero’s life when you have to stop fighting. This is it.
If there was ever a time that I learned to trust the power of the pitch, it was my first time ever using it, and I did so because I had no choice. There haven’t been many times when I’ve had such overwhelming fear that I thought it was going to cripple me, but this was one. It was 1991, I was in Bideford, England, and I was taking care of my buddy Phil Clamp’s T-shirt stand.
This gentleman pulled up opposite me and he was selling something called the Amazing Washmatik, a car washer with a bucket, a hose, and a scrubber. I started watching him do his patter over and over again. He would repeat his patter and then he would sell. Then he would wait for the crowd to clear and he would repeat the patter and he would sell. He made it look really easy. He made it look fun.
I got tired of hearing the same jokes over and over again, but then I started to count how many £10 car washes he was selling compared to what I was selling. I would sell one T-shirt an hour. He would sell twenty-five Washmatiks an hour. It didn’t take algebra to know he was doing pretty well, and he was using techniques I had never even seen before. He was having fun, telling jokes—he was pitching.
I plucked up my courage, went over to him between tips, and said, “Hey, my name is Sully and I want you to teach me how to do what you are doing.” Immediately, he said no. He flicked me off like a mosquito. I went back to the T-shirt stand with my sad face and told Phil what had happened. When I got to the market the next day, Phil told me he’d asked the guy, Mark Bingham, and Mark had offered to teach me—or try to teach me—how to pitch like he did and sell the Washmatik.
Mark gave me an old-school tape recorder and told me to record his pitch. So I did. Then he told me to write it down and learn it word for word. He was adamant about it. Word for fucking word. “Don’t change a thing. Don’t make it your own. I will only let you do this if you do exactly as I say.”
That’s pretty powerful, so I did. I learned it like a script, like learning Shakespeare. It was about two pages of copy and I had it on the visor in my car. Every time I stopped at a red light I would pull it down, read it, and put it back up again. I would drive, learn the lines, and repeat them over and over.
You’re a pitching superhero by now, so can you see where I messed up here? Of course, it was completely unknown territory, but still… you’re right. I didn’t rehearse with the product, because I didn’t know I should. You need to put yourself in the arena—wearing the sword, holding the shield, and fighting to the death. I didn’t. I practiced the words while brushing my teeth. I washed my car with the thing, but I never parked the car in front of a big window and pretended I was trying to sell it to anyone. So when I showed up at the market, I was confident and blissfully unprepared. I watched Mark pitch the Washmatik like a master, and then at noon he threw it at me and said, “You’re up. I’ll be back in an hour. I’m going to get lunch. See what you can do.” Then he disappeared. That was good in a way because he wouldn’t be watching me, but now I was terrified.
I didn’t know how to bally a tip or stop anybody who walked by. I knew the pitch but I didn’t know how to get anyone’s attention. Standing there like an idiot, I thought, I can’t do this. I forgot everything. Everyone seemed to be staring at me; I had complete, paranoid stage fright. Then I thought, Fuck it, I’ve got nothing to lose. Just do it. At that moment, a gentleman came over and said, “What does this do?” Thank God. The perfect question. I was off.
I was terrible. I didn’t know how to match the words and the actions the way I had seen Mark do it. Nothing was working the way it was supposed to because I just didn’t know the dance: the words and movements and engagement, the mechanics of the thing. Somehow—I don’t know if the guy felt sorry for me or what—I managed to go through the whole pitch. By the time I finished, I had a crowd of eight or ten people watching me. And then I realized something huge: they didn’t know this was my first go. They had no idea. When I “went to the turn” (pitchman-speak for asking for the money), I sold one. It was a magical moment. Oh my God, I sold one!
Just like that, all my fear went away. It had worked. It was like an incantation. I had said these words—I’d ham-fisted them and said them all wrong, but I’d said them—and someone handed me a £10 note. That’s when my whole career started. The fear was gone because I had done it. I had broken the ice and someone had said yes. I’d trusted the pitch and it had worked. Welcome to the world, lad.
I ballyed another tip and now I was getting more confident. By the time my hour was up, I’d sold seven Washmatiks. When Mark came back, he said, “How many did you sell?” and I’m certain he thought the answer would be zero. When I handed him the £70, he just stared at it like I’d handed him a pineapple or a baseball. Then he said, “Seven?”
