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You know this was me five years ago.
And it's still me.
but I confess am a waistline larger from way back.
Well, that's enough for today.
Now for a lively lift, ice cold Coca-Cola.
There's no waistline worry with Coke, you know.
Actually, this individual size bottle has no more calories than
half a grapefruit.
>> [LAUGH] >> I really believe in that.
[LAUGH] I'm on a Coke diet.
Boriani, you want to join?
>> Sure. >> You'll lose weight.
>> [LAUGH] >> Brad,
you will talk about healthy living all right.
Do you want to include Coke in your smoothies?
>> Sure thing.
>> [LAUGH] >> Do you all believe
in what they both said?
>> No. [LAUGH]
>> Exactly.
Was that pushy, a little sleazy a little yucky in what I was trying to do,
trying to sell Coke to you both?
A recent survey asked about adjectives to define sales and
salesmanship and these are the words that came up.
Is sales bad or are the techniques that are used to sell bad and why are they bad?
This is what we want to talk to you about today.
I must confess I have a certain relationship with tobacco.
[LAUGH] I used to manufacture them in the past as well.
When John Wayne says that not a single case of throat irritation and
when he also mentions you do smoking.
No I don't believe it and
let me tell you as a subject authority, subject matter expert, it's a lie.
When my child looks at a Big Mac in McDonald's, he wants to have it.
When I look at it, it looks very juicy and very big.
>> [LAUGH] >> And you go a McDonald and
buy one it looks like that.
>> [LAUGH] >> My kid loves it.
He still has it, not because it's big, but because it's Big Mac.
Maybe selling him a Big Mac requires a different strategy.
And this has not only happened in the past, every day, even now,
we see this technique being applied over and over again.
Sprint tried to talk about how fast their network is, and used subliminal messaging
in the form of a US map fully colored, to talk about coverage.
Guess what happened?
Verizon used Ricky Jarvis and basically called their lie up front.
What happened there?
They're selling, everybody is selling.
But what are you selling?
Should you be selling what you really give to the customer?
Or should you be selling because you know what, it looks very catchy?
Trust me, in this day and age,
with information literally ubiquitous, it's not going to work.
So today what we are going to talk to you about is authentic selling.
We are going to talk about, what is inauthenticity?
We are going to talk about why it is a problem.
And we're going to talk about how you can be more authentic and
how you can use authentic selling on a broader scale.
>> So let's unpack what we mean when we talk about inauthentic selling.
We've all been subject to very generic selling strategies.
So a lot of companies will sell the same way they sell to me,
the same way they sell to Mike or to Vino.
They will sell us the same message through the same channels in the same manner.
And as customers we want more.
So what they'll do is they'll throw in some incomprehensible jargon that we
don't understand.
Second, selling has become very linear.
Think of the traditional car sales person.
So I know what I want when I go into a car dealership.
Well, so does he.
He needs his commission, he needs his bonus, or
he needs his recognition from his peers.
So when I walk in, he's going to sell me what to get him what he wants,
not what I want.
So it's not a dialogue, it's very linear.
It's all about him, it's not about me.
And we want more, we are more deserving of that as consumers.
So we need to think about how can we build relationships between
the people we are selling to and the customers themselves.
And then thirdly, selling has become very intrusive.
So I don't know about you, but every Monday morning,
I get this phone call at 6:00 AM from this credit
card company that's selling me 0% APR on a credit card that I don't own.
[LAUGH] Oops, and the thing is, it's not just credit cards.
It's not just phone calls that are happening.
Our inboxes are full, our mailboxes are full with all these promotional
messages selling us thing that we don't need all the time and we're tired.
We can't do, they need to find another way to engage us that makes us
actually want to engage with them in a productive manner.
And not just spammers.
And lastly, which Alli mentioned earlier,
traditional selling strategies have become very insincere.
If you see, [LAUGH] I'll give you a chance to read this.
[LAUGH] And we live in a world where we all have access to information.
We can all log in to the internet, we can read customer reviews, we can tweet and
yet companies are still lying to us.
They still want us to buy what they're selling to us and
the good thing now is that as consumers we now have a voice.
We can now call them out when they are untruthful and
people are starting to do that.
So Loft is this trendy female apparel company, and
here they were launching their favorite new pants.
And consumers weren't happy.
So they were launching their new favorite pants, and well, they put it up and
they put these five feet ten models.
And then their customers called them out they said, well we don't look like that,
those products don't appeal to us.
That their customers couldn't relate to the products that they were
selling to them.
So the internet has given us a voice that we can now use to call companies up
when they're being inauthentic and authenticity is not just a buzz word.
When we ask the Baby Boomers generation,
they placed more value on a strong brand than they did on authenticity.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] And with Millennials we
actually value authenticity more than we value, more than we value strong brands.
>> [LAUGH] >> So
it's just not a buzz worth that we're using it's actually irrelevant.
It's driving consumer behavior and it can be a source of competitive advantage.
>> Well Tessie and Nellie have talked to you about why it's so
important to bring authenticity to selling and more broadly, to communication.
But how do we do it?
Throughout this course we've learned some great tips and JD is a great communicator.
But I know that if I copied exact every single thing that JD does,
I would probably appear quite fake, and even pretentious.
Because it just wouldn't be me anymore.
