Newsletter

I have a number of clients in the consulting business, and many members of this email list are consultants. This one goes out to them… Some outside the industry say consulting is all about the collection and presentation of data. However, the real business of...

This subject line is, of course, a reference to the scene in the movie The Matrix where Neo visits the Oracle's house and the weird bald kid tells him how to bend the spoon. (As you can tell, I am a huge fan of The Matrix, and in fact have, for over three years, been...

ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) will get you 90% of the way there. Which means if you are using ChatGPT to write your sales materials, you will convert about 10% of the time, which in B2B leads to bankruptcy. If you are a going concern, you will usually convert 20% to 25%...

When I was walking across Turkey, my life depended on strangers in ways it hadn't before. One of the things I did to size up the people around me was to spell each person’s name out loud and make lots of mistakes in the process. There were a couple reasons this was a...

When I was a kid, about 5 years old, my mom used to take my brother and me to the McDonald's. At that point, we lived in Oakland, California, just a few miles across the bay from downtown San Francisco. The three of us would get on the subway, ride it across the bay...

As many of you know, I am a huge fan of Rory Sutherland. Not only is he very thought-provoking, he is quite funny -- in fact, given the opportunity to watch a professional comedian or Rory Sutherland, I'll choose Rory Sutherland every time. If you are a reader, he has...

(NOTE: there are some of you who forward these emails to your kids; you might want to think twice about doing that this time; I try to keep it family-friendly, but every family has different standards about what is and what is not acceptable) Many years ago, I had a...

I got so angry at that book that I threw it across the room. Multiple times. And at over 700 pages, it was a big book, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t throwing it at a window or at anything else breakable. The book was Naomi Klein’s 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine.” Why...

I talk often about the need to put some of yourself into your stories. Today I’m going to beat on that drum again, but perhaps from a slightly different angle… Not putting yourself into your stories commodifies your business and raises your cost of sale. Remember,...

I've written many times encouraging you to put personal details into your speeches and presentations. Why is that? The people you are doing business with want to see how you interact with the world. That's just what humans do. Even in the most rational of B2B...

In a new episode of the podcast, Alper and I riff on building trust, one of the common themes we heard recent guests touching on. We mentioned things like borrowing trust from the audience’s parents, putting yourself into your stories, etc. Also, Alper discusses an...

I usually try to stay away from politics in this newsletter. After all, most of you are here for presentation tips, and some dude spouting off about politics probably isn't what you signed up for. And like they say, "opinions are like a**holes -- everyone has one and...

By far the single most common problem I see with case studies is what I call the "Wall Of Context." The Wall Of Context obstructs your connection with your potential client and reduces your case study's effectiveness as a sales tool. You know the Wall Of Context: It's...

The other day, recent podcast guest and list member Wes Wheless (hi Wes!) challenged those of us on his own email list to represent an idea visually. I accepted the challenge, and figured I would try to visually represent that moment my friend Jeff buttressed my faith...

Observation #1: Rory Sutherland has a great line, to the effect that half of the people around you simply don't know what you do. (By the way, as many of you know, I'm a huge Rory Sutherland fan. I've read his book "Alchemy," I binge-watch interviews with him on...

I talk a lot about how we are often wrong, no matter how thorough we are trying to be, and how that means we just have to throw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. In other words, have a Plan A, a Plan B, a Plan C, etc, and try them out...

For years, I've seen quite a few salespeople, people who should know better, making a mistake, and that is thinking that in a B2B sale, there's one decision-maker, and the higher the better. What I mean by that is that they know there are others involved, but they...

In that recent LinkedIn Live I did with Rick and Jennifer from Sales Force Europe, I went into one of my favorite story structures, and how would it be used in sales. You probably all know the structure, since I talk about it all the time: BMG (Boy Meets Girl)....

In business life, we adults like to think we can predict the world better than we actually can. This means we often spend years pursuing "A," when "A" is going to be a total failure, while "B," which takes a mere fraction of the time, is what will end up being...

One of the most common questions I get about presenting is: "I'm nervous, how do I get over it?" And my answer is: "Sorry man, you're never going to get over it." I know, it's not the answer anyone wants to hear. But I'm not very good at blowing smoke up someone's...

The other day, Alper and I recorded a podcast episode with Wes Wheless. (Wes is on this email list, so if you are seeing this email Wes, hello!) Wes and I do very similar things in our work, so it was a pleasure to talk to someone of a like mind and see how they do...