“Yeah, is that good?” I said. “Did I let you down?”
He just looked at me for a second and then said, “Be here tomorrow at 8:00 a.m.” That was the beginning.
I couldn’t have made the people at that market buy from me. I wasn’t experienced. I barely knew what I was saying or doing. I was almost having an out-of-body experience. That’s the point. I didn’t try to sell them, coerce them, or manipulate them. I didn’t “close” them or “ask for the sale,” like they tell you to do in every book and seminar on selling. I did my pitch and let it do its thing, and I stepped back and let the results happen. At some point, that’s all you can do.
Remember Blake, the Alec Baldwin character from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross? In his “go to hell” suit and his $10,000 Rolex, rapid-firing obscenities at poor Jack Lemmon and Alan Arkin? This is what pitching looks when that guy describes it:
A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!! A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention—do I have your attention? Interest—are you interested? I know you are because it’s fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks! Decision—have you made your decision for Christ?!! And action. A-I-D-A; get out there!! You got the prospects comin’ in; you think they came in to get out of the rain? Guy doesn’t walk on the lot unless he wants to buy. Sitting out there waiting to give you their money! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?
I love it, but I hate it. I love the performance, but I hate the impression of pitching that it makes: high pressure, manipulative, not giving a shit about anything but getting what you want. In a movie that might work, but not in real life. Sometimes, you make your best pitch but the other person doesn’t like it. Worse, he or she feels manipulated despite your best efforts. That’s when you’ve got to be totally aware of the vibe and tempo in the room and know when to stop pitching.
Blake says, “Always be closing.” Wrong. This Pitch Power is about doing the opposite.
Don’t push. Don’t say, “What’s it going to take to sell you this car?” There is a moment to stop pitching, shut up, and let the chips fall where they may. Your goal is to get what you want, but that’s not going to happen 100 percent of the time, or even 50 percent of the time. But you know what can happen most of the time? The person you pitch can walk away feeling good about spending time with you. Most of the time, that means you stop trying to control things and give control back to the listener. You listen and learn and don’t try to control the outcome. No one wants to feel worked or overpowered, and having the grace and sense to see that is a point in your favor.
In my world, the most important transaction I can be involved in is forming a good relationship with you. If I’m pitching you, I’m not interested in making a one-time sale. I don’t want you to walk away feeling dirty and believing you’ve been ripped off. I want you to leave happy, content, and satisfied, even if you don’t hire me or date me. I want you to leave with a story of someone who came to see you, made you laugh, and had some guts. I want you to remember me as a good guy who was trying to help, because while we don’t wind up working together today, maybe a year from now you remember that I was the one who didn’t push too hard and you call me when another opportunity opens up.
Plus, at some point, continuing to press just damages you. You become the guy who won’t quit hitting on the cute girl even though she’s obviously not interested. You want to lean in and whisper, “Mate, you’re just embarrassing yourself.” Sometimes, the desk clerk isn’t going to give you a discount on the room. The loan officer is not going to negotiate with you. Let it go. The idea is to win more times than you lose but not think you can win every time. A percentage of pitches are going to fail. I know, because they fail for me, too. Let them. How you handle the failure—the poise and confidence with which you process the fact that you can’t control this encounter—will say as much about you as anything else you do.
What makes this Pitch Power unique is that it’s less about what you do than about what you don’t do. Don’t press. Don’t force the issue. Don’t say something transparently salesish. The goal is to make the person conducting a job interview feel stupid if they don’t hire you. What a powerful thing. Instead of you walking in and feeling like you’re Oliver Twist asking Fagin, “Please, sir, can I have some more?” you can turn the tables. You make the person know he has to hire you right then and there, because if he doesn’t, you’re going to go and work for his competition.
Or maybe the girl is going to sit on her barstool and think, I need to go out with this guy right now because he just blew my mind. Or you’ll be the teacher whose kids can’t wait to go to her class because she’s engaged them and has them loving the material and getting great grades. Or you’ll become the car salesman who, instead of watching two-thirds of prospects walk away after a test drive and a pushy sales pitch, has the customers who not only buy cars but enjoy the experience and even refer their friends.
