No doubt about it, AI has rocked the presentation world. You can use it to crank out slides, and entire scripts, in seconds.
But AI gives you the average of the internet. And in a sales situation, the average is rejection.
Which means that if you go into that meeting with an AI-derived pitch, you will go down fast and hard, and the one who wins will be the one who took the time to understand, and therefore be able to speak to, the customer.
Which is why our company is called “Recipient Labs” and our logo is a microscope. Because our job is to understand the room you will be walking into so well that you can’t help but win the business while someone ELSE goes down fast and hard.
Here’s what’s going on: You know the bridge to the future is safe. After all, you’ve done this a million times.
Your prospect, however, sees risk. And humans hate risk, almost more than anything else.
So your proposals don’t get approved.
Fortunately, you are not doomed. There are tools you can use. One of those tools is your POV and story, and you need to be telling them. Right there in your website and your proposals and your presentations and yes, your public speaking.
That’s where we come in. Whether it’s by teaching you how to do it yourself, or teaching your team how to do it, the goal is to make your prospect see you as a better bet than where they are now.
Your POV, and your story, and your telling of them, infuse your prospects’ brains with the trust hormones that make them move forward with you. Get someone to help you pull that POV and story out and figure out how to make them work for you.
And believe us, because lord knows we’ve tried, AI’s not going to show you how to do this.
Why do you do it?
Because your board told you that if you do not start selling your ideas, they will fire you, and that job is how you pay for the roof over your spouse’s head, and the food on your table, and the clothes on your children’s backs.
It’s a dead f***ing serious existential issue for you.
Who will you be working with?
You’ll be working with me, Matt Krause. I am an American from California.
I came to Istanbul in 2003. Having spent the 10 years before that sourcing goods from China and importing them into the US, I naturally gravitated to international trade on coming to Turkey.
In 2007, I founded the first Toastmasters club in Istanbul to help a friend with her public speaking skills. I’ve written three books (“Heathen Pilgrim” about my walk across Turkey, “A Tight Wide-open Space” about moving to Turkey, and “Soapbox” a collection of opinions and comments about stuff).
If you want to find out more about me, there’s always the About page of this website, my personal website, or my LinkedIn profile.
What we do:
Speaking training and practice
If you want to sell an idea, you need to up your game presentation-wise. That means improving your speaking skills.
The four key components for that are business storytelling, filler-word reduction, speech practice, and a vocabulary upgrade.
We use a mixture of one-to-one and internal group classes to get you and your team up to speed fast.
Sales collateral rewrites
Selling premium services requires your customer to trust that you are the right person to take them into the future. And there are specific ways for you to encourage that feeling.
We redesign and rewrite your sales materials so you leverage your ability to show your customers their new world and maximize the trust they have in you to get them there.
International Business Development Director
Sometimes you want someone to take the lead on developing the international side of your business.
Use us for financing activities, investor meetings, and customer-facing presentations and communications.
Puke, Clean, Coach:
By far our most popular service is the speaking bootcamp and its “puke clean coach” method. If you want to grow your business, there is no surer way than this.
How do you know when you need this?
- Have you hit a crossroads and you aren’t sure what’s next?
- Are you not sure what makes you different?
- Do you feel like you have a confused offer / messaging / brand?
- Do you feel like your customers don’t care?
- Do you feel like your team is uninspired?
Or maybe you are simply a leader who is starting to realise that mediocre competence isn’t going to cut it in the next few years.
Who hires us and why:
- A Dutch civil engineering firm that is pitching a commercial development project in Riyadh.
- A Turkish software startup that wants to grow its sales in Europe.
- A British cloud storage company that wants its CTO to present better to the board.
- An Italian steel manufacturer that wants to increase its credit line with a German bank.
- An American e-commerce company that wants its software engineers in India to communicate better with warehouse managers in California.
Basically, it doesn’t matter whether your industry is software, electricity, construction, or something else. If you pitch X to Y, we’re the ones who help.
Companies we have worked for:
Note: Since discretion is paramount to us, you will find no testimonials on this site, and there are no samples of our work. Sorry, this logo wall is as far as we go. For confidentiality reasons, Matt won’t even tell his own mom the names of the people he works with, and he changes pronouns and other identifying markers for his clients often. For example, that “Dutch civil engineering firm” mentioned above wasn’t actually in The Netherlands, and the “Riyadh” project wasn’t actually in Riyadh, it was in another Middle Eastern city.
If you would like to see samples of our writing, consider subscribing to the email list below, or reading recent issues of the newsletter. There are also over a hundred podcast episodes, and there are over a hundred videos of Matt on this site alone, along with three books and hundreds of blog posts. And if you’re a LinkedIn person, there is more on his profile there.
What makes for a successful client?
- A history of serial problem solving.
- A frustration coming from one of life’s slaps in the face.
- The fear of god (an external force that makes them want to solve the problem that #2 brought to the forefront).
Look inside yourself and get in touch with these three traits in you. You’ll get a lot more out of it if you keep them close at hand!
If you want to hear more on that subject, listen to this podcast episode:
Why the focus on engineering-heavy industries like software?
Engineers often think their product’s feature set is going to sell itself, and then they wonder why the incumbent with a lesser feature set is kicking their butts.
Also, engineers have a special need when they are talking to others: They are technical people speaking to non-technical people. Getting those non-technical people to buy in is much easier if the engineers “talk to the dog” — speak in the language of the audience, not in the language of engineers.
Engineers are also one of the most globally-mobile groups. They tend to be produced, disproportionately, by middle-income countries, and then be sought after around the world.
How do I know if my engineers need communications assistance?
Your engineers might need communications assistance if you experience one or more of these situations:
- Your RFPs are getting turned down late in the game.
- You would like your engineers to represent the organization in public.
- Other departments groan when they hear the engineers will be presenting.
- You feel like the engineering voice is being drowned out in board meetings.
- You are trying to raise money, and an engineer is part of the pitch.