As many of you know, I walked across Turkey (click here if you want to see a map and photos). At one point I was passing through a small town, and the group I had befriended suggested I have a drink with "Başkan." "Başkan" is "Mayor" in Turkish, so I was quite...

Some years ago, before we got married, I heard my wife call her cat "Anneciğim" ("mommy"). This was before I learned that it's quite common for Turkish mothers to call their infant sons and daughters "Anneciğim," so I said, in that tentative and careful way you speak...

I've written before about the importance of constraints in bringing out your creativity. A lot of people mistakenly seem to think that creativity comes from the removal of constraints. But if you want creativity, put the project under such tight constraints that...

Back in May 2023, Alper and I had our first guest on the podcast, Tom Tran. That was two years ago. I don't think Tom realizes how big a deal he was, but having guests was a key part of our podcast still going strong two years later. You see, when Tom came on, Alper...

Years ago, a girlfriend of mine in Seattle joined a climbing gym. One day, she was talking to some of the teens in the gym. (By the way, I was never much for talking to teens, even when I was one, so she was doing me an immense service in picking up the slack in that...

A couple days ago, I wrote about AI and my world. Today I'm going to branch out a bit beyond little ol' me… A lot of people these days are afraid of AI. Is it going to make us humans obsolete? When I say there's not much to be afraid of, I tend to get pushback in two...

My business, as most of you know, is using storytelling to bump conversion rates. A lot of people lump that in with content creation. And when you think of the phrase "content creation" these days, the topic "effect of AI" is a mere half-step away. ("Content...

My podcast co-host Alper and I are both huge fans of Blair Enns. Have been for over 10 years. For those of you not familiar with the name, Blair Enns is all about the selling of creative services. Recently, Blair Enns released a new book and is doing a series of...

Today’s email has absolutely nothing to do with presentation tips. If you’re here for presentation tips, sorry, come back next time. As the kids say these days, I’m just putting this out there in case anyone needs to see it (plus there’s kinda-sorta a life lesson in...

A few days ago I interviewed an old friend of mine, Baldwin Berges, for The White Rabbit podcast. Baldwin and I did a short-lived podcast on investment fund management about 10 years ago, and then Alper and I called on him for some key "behind the scenes" advice we...

For years I've been saying, "There are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and there are the realities of our lives, and the two are almost never the same." However, all this time, I conveniently managed to not apply this tidbit of wisdom to myself. Then...

In my early 20s, I got really lucky. After graduation from university, I went to live and work in China for a year. Shortly after I came back, I got a job where, right from the very first morning, I learned a ton of very useful stuff they never teach you in college....

A great example of a time shift phrase at work is this pitch from Mad Men (I've linked to this pitch scene many times, so you've probably seen it): The pitch starts with: "My first job…" Remember, starting your pitch with a time shift phrase is a subtle but potent way...

Other things that juice the oxytocin: Location shift phrases: "A customer in Manchester…" "A friend in Frankfurt…" Remember how stories often start out: "Once upon a time, in a land far, far away…" We've been trained since childhood to respond to phrases like that....

I talk a lot on here about breaking patterns. The other day I broke one of my own patterns, and I didn't even mean to. I was talking to a friend. He said, "People only value what they pay for." "True," I replied. Up until a few days ago, I considered that one of those...

Think of when you were a kid. Who do you trust when you are a kid? Probably your mom and dad. What are your mom and dad often doing? Telling you a story. What do a lot of stories begin with? A time shift phrase. So you see, humans have been trained since birth that...

Remember, oxytocin is the trust hormone. Oxytocin is what gets your customer to step out onto that bridge between "where I am now" and "where I want to be." What gets oxytocin flowing? Stories. I can already hear the collective groan from here. "Stories, ugh. Who has...

For the past few days I've focused on operating within the world of constraints ("The relief of pain," "All I want"), so today I'll move on to something else and discuss one of the crucial drugs that needs to flow through your customer's brain during your pitch (sorry...

The other day, for reasons I can't quite remember, I ended up listening to "All I Want" a million times over. "All I Want" is from The Cure's 1987 album "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me." By the time it put out that album, The Cure had been around a while. "Kiss Me, Kiss...