The key to this Pitch Power is a truth that seems so bloody simple but is so easy to miss if you let yourself get caught up in worrying about outcomes and commissions and all that other bollocks: your audience isn’t going to decide based on anything you say or do, but on how you make them feel. Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” That’s 100 percent right.
Successful pitching isn’t about facts and figures. It’s about making your audience feel comfortable—getting them to know that they can trust you with their time, money, safety, reputation, whatever you’re asking for. When you pitch a literary agent on representing your novel, you’re trying to convince her that she can trust you to deliver a terrific book, be a professional, and not waste her time. When you persuade a bank loan officer to give you a great rate on a mortgage, you’re really persuading him that you’re a good person who can be trusted to pay back the money and not get him fired. When you close a sale, the customer trusts that the product will be as good as advertised and deliver the value you promised.
Where does that trust come from? Hell, this is all so simple when you strip away the salesy bullshit! Trust comes when your words, actions, and the whole person who shows up says this in big, bold letters:
I care about you and your well-being as much as or more than I care about my own.
The funny thing is, you can’t say that or you’ll sound completely full of shit. If you make a ham-handed grab for the sale like a dog lunging at a piece of meat, you’re letting the person across the desk know that it really is all about the sale and you couldn’t care less about them. That’s why the pitch at this level is like jujitsu: you don’t attack the goal directly, but indirectly. You say it with your sincerity, knowledge, attention to value and detail, confidence, humor, good ideas, and preparation. When the audience feels comfortable, when they like you, when they trust you—that’s when you win.
Want to see examples of what not to do? Go to any clothing store, for starters. Department store salespeople are the worst. Everything looks good on you because they just want the commission. But ask them about Prada versus Versace and they look at you like you just asked them to explain relativity.
Car salesmen have a terrible rep and mostly deserve it. Pressuring you into buying by taking your trade-in car for hours and not giving it back isn’t pitching. A great pitch doesn’t make you hate the pitchman. Want a fun activity when you’re feeling cheeky and want to screw with someone? Walk onto a car lot and after the jackals descend, pick out the guy who seems like the biggest jerk. Walk up to a Ford Focus and hear him insist, “You’re a Focus person.” Then change your mind and walk over to an F-150 and he’ll go, “Oh, you’re a truck person.” Then try it with a Mustang. You can do this all day!
You also see it in waitstaff. I can’t stand the ones who I know, no matter what I ask about on the menu, will say, “Oh, it’s really good.” Look, sunshine, not everything on the menu can be really good. I need you to help me out here, not kiss the chef’s ass. Outcomes, outcomes, outcomes. When all you care about is the outcome, you lose.
So, what can you do to create trust and comfort while not closing?
Too many inexperienced pitchmen talk and talk until the audience is bored silly, and they don’t even realize they’re missing out on the best source of information about their audience: their audience itself. Often, verbal diarrhea is caused by nerves. A little bit of nervous energy is fine and normal, but nerves that make you blather on while the listener becomes glassy-eyed will cost you. That’s why you practice your pitch.
Say your piece and then shut it. Let the listener settle in and absorb what you’ve said. Most important, listen to what he or she has to say in response. You can learn a great deal about what your audience needs, fears, or isn’t getting from people. I’ve learned more about potential clients from listening to one of their people bitch about their other production companies than I ever have from formal research.
Listening comes with a companion skill: asking great questions. Don’t just talk about yourself and what you have to offer. Learn about your audience and prepare two or three brilliant questions. Then when the time is right, ask them, maintain strong eye contact, and wait for the answers. Remember, people want to tell their story. If you let them, they will usually share even more than they intended.
Are you one of those people who fears silence and tries to fill it with talk? Start doing what you must to become comfortable with silence, because it’s one of a pitchman’s most powerful tools. Many times I’ve sat across a desk from someone and finished my pitch and just let the silence settle in. They didn’t talk. I didn’t talk. But silence doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
In silence, the other party can be absorbing what you’ve just told them. Their defenses can be dropping when they realize that you’re letting some air back into the exchange. You can be thinking about what you’re going to say or ask next. Also, when you get comfortable with silence, you give the other guy a chance to fill it, and what he or she says might be to your advantage.
