Let’em Sniff

If you want to sell your idea, you have to let people sniff it. it is similar to the nice ladies standing in the food court of a shopping mall offering you samples of their wonderful teriyaki chicken or minestrone soup. You are hungry after shopping for a long time with your significant other and you lap up the not-so-good tasting food. Actually, my wife is very good at this. Lot of times when I say I am not hungry or I do not want to eat, she just convinces me to try a little. Well, there I go! She is a good cook and she needed to just give me a taste of the wonderful food I am going to eat, if I choose to .

Selling deas both inside an organization or in the outside world is the same. You need to give it away just enough so that people have a chance to see what a great product/idea they are going to own.

Let

The “Hope” Factor

As an intrapreneur, one of the biggest factors that I have found to win over people’s hearts is hope. Yes, providing hope can be one of the greatest ways to attract people’s attention and cut through the layers of resistance and bureaucracy. As I mentioned previously, I had been invited to a leads meeting (meeting that is attended by all the chip leads, directors and VPs) to give a presentation on the software I developed. I saw that everybody became super excited and provided insights on how much this tool can help our projects. If I should summarize one factor that won their hearts, I would say – “hope that some of the outstanding challenges will be addressed”.

Even when I did the 10 minute presentation to a senior VP over a month back (which resulted in this invitation), I focused specifically on things the tool will help solve. These are not trivial problems, these are the problems that the industry is concerned about. I showed how we are already a step ahead in addressing these challenges. This tool provided the hope that we can be leaders in spearheading this process.

As an intrapreneur it is important to pick problems to solve early in your career. Picking tough problems and solving them is one third of the path. Doing this without making a lot of noise is one third of the path. The last third of the path can only be conquered by knowing how to present/woo. The hope factor helps a great deal in conquering the final frontier. If you think about this early on while you are thinking about the problem to solve, it will also help you pick the problems to solve.

Hope is a magnet

Being ready with TMP (Three minute punch)

My original time slot for demoing the prototype was 20 minutes. I was sure of nailing down the presentation and demo in that time. However, surprise surprise! I got 10 minutes at the end.

Elevator pitches are common in the entrepreneurship community. This is one thing every entrepreneur is advised to practice. The idea is to impress the listener in about 30 seconds.

While it is not required to be that strict here, I think every presentation (to decision makers) must start with an elevator pitch of 3 minutes. In this three minutes, you should awe them with your talk and then demonstrate your prototype or product idea or beta versions…This I call TMP (Three minute punch)

When you get to talk to the VPs or on their schedule, firstly it means that your work is big and sexy enough to warrant their time. Now this itself puts you in a dominant position. Your TMP can take advantage of this fact and start with the most bold opening statement you can make!

Consider the following statement:

“Thanks for your time. Today, I am going to show you how we have solved the _foo_bar_ problem everybody in our organization is talking about. Not only have we solved it, but we have reduced it to practice and created methodologies for everybody to adopt this in their projects”.

The above is one of the boldest statements you can make. The more everyone in your organization is scratching their heads over the _foo_bar_ problem, the more powerful the above statement is going to be for you. This will make your audience (in this case, upper management) open their ears, lean forward, stop checking email and pay attention to you.

Your TMP does not need to contain background of the problem. Everybody knows it and hence, you can skip it. If nobody knows about this problem, you are not even going to be there presenting before your VP. Instead, build it up…restate the biggest challenges and emphasize that you have solved them. This creates a curiosity or the “how factor”. Then give a demo. This nails down your point.

This is just one way..There might be several others. I would love to hear them from you.

Spread the word around…

:: :: :: :: :: :: ::

:: :: :: ::