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine. He had been enduring an extended period of deep pain, and it just kept coming in waves, worse and worse and worse. It was "Job-like," he said. (Job, or "Eyüp" for our Turkish speakers here, is of course the guy God...

When money lands in your bank, like the monthly salary that your employer pays you, you like to think that that money is now yours, right? The payment is final. The money belongs to you, not to the person who gave it to you. Along those lines: In recent years, for...

A few years ago, I served on the board of the US's Presentation Guild. I had 10 years in the industry by then, but serving on the PG board gave me a broader view of the industry than I had had before. And you know what? I had noticed this issue before, but being on...

One of our recent podcast guests, Alex Smith, says the first thing you do, before you make your company and customer stories, is decide, "What is the thing I am trying to change?" If you don't do that first, he says, you are lost and your stories will go over like...

As many of you know, I am on a quest to assign a dollar value to stories. I will not rest until there is a calculation a company can use that says "stories add X to our P&L each year." Why would something like this matter? It helps us make better decisions....

The other day I mentioned I was working on the second most-common mistake my customers make in their sales proposals. One of you emailed me back and said, "Nice, Matt, but what's the first most-common?" The first most-common mistake, by far, hands down, no contest, is...

People ask me a lot, "What does ChatGPT mean for my presentations?" The short answer: Nothing. If you’re a CTO, ChatGPT and AI are helping your coders a lot. They probably save them boatloads of time. They might even be helping clean up their code or even write blocks...

Today's email has absolutely nothing to do with presentations. If you're here for presentation stuff, sorry about that. The next one will have something for you, I promise. If you're still here… In 1992 and 1993 I was teaching English at a university in China. On my...

Yesterday I was sitting in my office, rewriting a sales proposal for a client. Nothing unusual about that. That's what I do for work, so I do it pretty much every day. By the way, when most people hear the word "writing," they think fingers on keyboard, eyes glued to...

In recent weeks I've written about the importance of breaking patterns in your presentation (yuvarlanıp gidiyoruz, clear the cache, etc). I know, I'm a strange person to be giving that advice. Routine and patterns make up a huge part of my day-to-day life. I wake up...

When I was a kid, I heard my mom say to my dad, many times, "Jim, sh*t or get off the pot." I've always loved that phrase, and its bias towards taking action, even if imperfect. I've mentioned before, and I'll say it again: People care way more about whether you have...

As many of you know, I used to be an import buyer, which means that I was flying from Seattle to Hong Kong quite often. I used to love that flight. I hated the return flight, because I knew that when you fly east across the Pacific Ocean, you tend to have huge jet-lag...

For years, I was puzzled by the word strategy. "What is strategy, what does that word even mean?" I figured it was a word people used mainly when they wanted to sound smart. Then, a month or two ago, Alper and I interviewed corporate strategy consultant Alex Smith on...

I've been doing presentation training and public speaking for over 15 years. If I had a dollar for each time I've heard someone say those things make them nervous and they want to learn how to not be nervous, I'd be a very rich man. Of course you're nervous. Humans...

Below is a cut from our blooper reel where I forget the name of my own podcast. My point for your presentations is that you will never be perfect. In this example, even if you've been doing your podcast for three years, you're still going to forget the podcast's name...

I'm currently reading a book, "Alchemy," by Rory Sutherland. Sutherland is Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, one of the biggest advertising agencies in the world. When Coke and Apple choose an advertising agency, Ogilvy is probably on their short lists. Rory Sutherland is...

When I was 28, the company I worked for bought a pepper grinder company. We would buy the raw peppercorns from India and have them shipped to the grinder companies in Thailand and China, where the grinders were made and then filled with the peppercorns. It was the...

I got to visit my first metal stamping and polishing factory at age 26. This one was in China, and there were many more to come, in many other countries, but I'll never forget my first. You see, metal stamping and polishing is an inherently filthy process. I was...

As many of you know, I'm on a quest to quantify the value of a story. I want a financial calculation I can plug into a spreadsheet. I want to take something people consider subjective and turn it into a hard metric. And the question often comes up, from people whom I...

We've talked a bit about the BMG story structure. We've also talked about the drug flow of the BMG cycle, and we've even talked about how tweaking the sentence arrangement of a case study from Finland would improve the drug flow in that particular case study. But it's...