But what I find most useful about silence is that it reboots the exchange. Everybody can breathe, step back, shake themselves, and then dive back into the conversation refreshed and ready. Finally, contrast is pleasing to the senses, and choosing silence after several minutes of passionate declaiming puts you in control of the pace and tempo of the conversation.
The best service providers I know—consultants, writers, lawyers—are more than happy to share what they know on the phone or in person with no obligation. That’s smart. Obviously, they’re not giving away the store or spending eight hours consulting with someone for free, but they provide tremendous value in letting a prospect pick their brain for a pleasant forty-five-minute Skype session. That makes a fantastic impression on anyone you’re pitching, because you’re essentially saying, “I’m giving you all this wonderful information without asking you to commit, and I’m confident enough that I believe you’ll come back as a paying client when the call is over.”
You know what? They’re usually right. Giving someone value with no strings is an incredibly potent pitching technique. Let’s say you’re sitting across the desk from a recruiter for a highly regarded tech company. You’ve studied the company exhaustively and you have some terrific ideas for solving some of their IT security problems—and you share those ideas in your interview. You don’t say, “I’ll share my ideas if you hire me”; you share them to show the recruiter just what he could be missing if he doesn’t hire you. Then you smile, say thank you, and walk out. If your ideas are strong, eight times out of ten you’re going to get called back.
Before your next pitching opportunity, think about how you could create value for the other party. It won’t work with every audience; you can’t really create value for a credit card company or airline. But when you’re pitching for a job, a client, or to get a reporter to write about your company, that extra value can be the difference between yes and no.
My favorite restaurant experiences are the ones where I walk in and ask, “What’s good?” and the waitress says something like “These are my favorites, but just because I like them doesn’t mean you will. Let’s talk about what you like.” I love that you’re willing to be candid about your restaurant, because now we’re co-conspirators in trying to find me a good meal. The server has shown me she cares and is honest—oh, and by the way, she’s now completely in control of what I eat.
If you can find a way to turn the people you’re pitching into collaborators with you, you’re golden. Now you’re working together against forces of evil. It takes things to a different, more intimate level and gives you opportunities to steer the encounter toward your goals. For the waitress, her goal is a big tip. To get that, she needs me to buy a $100 bottle of wine, because she doesn’t share tips on wine with the kitchen. But she doesn’t sell me the wine; she sells me an experience that she curates and that we collaborate on. She knows if she can get me to order this dish, she can legitimately recommend that wine to go with it. She’s not selling wine. She’s selling trust: trust that the food she suggests will be great and that the wine will complement it perfectly. Maybe she even suggests that the people at a different table hated this wine, even though it’s a ninety-six-pointer in Wine Spectator, but she thinks I’ll appreciate it because, fuck them. She’s gone from being a server to an advisor to an ally. She’s made herself my personal food consigliere and I’m going to tip her magnificently.
The pitching superhero anchors the listener in the moment, not thinking about anything else. That doesn’t happen when you’re closing somebody.
At the beginning of my career, I was a twenty-two-year-old man holding a mop at a street market and telling you how I was going to make your life easier. It was a repetitious, not very glamorous job. People laughed at me and made fun of me. Hell, I would have made fun of me, too. But I was good at it, and it wasn’t just about the pitch. If we’re being honest, any idiot can memorize lines. I know because I did it. To really have success in connecting with people and building trust, you need to own what you’re doing and love what you’re doing.
I worked hard. I got ten times more rejections than sales. By the time I paid for my market space, petrol, and cheap food, I probably cleared £10. But I loved it, and it showed. I loved the products I was pitching, loved making people laugh, loved knowing that I was getting better and better as a pitchman. My goal was to infect people with my enthusiasm so when they saw me, it felt like the only reason I was there was to share my enthusiasm with them—not to sell them anything.
If you’re going to really be a superhero at pitching, learn to love doing it. You have to love sharing what you know and sharing your story. You need to love your product, especially if the product is you. That way, you’re not selling or closing. You’re confident and excited and telling someone about something amazing in a non-Amway or “join my church” kind of way. Mark told me to memorize the words and actions and people would buy, but he missed something. I had to love what I was doing or it wouldn’t have worked. The reason I sold seven car washers when he expected me to sell none was that, nervous as I was, I instantly loved it. The old saying “Do what you love and the money will follow” is true.
