Yes, it sounds like the name of a pop band. No, it’s not.

CommLog, however, has a great post on confidence markers — the verbal and non-verbal clues we give off to denote certainty — and how they weren’t in overwhelming evidence in Condoleeza Rice’s testimony last week.

Alan Nelson does a great job of laying out the basic markers, and it’s something every communications pro and business development professional should commit to memory for greater success.

(Standard disclaimer: Engage is about communications, not politics. Got comments about the former? Love to hear ‘em. Comments about the latter? Take ‘em somewhere else.)

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Josh Greene, smart marketer over at Time Warner, has some things to say to the ad agencies that pitch him. Damned good advice for anyone who has to sell via a pitch or presentation. My favorite bit:

Don’t give us “leave behinds” with PowerPoint printouts at the start of the meeting. They’re called leave behinds for a reason. We’re like children. If you geive them to us, we’ll flip through them, depriving us of the surprise of discovering the brilliance of your thoughts.

Go read it. And while you’re at it, read the single most hilarious PowerPoint presentaiton (in PDF form) you’ll ever read.

Kudos to Gaping Void for pointing out the link.

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Came across an outstanding interview with Rich Mayer, a professor of psychology who’s got the chops to talk about PowerPoint as learning tool/learning hindrance.

And talk about it he does.

My favorite bit:

Bullets dont kill learning, but improper use of bullets kills learning. To create effective PowerPoint presentations, it is important to understand how people learn.

In particular, cognitive scientists have discovered three important features of the human information processing system that are particularly relevant for PowerPoint users: dual-channels, that is, people have separate information processing channels for visual material and verbal material; limited capacity, that is, people can pay attention to only a few pieces of information in each channel at a time; and active processing, that is, people understand the presented material when they pay attention to the relevant material, organize it into a coherent mental structure and integrate it with their prior knowledge.

The implications are that (1) PowerPoint presentations should use both visual and verbal forms of presentation; (2) filling the slides with information will easily overload people’s cognitive systems; and (3) the presentations should help learners to select, organize and integrate presented information.

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To the chagrin of some of my more high-minded colleagues, I maintain that we’re all in the sales business, and the sooner we embrace that, the more successful we’ll be.

• Work in PR? You already know you’re in the business of selling ideas.
• Work in public involvement? Well, if your project has a predetermined outcome (“we’re building a freeway, but need to talk to homeowners in the way”), then you already know you’re selling ideas with a little bit of process on the side. But if you’re lucky enough to be doing genuine public involvement rather than the get-out-of-the-way-you-pesky-citizen kind, then what you’re really selling is a context, a process and trust in that process.
• In the planning or A/E fields? I’ve already talked about what you’re selling (hint: It’s not always what you think), but it’s worth repeating.
• Work in the public sector? You’re selling projects, processes, or both.

Having laid out my thesis, here’s a round-up of sales-related links useful no matter which of those categories you fall into.

Read more …

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Phil Wendley points out that the State of Utah has an RSS feed on its purchasing page — a perfect way to track RFPs (Requests for Proposals to all you non-business development types out there).

This is smart, smart, smart — and great news for everyone up and down the public-sector purchasing chain:

• Public agencies are regularly trying to get RFPs out to a large pool of potential bidders. RSS helps because now bidders don’t have to come to the Web site; the information comes to them.
• Potential bidders can more easily track potential opportunities. Up until now, you either had a staff of people tracking this, or you paid services like Onvia upwards of $3,500 per year to help deliver leads to your door.

Memo to Onvia: Make RSS part of your service offering because it’s likely easier to manage and less resource intensive than the daily e-mail you do now.

Memo to Google: You already spider most of the purchasing-related pages on public-sector web sites. Figure out a way to sell this data as an RSS feed to people who don’t have time to crawl through 1,000 hits returned from a Web search. Give Onvia some competition!

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I work with a lot of consulting engineers and planners, and I’m consistently impressed with two things:

• How genuine they are in their desire to do good work in the face of project, client and internal challenges; and
• How perfectly awful most are at explaining the importance of their work.

As you might imagine, this hurts a lot of engineering firms when they’re out pitching new business.

The University of Newcastle Upon Tyne (don’t you just love British place names?) has this helpful collection of presentation tutorials for engineers. Some good (albeit largely tactical) stuff worth reading. Not an engineer? Give presentations? Read it anyway.

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