Some of you have asked for me to sketch out what BMG (the story structure boy meets girl) looks like. Here you go: The first leg (boy meets girl) gets the dopamine flowing (you want your customer to get at least somewhat positive vibes from you), the second leg (boy...

One of the deepest needs in man is to make sense of the world, to see order where it may or may not exist. Evidence of this deep-seated need is all around us. You can see it in how we vote. You can see it in how we think about chaos theory. You can even see it in how...

Sorry, no, I'm not talking about the illegal ones, like heroin or cocaine. I'm talking about the ones your body makes naturally, like oxytocin. Oxytocin is often called "the trust hormone." It enhances bonding between people. Your body makes it when you fall in love,...

Fully 70% of the people who call me are chasing the wrong solution. And as a result, they are setting themselves up for misdirecting a huge chunk of time, 10 years, when all they need is 4 months. You see, the problem they are trying to solve is how to make a better...

It's counter-intuitive, but the fastest way to say more is to slow down and say less. Here's what I mean: Recently I was working with a client on her storytelling and public speaking skills. She ran an insurance company, and she felt like her speeches to her employees...

One of the most interesting things I ever learned was that a lot of what we think we're seeing, we're not actually seeing. Turns out the human brain caches an awful lot of information, including information it's getting from the eyes. For example, right now I am...

My friend Şebnem Dağ Güven, Chief Commercial Officer for payments processor iyzico, has her people use an approach similar to what I’ve been using in my trainings for years. Before she lets them build the presentation, she has them walk through what they are going to...

There's a podcast I love listening to, Acquired. We're not talking about a podcast I kind of enjoy, something I turn on for background noise while I cook eggs in the kitchen or fall asleep in bed at night. No, we're talking something like appointment TV. When there's...

There's a guy, I've written about him before, the 85-year-old guy who goes to the park to exercise six days a week. He's been doing it for 30 years. Maybe not at this particular park, because who knows where else he's lived during that time, but exercising, somewhere,...

One of my favorite projects was for a Turkish client who was attending the IMF meetings in Washington, DC. (Most of you will be familiar with the term "IMF," but for those of you who are not, it stands for "International Monetary Fund.") The IMF meetings happen twice...

I used to have an early morning class, and I was usually greeted at the door by my client's assistant, who would arrive at work a few minutes before his boss. He would ask me how I'm doing, and I would sometimes reply "yuvarlanıp gidiyoruz" (we're rolling along). It's...

It is well-documented that sprinkling personal details into your stories works. It works whether you are hanging out with friends over a beer, or whether you are selling a widget to a potential customer. Why is this? Why are personal details such a potent ingredient...

The other day, I wrote about a scene in the show Mad Men. That scene illustrates some really useful presenting skills, so I wanted to call them out here. If you clicked through to the video the other day, you've probably already seen these, but in case not... He...

A couple weeks ago I mentioned a back issue of Scientific American magazine, and how enamored they were of the use of anecdotes. I see this all the time in my own work. If you want to make a point, wrapping your point in an anecdote that makes your point, too, goes...

I've mentioned before that when I was a kid, I was really into bicycle racing. There's a point at the beginning of every race, immediately after the gun goes off, when everyone has a lot of energy. Everyone is sprinting ahead, the pack is going really fast. It's hard...

One of the more embarrassing moments of my life was when I told a story to Maya. Or, more accurately, failed miserably to do so. You see, when I was in university, I was totally hot after Maya. She was beautiful in all the right ways, with just enough of an edge that...

Mike Tyson has a great quote, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." Years ago, long before we started the podcast, Alper and I were talking to Noel Francisco, an old university roommate of mine who has gone on to fame and fortune as one of the top...

When I was 9 years old, my mom took my brother and me to see the new James Bond movie, Moonraker. That was when Roger Moore was James Bond, remember him? Moonraker was my first James Bond movie. The movie had everything a nine-year-old boy could want. Outer space,...

Today we dig further into this "measurements don't need to be exact to be useful" idea. Here we go… At one point I needed a new heater core for my car. The heater core is the little radiator that sits inside your car, behind the dashboard where you can't see it. When...

In my bathroom there is a new sink. That sink is 0.9 meters wide. Or maybe it's 0.89 meters wide, or maybe it's 0.91 meters wide. I don't know and I don't care. If I had been working in a tight space, or if I had had to fit that sink into a cabinet, then the added...

