Public Speaking Meets Network Marketing
INTERVIEW WITH BILL GOVE AND STEVE SIEBOLD
By Uma Outka
Public speaking as a profession has a history even longer than Network Marketing's, and the two worlds have always frequently crossed paths. Many professional speakers have noticed Networkers' rare affinity for personal development, and it's no surprise that they'd find such a dedicated audience to be a delight. It was with interest, then, that I heard of speaker Bill Gove's unique spin on Network Marketing -- where most speakers may recognize that Network Marketing has something to offer them in the form of an audience, Bill and his partner Steve Siebold point out that professional speaking has something to offer Networking. They assert that the skills one develops as a professional speaker can propel Networkers to greater success quicker -- and they're not just referring to the ability to present on stage. Always eager to learn and improve, Networkers are listening -- and seeing results....
-- Uma Outka
Bill, you've been a professional speaker for such a long time, tell us about speaking as a business.
BG: I started out with the 3M company speaking in a public relations capacity. In 1947, I went out on my own -- I figure that I've made about 5,000 talks over 53 years. Essentially, I've been in the training business. We didn't have the best training at 3M, but we were among the best -- right up there with Procter and Gamble and GE, and, later on, IBM. We had a good training department. Before our men went out to talk to the trade, I would say they were pretty well trained. So, I've spent my life doing it, as well as a certain amount of coaching. Mostly I speak about sales and management, but I never did like the title "public speaker." I wanted to be known as a storyteller. Hopefully, I've always included enough content to make it worth my audience's time. I've told a lot of stories, and I have a reputation for building vignettes . . . I've developed a wide repertoire of experiences.
How did the two of you come to meet and work together?
SS: I was a professional tennis player and started a seminar business based on mental toughness training -- had pretty good success with it and built a national company in about four years. As it grew, I was getting called on to do more speaking -- keynote kinds of speaking, dinners and lun 242j94c ches, that kind of thing -- so I set about finding the top speech coach in the world. I asked members of the National Speakers Association for their recommendations and they all said the same guy: Bill Gove. I found Bill and attended his workshop. We hit it off and became partners -- that was about four years ago.
When did you come across Network Marketing? When did Network Marketing come up on your radar?
BG: Over the years, I can remember having calls from many people wanting me to join, but I wasn't sold on Network Marketing as I am now. I know the expression has been used before, but I think it's the wave of the future. It's the way to go. I've met some impressive, high-quality people in this industry, which I learned about sort of piecemeal -- in part through my friend Bob Proctor, who is a speaker and great proponent of Network Marketing, and through Randy Gage, who I became friends with when he was president of a club I belong to, Florida Speakers.
Did Bill tell you about Network Marketing, Steve?
SS: No, I had been in Network Marketing in college in the early Eighties -- I had a great experience, did great with it, loved it. It taught me a lot. It might have been a better education than what I learned in college, to be quite honest with you. Real-world learning.
BG: It all happened when Bob Proctor
recommended me to a prominent Network Marketing company, and I spoke before
nine or ten thousand people at a company-wide event in
What's different about working with a Network Marketing company compared with a traditional corporate company?
SS: The biggest difference is also the reason we like to work with Network Marketers so much more -- Networkers want to be there. They want the training; they want to learn. Even in the biggest corporations, employees are often paid to be there, and that's why they're in the audience. Network Marketers are paying for their own tickets and buying their own tapes and books. They're studying and they're entrepreneurial, whereas a lot of the corporate people just want to get out of the corporation for a few days. I think Larry Wilson, one of our partners, may have said it best when he said, "I spent my whole career, 40 years, building the second-largest training company in the world, Wilson Learning. I've trained the biggest companies and executives in the world, but I've spent 40 years convincing them that personal development was the way to increase the bottom line in a company. Network Marketers, you don't have to convince them; they already know it."
So it creates a different environment within the training?
BG: Oh yeah, it's a different environment -- for instance, in the boss/subordinate relationship, particularly in tight, well-structured companies, you get the feeling that somebody is always looking over your shoulder. With Network Marketing, you're in business for yourself, ostensibly: "I'm an independent distributor." Networkers act like they won't stand any pushing around. Am I right, Steve?
SS: Definitely. And that makes them better audience members and better students, I think. They want to be there; they're the boss.
What are the main things that speaking expertise has to offer Networkers?
SS: The biggest thing overall is confidence, without a question. If you think about it, if you're not afraid to present, and you have skills, and you're not afraid to go up in front of 50 people or 100 people or 1,000 people even, then why would you ever be afraid to talk to one person on the phone or face-to-face? It takes away your fear because it builds up your confidence in your ability to communicate a message. I call that the general benefit of speaking.
The specific benefit is that speaking is all about one thing: connecting with an audience. It's about establishing connection, and that's really what Bill's taught the greatest speakers of the last 50 years or so to do. We bring that into the speech workshop for Network Marketing, so they can learn, as Bill has said, not to be public speakers, but to be storytellers -- to tell personal stories about their experiences. This is what Bill has spent his entire life doing; he's been one of the greatest speakers of the last 100 years just by telling stories and by connecting with people. Of course, Network Marketing is all about connecting with people, so Networkers will benefit from these skills anytime a relationship has to be built, whether it's with an audience or one-on-one. It's that connection process, and so many Networkers struggle with it.
So you think it can serve Networkers to learn the craft of speaking in public as a topic on its own, unrelated to their prospecting interactions, in order to boost their performance in those settings?
BG: Yes -- we know that picking up the phone and knowing what to say and how to say it is terribly important; it's how you get connection started and keep it going. We teach a lot of that in a three-day workshop. We have people up on their feet, 13 or 14 times, videotape each one, and the transformation from the first time to the last time is pretty dramatic. We know one thing -- the more you do it, the easier it gets.