So, instead of telling you what to do,
we want to encourage you to adopt change your mindset around communication.
And encourage you to tap into these four basic impulses,
to be open, to connect, be passionate, and to listen.
People sometimes appear as inauthentic or
maybe even untrustworthy when they're too rehearsed.
You have this big presentation, large, and
intimidating audience which I can strangely relate to right now.
>> [LAUGH] >> Of course,
of course you're going to come up with some script and
you're going to stick to it.
Because you're nervous about saying something wrong.
But you can change your mindset to become more open.
If you imagine that you're presenting to someone that you really care about,
someone you trust like a friend or a family member.
That way you'll be more relaxed and you also be more honest and genuine,
because you care about your friend.
And you also care less about how they judge you.
In fact, you can even start by practicing, or crafting your message,
with this person in mind.
My biggest fear when presenting is to look at the audience and see bored faces.
And I'm going to assume that everyone who's not looking at me right now
is writing some great feedback.
>> [LAUGH] >> I thank you very much.
But really, for a lot of presenters, they don't even think about engaging with their
audience until the end of the presentation, the Q and A.
And you can change that if you change your mindset and
think more about connecting with your audience.
Think, imagine that you have this desperate need
to connect with your audience every single minute.
Imagine that you are dealing with a child who is bored and ignoring you, but
whose attention you desperately need and you just need to engage them.
And if you got that, you will think more about connecting with your audience.
Earlier, we showed you a picture of burger that's perfect looking.
But actually this picture right here is appealing to me so much more.
Because I'm actually sensing his passion and satisfaction of eating this burger and
the meat juices coming out.
I want to be this guy right now, right.
>> [LAUGH] >> So
remember to bring out the underlying emotion of what you want to say.
Because, we're all going to connect better to this feeling of hunger or the munchies.
But, any food item and
I think this would work even if I'm at the vegan conference right now.
Finally, a lot of times that we develop our pitch we're not even thinking about
the audience reaction.
We're not looking at people.
So I don't know.
Are you excited, ,nervous, thinking about your own presentation,
just trying to get me to move on?
[LAUGH] So Fred and I were actually in a class together where we spent a lot
of time talking.
So I feel like I know, I'm reading his reaction.
I think he wants me to move on, I will.
Well it's really, really important to think about what your audience is thinking
every minute of the time and trying to understand how they feel, and that way
you can adopt your message to their needs and emotions and become better at selling.
And also, instead of talking over and over again saying what you don't want to hear.
>> Great, thanks Sophia.
So this is all well and good, but
I think it brings up the question why should any of us care about this, right?
1 in 9 Americans are actively involved in selling.
I think there are about 45 students here in the room right now.
That means maybe 5 of us are going to actively be using this
in our day to day lives, right?
That might be the case in practical terms but
in reality every single person in this room is a salesman.
Everything you do, every single interaction that you have,
you're selling something.
You're selling yourself, you're selling your ideas, you're selling your value and
your potential to everyone that you talk to, and every person that sees you.
We do this in work all the time.
I was going to give Eric a great shout out, unfortunately he's not here.
But he gave us a great presentation on LinkedIn on Monday,
and talked about how we sell ourselves on LinkedIn.
And that's just the first step to selling ourselves in work.
We sell ourselves in our resume, in our interviews,
our first day on the job, eating lunch with our coworkers.
You know, how we speak up in meetings, how we hold ourselves in meetings.
Every single time we do these things, it's an opportunity for us to sell ourselves
as someone that people are looking at for promotion, people that sell yourselves as
someone you want on your team when there's a big project coming up at the office.
We also sell ourselves in our personal lives all the time.
And Rojan as well isn't here but he told us about selling ourselves on Tinder.
And the thousands of people he's trying to sell himself to every single day.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
it's not just that you're selling yourself when you go out on a date.
You're selling yourself when you meet your potential partners' parents or
their friends or really just when you're interacting with friends on daily basis,
reminding them that you're someone that they want to have in their lives on
a regular basis.
All these are opportunities for
us to sell ourselves and to improve our prospects moving forward.
And sales are not something that are going to be occurred
by our choice to do or not to do it, there's something that happened naturally.
And we can ignore that fact, or we can embrace it, and
try to use this opportunity to sell ourselves authentically.
I want to talk really quickly about the person who I think is the most authentic
salesman in America today to close things out.
And Bert I know you told me not to do politics for my final presentation but
I almost made it through Donald Trump it wouldn't be authentic if I didn't right?
>> [LAUGH] >> Everyone was amazed when Donald Trump
rose in the polls last summer,
and political scientists couldn't figure out what it was, and
they asked Republican voters, is he most closely aligned with your ideals?
They said no, he's not most closely aligned with our ideals.
Is he the most conservative candidate?
No, he's not the most conservative candidate.
>> Is he the most qualified?
No, not the most qualified.
Maybe, the most trustworthy, no he's not the most trustworthy either.
The one poll question that voters, almost unanimously said Donald Trump
was the leading Republican candidate in, is does he believe what he says?
Not is he being honest but, does he believe what he said?
>> [LAUGH] >> Is he authentic in the way he
communicate with his audience.
And that's why he's one vote away from the Presidency right now because he's put
himself out there as an authentic figure and he's presented himself authentically.
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