INBOUND 2016: Monique Blokzyl "How to Convince Anyone of Anything (Almost) Every Time"

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I find it amazing that you made it to the very first session today, which means either three things or all of them. Either you're early birth, which normally I'm not, or it means that I've done something good with pitching my session to you to convince you to come into the room early, or it means that you have understood that pretty much what you say and how you say things is equally powerful to the tools that you're using to distribute your message. And you might know that pretty much speaking, communicating is a powerful skill. And it's not what a lot of people think, a soft skill. It leads to really concrete, hard fact results. How many of you know this TV show, the Shark Tank? Have you heard of that? Yeah. Okay. Quite a few. So it's pretty much a show where startup entrepreneurs go and pitch their ideas and they only have few minutes to convince someone to invest millions or at least trigger some initial interest. Right. And today, this is what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about how you can convince anyone of anything almost every time. How does that sound? It's a big promise, right? Right. But before we tap into it, let me get to know you a little bit so I can tailor the session to what you need. How many of you are having a job in marketing or sales? Okay.

Wow.

That's the vast majority. That's great. How many of you run your own business? Okay. Quite a few. And how many of you are thinking about or dreaming about or planning to start your own business at some point? Quite a few. I hope your boss was not in the room. Good. So what I realized is that no matter if you are employed in marketing or selling, or if you run your business or. Or want to grow your business, or if you need these convincing skills in your private life, you need them every single day. Right. And what I realize is that most entrepreneurs and marketing and selling people, no matter how much training you go through, it is still a challenge to convince people. It is still a challenge to get this. You know this. Yes. How many of you have tried to ever sell something to anyone? How many of you have, like, an old phone, an old car, an old boyfriend or girlfriend or anything else? Yeah. And have you ever been in a situation where you got a clear.

No.

Yeah. How many of you? I guess all of you. Right. So that is the challenge. And what we're going to do today, as soon as the slides are up at some point, pretty much what we're going to do today is we will give you an insight into what does it mean to convince someone? What does it mean to pitch with impact? How or what makes a pitch outstanding? We're going to look at that and then I'm going to share with you the magical formula of how do you convince someone? I'm going to share that pitching formula with you step by step. But most importantly, what we're going to do is we're going to roll up the sleeves and you're going to work on your own most important pitch right now. How does that sound? Yes. Great. Wonderful. So what I invite you to do also, throughout the sessions, whenever you pick up something that is valuable to you, any kind of golden nuggets, tweet them to pitchforya for yourself and for others. Also, if any questions come up, we don't have a lot of time to answer questions today. You know, if questions come up, please tweet them as well. I'll keep an eye out today. I'll answer them today. Pitch for yes. And also, if you want to check if your pitch starts working already, put it up on Twitter and see how other people resonate with that. How does that sound? Okay, good. So now let's talk about what you should actually look at before you start creating your own pitch. There's a couple of questions you should ask up front. What do you think are these questions you should ask? Any ideas? Yeah, go ahead. What's their audience need or problem? In the first place, it's who is in your audience, right? What else? Okay, I give it to you. What is the intention? Why do you page in the first place? Why do you undergo this effort to prepare a pitch, to step up to someone and give the pitch and hold the pitch. And why do you maybe even step up on stage? What? I invite all of you because I said this is a very practical session. I invite you to just take a piece of paper right now, take 15 seconds and write down what is the next situation in which you want to convince someone what is your next pitching situation? And that could be your boss, that could be a client. Just write down for yourself what is your next pitching situation? Because I would like you to work on that with me in the next 40 minutes. Sounds good. Okay, cool. And by the way, that could be also something private, right? I mean, you're pitching to our kids to. To get them do something. We pitch to our mothers and fathers in law, right? I mean it can be anything. It can be business related or private. So just write down what is your next pitching situation and what is your intention what are you trying to get out of it? What do you want them to say or do or buy into? What is your intention? Okay, good. I hope you all have something once you know why you actually pitch in the first place and who you pitch to. As you said, it's important to know who. Who are you actually pitching to? You have the intention clear. And here is another really important hint before you go and pitch, get clear on what is the major message after you've gone away from that conversation or off stage, what do you want them to remember long time after you left the stage? What do you want them to say to others about it? Okay, and then let's look into what makes a great pitch great. How many of you have heard of a guy called Michael Pritchard? Okay, some of you order Lifesaver battles. Let me share with you the video of him giving a pitch. It's just a three minute clip, very short, and I'd like you to write down what do you think makes this pitch great? What does make it great? What is he saying or doing to convince you? Okay, so let's have a look at that and just take some notes. That's going to become your checklist of what makes a pitch impact.

Good morning, everybody. I'd like to talk about a couple of things today. The first thing is water. Now, I see you've all been enjoying the water that's been provided for you here at the conference over the past couple of days. And I'm sure you'll feel that it's from a safe source. But what if it wasn't? What if it was from a source like this? Then statistics would actually say that half of you would now be suffering with diarrhea. I've talked a lot in the past about statistics and the provision of safe drinking water for all, but they just don't seem to get through. And I think I've worked out why. It's because, using current thinking, the scale of the problem just seems too huge to contemplate solving. So we just switch off US Governments and aid agencies. Well, today I'd like to show you that through thinking differently, the problem has been solved. By the way, since I've been speaking, another 13,000 people around the world are suffering now with diarrhea and four children have just died. I invented Lifesaver bottle because I got angry. I, like most of you, was sitting down the day after Christmas in 2004 when I was watching the devastating news of the Asian tsunami as it rolled in plain playing out on tv. The days and weeks that followed. People fleeing to the hills, being forced to drink contaminated water or face death. That really stuck with me. Then a few months later, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the side of America. Okay, I thought, here's a first world country. Let's see what they can do. Day one, nothing. Day two, nothing. Do you know it took five days to get water to the Superdome? People were shooting each other on the streets for TV sets.