Q & A: Uncovering the hidden agenda
According to Kevin Allen, we pitch business ideas every day. But how do we ensure our pitches will be successful? Allen’s forthcoming book, The Hidden Agenda, teaches readers how to connect to their audience on an emotional level in order to win pitches. Entrepreneurial spoke with Allen about how to find and connect to what he calls the hidden agenda.
You write in your book that each of us makes a pitch every day. What do you mean by that?
Whether you’re trying to get a group of people to follow you for the first time who you’ve hired or you’re running a small company, at the end of the day there’s an organization you’re trying to reach and connect with. In business (that’s) an audience that you’re trying to get to do what you want them to do and to buy your product. So the notion of pitching, that is reaching someone and connecting with them so they will follow you is a universal thing in business we do each and every day.
What do you mean by the title of your book, Hidden Agenda?
Over the years of pitching, I realized that behind every decision is an emotional desire. People don’t buy with their heads, they buy with their hearts.
While everyone was listening for the functional stuff (in meetings), my antenna would go up and I would say I think this person is nervous or this person has an ambition. If I could connect with that in the form of what makes me special or what I believe or maybe establishing a shared ambition, I’ll connect with them and they’ll believe in my business. Once I started to codify this and use this as a process, we won much of the time.
First, it’s putting yourself in a relationship of empathy with your prospect to understand what keeps them up at night, what they aspire to, what they believe in. But that’s only half the job. The other half is reaching inside yourself, your core, to see what makes me special? Or what is it I believe or what ambition do I have? Often connecting to that hidden agenda is the magic.
Author self publishes aromatherapy-scented children’s books
The idea for a children’s aromatherapy-scented book about a rescue dog came to Margaret Hyde in a dream.
“I woke up with the idea for it in the middle of the night, four years ago,” said Hyde, author of the Mo’s Nose book series. “I got up, wrote the idea and wrote the first version of the first story. I even saw it illustrated in Japanese ink brush in my dream.”
The dog in Hyde’s dream belonged to her best friend Amanda Giacomini, whom she asked to illustrate the first book, “Mo Smells Red”. Giacomini didn’t know how to use Japanese ink brush, but learned the skill for the books.
Most of the six books focus on the special dog using his nose to see a color. In the latest installment, “Mo Smells Pink”, Mo smells things such as pink grapefruit bubble bath and pink peppermint ice cream.
Hyde, 37, grew up loving scratch-and-sniff stickers and scented markers, so she always wanted the Mo’s Nose books to be scented. She also wanted to use scents that were safe and hypoallergenic for kids, so she decided on aromatherapy essential oils.
“Aromatherapy has benefits that have been known many, many years,” said Hyde. “We tried to choose scents that are soothing.”
One of the other elements you probably need to consider is the difference between a conversation with one or two people and talking to an audience. It’s hard to judge what a large group is thinking because we tend to think blank faces are judging us. Blank faces in groups are normal.
So reaching a group can be hard unless we understand what is going on.
We, as speakers, still tend to look for approval because we are still using normal conversational skills in front of a group. But on the whole we don’t get approval signs when we speak. So you might be thinking that you know their hidden agenda (they think you are boring) when you are interpreting the wrong signals. They are just listening. We need to re-think the audience and need to re-think how we are in front of an audience. It’s a fundamental of public speaking that tends to get missed. It seems to catch a lot of people out and during my courses you see the a-ha moment when we explore this point. So to be in front and to have trust in yourself learn how to be ease with blank faces – then you can probably see their agendas better.
John Dawson, Bath UK