Pay attention to the flip side of this, too: don’t ever pitch for an opportunity that you don’t 100 percent want or pitch a product you don’t believe in. If you do, you’ll become nothing more than a closer and a salesperson. That’s soul destroying.
Finally, as often as possible, go into every pitching situation with the mindset that you’re there to serve. Again, that doesn’t always apply, but more often than not it does. Let’s say you’re buying a car and hate car salesmen. But that pushy hack is trying to achieve a goal, which is to earn a commission fast without having a miserable time. He doesn’t want to sweat you like an FBI interrogator to get you to buy a car; he might just not know another way. But suppose you go in with a service mentality and say, “This is what I want, this is what you want, so let’s not play the usual games and you can walk away in an hour with a nice sale and everybody can be smiling, okay?” Now you’re showing him another way!
A service mentality won’t always land. Some people aren’t interested in liking you or even listening. But this approach will show you who they are fast, so you can move on to a more receptive audience in pitch-perfect situations like:
• Consulting. Consultants frequently dig deep into the affairs of their clients, so trust is imperative. If you’re a consultant and you want more clients, talk less and listen more. When you do speak, ask smart, concise questions and then while the prospect is answering, plan your follow-up questions. Be a fount of useful knowledge and resources so the prospect can’t imagine living without you.
• Financial planning. The saying goes that a physician might know about a patient’s habits and an attorney might know about a client’s troubles, but a financial planner knows about everything. If that’s your profession, your product really isn’t picking stocks; it’s trust. Listen, learn, and be the source of reliable information about all things financial. Managing a person’s entire financial life means being an ally, not just a service provider.
• Reporting. If you’re a writer, journalist, or blogger, you’re going to be faced with the task of getting people to talk to you who don’t want to. Again, we’re back to trust. If someone sensitive and guarded thinks you see them as the means to a story, they’ll clam up. But everyone wants someone who will listen to them. Be a listener, not a note taker. That’s what digital recorders are for.
Bishop Carlton Pearson knows a great deal about the power of service and commitment, particularly of listening. A renowned, controversial Pentecostal preacher and author of multiple books, his dramatic life story is the subject of a film that’s in production as I write this: Come Sunday, starring Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor and Emmy winner Martin Sheen. As a charismatic performer and singer who speaks to huge audiences, Pearson believes that listening for and to the rhythm and vibrations of the audience and feeling how they change is the key to effective, meaningful communication.
“When I speak, I always stop and feel,” he says. “Feeling is the emotional attachment and connection you have to the person or persons you’re addressing, whether it’s a crowd of five thousand or an individual. I’m always feeling out the room and connecting with the energy of the people listening to me. When I speak, I take the time to stay connected to the emotional temperature and I flow with that. Sometimes I’m the thermometer and other times I’m the thermostat, but I remain in control of the room as best I can.
“In any exchange, even when a single person is addressing a huge audience, there are always traffic signals,” he continues. “They are the emotions or commotions that flash just below the surface. When you’re cruising along and talking without listening and without silences, you can miss them, just like you miss signs on the highway when you’re going eighty miles an hour. But when you see everything as a conversation, there are a lot of intersections. Green is go: they love what I’m saying and want more. Yellow is slow down: something isn’t working and I need to rethink or proceed with caution. Red is danger: it doesn’t mean I should stop talking, but instead take a different approach, back up, put it in neutral, and watch what’s happening… or needs to happen.
“The space between the words is the mystical part,” Pearson concludes. “The best communication comes in the space between the words. You need to constantly be aware of the pulse of the conversation, whether it’s long or short. Communication is as much about a feeling as it is about words and ideas. We spell words, but words also cast spells on us. A spellbinding speaker or communicator casts a spell or enchantment on the audience. Communication then becomes spirit to spirit.
For all that you might try to feel the room and listen, every now and again you will find yourself across the table from someone who insists on making your entire encounter transactional—what they have, what you want, period. When that happens, you probably don’t want to be your noncloser self, because they’re not interested. But that doesn’t mean you can’t pitch.
Suppose it’s a job interview and the questions are the usual ones: Where did you go to school? What was your GPA? What do you think you can offer this company? What do you think your strong points are? What are you most proud of? But every single question is an opportunity to pivot to something else, to take control more directly.