The other day I wrote about learning how to use an ice axe properly, and what it had to do with practicing for your presentations. Today, since we're in winter, the snow theme will continue, but the point changes to understanding your audience. Here we go… One thing I...

This is the main place these emails get written: Sometimes they get written here too: Notice that there is not a keyboard in either of these photos. Writing is not the words you use, it is the idea you are talking about, and the best ideas come when your mind is free...

At one point, I was doing a lot of stuff in the mountains during wintertime. Snowshoeing, backcountry trekking, building snow caves, sleeping on the ice, etc. One of the pieces of equipment I needed with me, just in case, was an ice axe. Ice axes are used for many...

Years ago, a girlfriend and I had a ritual: We would get take-out from the Boston Market restaurant, and then we would take it home and eat dinner while watching a movie we rented from Blockbuster (later, of course, the kids would coin the phrase "Netflix and chill"...

There's a great study from a university in Finland about using storytelling in B2B sales. The study looks at an IoT (internet of things) company that was selling sensors for factory machinery, and it was also selling an upgrade where they would monitor the machines...

The other day a friend sent to me a link to a video on YouTube, "How Anthony Jeselnik misdirects the audience." Anthony Jeselnik is an American comedian. I hadn't heard of him before, so don't worry, if you don't know his name it doesn't mean your knowledge of...

In my quest to put a financial number to the value of storytelling, to hold stories up to an ROI calculation, I often get the pushback that putting a number to the value of storytelling will somehow strip storytelling of its magic, that somehow it will kill the...

I have an elderly black woman who lives inside me. She wears a plain print dress with faded pink flowers and blue-green stems set on a white background. She lives in the state of Georgia or Alabama (I've never tried to figure out which one), speaks with a heavy...

The other day I was re-watching one of my favorite movies, "Not Fade Away." I've probably seen it 9 million times. Some of you know it, too. One of my favorite scenes in the movie comes during one of the band's practices, when the main character, played by John Magaro...

As many of you know, I am on a quest to quantify the value of storytelling. I want to put a number to it. I want a calculation I can put into a spreadsheet. It is not enough to say, "Storytelling is good, we should do more of it." It is not enough to say,...

You know how I bang on on a regular basis about how important mirror neurons are, and how important it is that when you are presenting, you display the emotions you want your audience to feel? Here's a little story related to that: When I was a teenager, I was really...

The other day I was reading a March 1847 issue of Scientific American magazine. Don't worry, I don't normally read 178-year-old Scientific American back issues. I was looking into something else and just so happened to stumble across this one. There was this great...

When I was 29, I was cruising through the streets of Hong Kong in the back of a taxicab with my friend Teresa. It was nighttime, so we were probably heading to dinner somewhere. Her dad had created a business that had become one of our vendors, and she was taking it...

I was watching a TV show recently, Outer Range. It started out so well. Rancher in Wyoming, a "strong but silent" cowboy-type played by Josh Brolin. Loyal wife. Two photogenic kids. Cute grandkid. A couple "hot, but realistically-so" types (one a vaguely-disturbing...

One of my favorite movies is “Cadillac Records.” It’s about the founding of one of the seminal record labels for American Blues. It and the movie “Not Fade Away” are must-sees for anyone interested in the birth of rock. In the the movie, Beyonce plays Etta James. She...

The other day I wrote about chaos theory. Today I'm going to write about a mixed tape a friend recorded for me when I was a kid. And believe it or not, there's a connection. When I was 16, I lived in eastern Washington state and drove my dilapidated Volkswagen back to...

These days, I am reading a book called "Fluke," by Brian Klaas. It's about chaos theory. You know chaos theory: Basically, "butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, and a hurricane hits the United States." A lot of people hear about chaos theory and think, "Boy, that...

Recently I wrote about the genius zone. Remember the genius zone? It's the place where you are doing something almost no one else can. The activity comes to you naturally. You don't even need to think about it. It's like god put the words in your mouth, you are simply...

Today is my birthday. I have never made much of my birthday, even when I was a kid. My birthday comes sandwiched between two of the biggest holidays in the world, and I figured, well, people are exhausted from all the holiday-ing, so I'll just shut up and pretend it's...

An excellent example of the value of storytelling comes from the non-profit world. Yes, the non-profit world. We like to tell ourselves that our world of business is the real hard-nosed one, and non-profits are for fuzzy do-gooders, but the reality is this: Cash...