Can you describe that transformation for us?
BG: Oh, we've had them when instead of starting to speak they started to cry.
SS: And then they want to leave and say, "You can have the money I paid for the workshop! I'm just leaving! I'm outta here!" Once we get them to stay, though, we can't get them to leave the third day.
Sounds a lot like what some new people say when they're quitting Network Marketing. What is that? If the fear is so strong initially that they are ready to give you the money and leave, it must be the same thing they're facing when they pick up the phone. What's going on?
BG: Some people have never encountered rejection in their lives. Imagine a housewife getting on the phone and the first 13 or 14 people hang up on her. Now, she's been using the phone to talk to her neighbors for years and she's never had anybody hang up on her before. It's tough. There are actually simple lessons to be learned, and we want people in our programs not only to hear or read about them, we want them to experience them.
SS: It's about understanding, too. They walk into the speech workshop, let's say, or get started in our Tiger Program [the Call Ten Tiger Program teaches calling strategies -- ed.], and they don't understand the dynamics of how to write a speech, deliver a speech, or see the audience in such a way that they perform at their best. I mean, where do you learn how to write a script in school? At first, they don't know how to do it, but once they understand the process, suddenly the fear is gone. It's like not understanding mathematics: Once you understand that everything progresses in a logical order, then math is very simple. But when you don't and you just look at all these numbers and letters in math, it's very intimidating.
BG: The attitude towards the audience is crucial.
Say more about that....
BG: I used to see the audience as hostile; before I even got started, I was convinced they didn't like me. But eventually I started to see the audience as my very own support system, because I wouldn't be there if they weren't, and they wouldn't be there if I wasn't. To think of a presentation as something that you're doing with the audience rather than against them, that's when the birds begin to sing. This applies in Networking prospecting situations as well. You have to see prospects as partners.
SS: In our Call Ten Tiger Program, we take the skills and techniques from platform speaking and bring them down into phone prospecting. In speaking, for example, you learn to build speeches in modules. You do the same thing to write an effective phone script. People in Networking sometimes don't realize the importance of getting the exact words for connecting with your audience -- whether it's an audience in a room or it's an audience on the other end of the phone. You want to use certain words that elicit emotional contact, emotional connection. You want to connect any way you can.
For phone prospecting, we're trying to help people get appointments; that's our goal. We want to connect with the person that we're calling right away. It's the same thing, basically, with a twist. There are some subtle differences between speaking on a stage and speaking on a phone, but not all that many, surprisingly enough. Once we chose the words and the words are working, then we work on delivery skills, just like we do in the speech workshop.
When you combine a strong delivery with a really strong script, we can predict almost to the number what kind of results you'll get based on the list of people you're calling. One of our participants recently had 20 appointments last week out of 50 calls, and they were cold calls at that. In addition to a script and delivery, this also comes from customizing your list so that it's a group of people with whom you can quickly establish a credibility line.
BG: We found that most phone fear doesn't come from just picking up the phone. It comes from picking up the phone and not knowing what to say if the person on the other end of the phone answers and says, "Hello." There are some very strong psychological leanings toward fear of rejection, but a good, honest script takes away a lot of the fear. If I know what I'm going to say, and I'm not awkward and I'm trained, it makes a substantial difference for both parties involved in the interaction.
At a home presentation in front of a group, Networkers find themselves in a pretty traditional public speaking role. On the phone, though, when it's really one-on-one, it's inevitably going to be conversational....How do you help people develop the flexibility to use speaking skills but still be adaptable to whatever comes from the prospect, not knowing what that may be?
SS: Rule number one is that preaching doesn't help: It builds fear, not connection. It has to be a conversation. Of course, in Network Marketing, there's a tendency towards hype, and the excitement can come off as preachy, even though it's not meant that way. The problem is that prospects often aren't even sure about how to respond, and that doesn't create connection.
BG: One of our strong suggestions is, "Don't be too perfect." The more you do it, the better prepared you are to be flexible. We feel that the value of the speech workshop is in part how much faster people develop the ease they need to be natural and conversational in prospecting or on stage. Even on the phone, most Networkers talk too much, period. The longer you talk, the less success you'll have. We've proven that. We've seen that in our statistics. There's much, much, much more to speaking than just the words you use, and it takes practice.
New people often say that one of the biggest challenges they face is feeling as if they can't be themselves in the business. As soon as they put on their so-called prospecting hat or get into a prospecting situation, they feel like they're being inauthentic. Have you found the confidence people gain through public speaking to make any difference in this area?
SS: Yes, it's what Bill calls the "uncluttering" process. We're trying to remove all the pretension, all the phoniness that a lot of people associate with speaking. We want people to be themselves, but even more importantly, we want them to be their best selves. When you combine that with teaching them skills they've never been taught before, then a new confidence takes over -- they know what they're doing and they know what's going to work. Who they are is extremely attractive to prospects. We've written some fabulous scripts for people and their delivery is so weak it just won't draw the appointments. If I'm confident, that comes across, but if I'm not, that comes across, too. Your prospects are judging you in the first five or six seconds, and if you're not confident, they'll smell your fear and react to it.
BG: And you better believe this is a root cause for attrition. There's all this focus on "You have to make your calls! You have to make your calls!" If people don't know how to do that successfully, it's so unpleasant they want to drop out. But if you know how to make the calls, I assure you, people are predictable in large numbers -- you know when you call a certain number of people and deliver the same script the same way, you're going to get pretty much the same response. It's amazing. In my mind, based on everything that I've done in my life, there's no reason Network Marketing shouldn't be easy.
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