I think every single question is a pivot point. When you get “What are you most proud of?” you pivot to “I’m most proud of the value I brought to my last employer and here’s how I think I can do the same for you” or “I don’t think what I’m most proud of is that important, but here’s what I would like to do for you.” When you get the classic clunker “What’s your biggest weakness?” you pivot to “That’s an interesting question, but I think my strengths are a lot more interesting.”
If the other party isn’t going to let you build trust and form an alliance, fine. But you can use Pitch Powers to steer even a transactional encounter back to how you can help, how you can create value, and how you’re different.
There are even times when the best thing you can do is cut to the chase, be quick, and be ultra-transactional. For instance, when you’re dealing with someone you know is extremely busy. They don’t have time to chat with you for thirty minutes; you get three. Here’s your shot, kid. Don’t hit it into the rough.
I’m incredibly busy, so at Sullivan Productions I love when someone comes in, pitches me, and tells me in two minutes why I should hire them: “I work at Wells Fargo Bank and I’m bored. I want a friendly environment with more challenge, and I think television production is exciting. I see your company growing. I can do QuickBooks. I can do Excel. I can manage budgets. I can do quarterly reports. I’m on time. I’m quiet. I can take the trash out. I can communicate. I’m a great team member. I’m a self-starter. I show up on time, do my job, and don’t gossip. I’m willing to learn. I’ll work late, and I’ll work weekends.”
You’re hired.
Know your audience and read the room.
How? By practicing, as always. Most of us love to hear ourselves talk and tend to treat the time when we should be listening, really listening, as an interval when we’re waiting to talk again. Plus, we speak too quickly and rarely pause. So… practice.
Go to social events and ask three questions of someone for every question you answer. Work on slowing down your speech until it sounds painfully, ridiculously slow to your ears. Trust me; it will sound quite normal to your listeners. Work on not jumping into the first break in someone else’s speech to fill the pause with your own words; instead, let silence sit. If someone else fills it, fine. Pay extra attention to details like names, which many of us are terrible at remembering, and where people are from.
You can do all these things at parties, nightclubs, or professional networking events—consequence-free spots that are perfect for quelling any natural reflex you might have to make the conversation all about you. Most of all, learn to read the room. Does it feel boisterous and playful? Quiet and conservative? Profane and subversive? Tilt the tenor of what you say and when you say it to suit the room.
A great time to do this is when you’re delivering a speech. Does your audience respond quickly to jokes? Do they nod in agreement? It’s probably worth trying some audience participation. If they sit like stones, attempts to get them involved will probably fall flat. Public speaking is a fantastic training ground for pitching; if you haven’t done it, try it. If you’re terrified, as many people are, try getting involved in an organization like Toastmasters or learn from online lessons on free resources like Udemy and FutureLearn’s Talk the Talk course.
Speaking is terrific because you’re never closing. Your main goal is to convince, captivate, and inspire. That’s superpowered pitching.
SCENARIOS FOR USING THE “NEVER BE CLOSING” PITCH POWER
Q: You’re at a sales meeting and the customer is clearly in sync with you, ready to buy. Do you go for the traditional “ask for the sale” move, or could you be sabotaging yourself?
A: If you’ve built trust, then it’s okay to ask for the sale. But do it in a way that’s engaging: “Fran, this is the part in my pitch where I’m supposed to ask for the sale, but I can see that we’re really having a good time and I don’t want to screw it up by turning back into a salesperson. Do you think it’s okay if I ask for the sale now?” Ninety percent of the time, you’ll get a laugh, and the sale.
Q: You’ve said your piece and so has your audience. Now there’s silence… and more silence. Nobody is saying anything, and it’s getting weird. Do you fill the silence or wait it out? How do you escape?
A: Read the room, but I think it’s stronger to wait it out. If the energy in the room is dying, you can perk it up by saying something completely out of left field, like “Y’know, I was giving away oranges to a bunch of triathletes one time…” Always fall back on making people laugh.
Q: You’re coaching a team (in sports or business; it doesn’t matter), a leadership position where you’re expected to be the main speaker. You want to open the floor to questions but don’t want to turn things into a free-for-all. What do you do?
A: Have everyone submit questions on cards ahead of time, like at a town hall meeting. Then answer the best ones.