Jack Malcolm

Jack founded Falcon Performance Group in 1996 specifically to combine his complex-sale expertise and his extensive financial background to design and implement complete sales process improvement initiatives at top national and international corporations.

Knowledge and Persuasion

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Posted on 2012-05-18

Last week I went on a little rant against those who tell us that in this Google Age it’s not important to stuff your head with facts. I showed how on having a deep well of knowledge to draw from is so critical for effective thinking. But what about persuasion? Compared to clear thinking and compelling communication, it would seem that having a lot of facts at your command would seem to be relatively less important. In this article, I’d like to show that depth of knowledge is a huge asset for persuasion as well.

Regular readers know that one of my key themes is that content is king. It’s wonderful to have a gift of gab and to know how to pull all the persuasive strings, but without a lot of facts at your immediate command, you can look like a fine pen that is running out of ink.

Unless you make a living as a writer, most of your persuasion is real time, so you’re not going to have time to look up the information you need to support your point. In a dialogue where two...

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Dear Vendor: Thank You for @&!XX Me Off!

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Posted on 2012-05-03

For years, I have habitually purchased office equipment and supplies from Office Depot. Whenever I needed something, rather than comparison-shopping or thinking carefully about my choices, I would automatically get into my car and drive to their nearby store. I also have other purchasing habits as well. You’ve probably figured out by now that I buy lot of books, and my habit is to log on to Amazon, place my order, and either read it immediately on my Kindle or, if I prefer a hard copy, get it within two days with free shipping.

It’s probably the same for you, regardless of the store or the category of goods. Once you get into the habit, you tend to stick to it. And, as Charles Duhigg tells us in his fascinating book, The Power of Habit, forward-thinking businesses invest a lot of research into finding ways to change our habits to their benefit....

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The Art of the Sale

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Posted on 2012-04-30

When I first learned about The Art of the Sale last Friday, I knew I had to read it. I downloaded it immediately to my Kindle and finished it on Saturday morning somewhere between California and Florida. It’s that good.

There are three key messages in this book:

The overlooked importance of selling in business and life

The book is useful for sales professionals and non-salespeople alike. I wish everyone in business who is not in sales would read this book, because it explains why nothing in business would happen without the...

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Selling to the Amoeba Brain?

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Posted on 2012-04-25

I bet you never thought you would learn about one-celled organisms in a blog about persuasion, but bear with me for a few paragraphs because I want to make an important point.

It’s been quite the fashion over the past few years in sales and persuasion circles to focus on our three brains: the reptilian brain, the rat brain, and the human brain. The idea is pretty simple: our human brains have evolved over eons in a different environment than our modern world; since evolution by definition proceeds from what went before, as our newer brain structures and functions evolved, the old structures remain and continue to be quite active. It’s kind of like the separation of powers in the Federal government: all three branches get involved in the process. So, if you want to persuade someone, you have to appeal to the simpler brains as well as to our logical faculties.

That may be true, but why stop at the reptile brain? If we trace our ancestry even further, we all evolved from...

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Charisma Is A Trainable Skill

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Posted on 2012-04-19

We all admire and envy those individuals that have it: the ability to walk into a room and captivate the attention of everyone. Imagine how much easier your life and your work would be if you had that natural quality. Everyone would want to be around you, would hang on every word that comes out of your mouth, and would want to do what you want.

In The Charisma Myth, Olivia Fox Cabane makes a convincing argument that you can have that ability, because charisma is the product of a certain mindset and behaviors that are trainable. In short, if you read this book, and practice and apply its techniques, you too can be the lightbulb instead of one of the moths.

When you come across a book like this, you may be reminded of the old ads in comic books when you were a kid, that promised to turn you from a 98-pound weakling...

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Stories that Sell, Part 2: How to Tell Them

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Posted on 2012-04-05

As we saw in Part 1, stories can be a powerful way to sell products or ideas. In this post, we will look at five suggestions to choose, craft and tell your stories for maximum persuasive effectiveness.

Bring out the conflict

Screenwriter Robert McKee, interviewed in the Harvard Business Review, said, “Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes.” He goes on to say that all great story tellers “dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective expectation and cruel reality.”[1]

Stories are such a natural fit with solution selling because they share the same aim. They both begin with a situation and then introduce some gap, or conflict that introduces tension or conflict. They then ratchet up the tension enough so that the listener is more than...

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Stories that Sell: Part 1

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Posted on 2012-04-03

When I was a banker, we faced a problem in our branches. Hoping to boost fee income, our leadership was pressing us hard to sell credit life insurance on our consumer loans, but nothing we could do or say to our loan officers seemed to make a difference. The problem seemed to be that the loan officers, knowing how expensive it was compared to ordinary life insurance, were reluctant to even bring it up with the customer. As we investigated and pondered what to do, we noticed that Rosa in our Kendall branch sold credit life on almost all of her loans, so we asked her how she did it. She told us that she had had a close friend whose husband had passed away, and in addition to her tragedy she had to deal with collectors and eventual loss of her vehicle because she could not keep up the payments.

This story inspired Rosa to believe in the product, and she passed her belief on to her customers as she repeated it to them. After Rosa told her story at a loan officers meeting, credit...

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Practicing and Delivering the Team Presentation

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Posted on 2012-04-01

The parts fit together, but will it fly?

In Part 2 of this series we compared planning for a team presentation to the way that aircraft manufacturers put together an aircraft from its major subassemblies. But even when everything fits together just right, when Boeing put together the first 787, they didn’t assume their computerized plans were perfect. They had to test fly the aircraft before they could put passengers on it. You should treat an important team presentation with equal care.

Practice is even more critical to a team presentation’s success...

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Effective Team Presentations

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Posted on 2012-03-28

Most sales presentation training, including my own, focuses on individual presentations. Yet that has to change, because in all the research I’ve done for my forthcoming book on strategic sales presentations, I’ve found very little written about how to effectively plan, practice and deliver a team presentation. Unlike a group presentation, which is merely individual presentations strung together, a true team presentation is seamless and synergistic.

Part 1: Team Presentations Are the New Normal

The reality of strategic B2B sales is that they usually involve teams. This is a fact that has clearly emerged from my interviews with top executives in researching for my book. Everyone I spoke to said that the majority of presentations they attend at their level are conducted by more than one person, and some said all of them are.

It makes perfect sense, because strategic sales presentations nowadays are almost by definition going to be team...

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Part 2: Planning the Team Presentation

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Posted on 2012-03-28

In Part 1 of this series we saw how important team presentations are for today’s B2B complex sales. In this part we look at how to plan the team presentation so that it is more than just a collection of mismatched parts bolted together.

The first thing to remember is that you are planning a team presentation, not a group presentation. Any collection of individuals can form a group at a moment’s notice, but it takes time and care to mold a team. They call it teamwork for a reason. That’s why there is a big difference between a group presentation and a team presentation.

A group presentation is a series of individual presentations that might or might not have a strong connection with each other. Each one could probably stand on its own. A team presentation, by contrast, is a single presentation with several participants. This is a critical difference, because it changes how...

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