Drywall anchor bolts and word choice
Years ago, when I was a university student in Chicago, I wanted so badly to go to Timisoara, Romania.
It was early in 1990, and a few weeks before, they had shot Nikolae Ceausescu in the head and broadcast his dead body on international TV. And they did it on Christmas Day, to boot!
I figured that if a group of people were that extreme, I wanted to go there and visit them. I wanted to see this for myself.
Back up a second. Each Sunday morning, after breakfast in the university's Woodward Court dining hall, I would sit in the reading room of the Harper Memorial Library, one of my most favorite libraries ever:
On one of those big tables, I would spread the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune newspaper out in front of me. The Trib had a great Travel section, and I would spend hours paging through it, in part to stare dreamily at the discount airfares buried in the back of the section. One of the destinations listed one week was Timisoara. When I saw that ad, I couldn't help but drool at the prospect of going to the place where the uprising had started.
You might be wondering, quite understandably, what this has to do with you. Here is what it has to do with you:
Your customer's decision to hire you happens in their head, not yours, just like my fascination with Timisoara was happening in my head, not on the pages of the Tribune, not on the oak tabletop I was reading on, and certainly not in the Sony factory that made the TV that showed me the hole in Ceausescu's head.
And so the words you use in your sales presentation, or your investor presentation, have to go into your client's head and open up and take life, much like a drywall anchor bolt...
Which brings me to a recent episode of the podcast, where Alper and I discuss the importance of slide summaries, and I mention the metaphor of the drywall anchor bolt. As your presentation gets shorter and shorter (and that's a good thing -- actually, even more than good, it's GREAT, your customers are going to love you for it), it's more and more important that the words that remain are vivid, just dripping with action and imagery, because that's what you'll need in order to get them to take life after your presentation is over.
In fact, that drywall anchor bolt effect is so important that it is one of our "Four Things," the four things you need to do in order to whip your communication into shape.
Knowing which words have this effect, and which ones don't, is very difficult when you are not a native English speaker. It can take years, and you don't have that kind of time. So if you'd like to inject some of this spirit into your communications, drop us a line, we can help you with that!
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