#350 How To Sell Like Steve Jobs

**David Senra** (0:00)
The book that I want to talk to you about today is The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience, and it was written by Carmine Gallo. So a friend of mine founded a company, and he raised money from some of the best venture capital firms in the world. And he sent me this book, because he says that they told him, his investors told him that he should read this book before his next round of fundraising, and apparently they give this advice to other founders in their portfolio as well. This book makes the case that Steve Jobs was the greatest business storyteller of our time. And so I think the ideas in this book are really important because essentially if you read the book, it tells you how to sell like Steve Jobs. And since business is sales, I want to dedicate an entire episode to going over some of his ideas. Because think about it, you're selling when you pitch an idea, you're selling when you talk to customers, you're selling when you're trying to recruit people to come work for you, you're selling when you try to raise money for your business. And I think when you study the life and career of Steve Jobs, it's very obvious that he believed all these things. That's why he spends so much time and effort learning how to sell. In fact, in this book, he said that he considered his keynote presentations competitive weapon. And he considered a competitive weapon for Apple.
There's a great quote in the book about why this is so important. And it says, a person can have the greatest idea in the world, but if that person can't convince enough other people, it doesn't matter.
And so what I did is I took the ideas in this book and I organized them in the way that the book recommends. So there's three things that I'm going to talk to you about today. One, what are you really selling? Two, how Steve Jobs made his presentations. And three, the importance of developing a messianic sense of purpose.
And so I want to start with what are you really selling? Because I really do believe this is the most important part of the entire book. So if you would ask Steve Jobs, he wouldn't say, oh, like, what do you do for a living? Oh, I sell computers. No, he would say that he sells tools that unleash human potential, tools that change the way that you work and that change the way that you play. And so there's a quote Steve Jobs said in 1997, that he says, you gotta start with the customer experience and work back towards the technology, not the other way around. He did this when he sold too. The number one question that you have to answer, the one question that matters the most is why should I care? Why should the customer care? And if you go back and watch, and you can also read his presentations in this book, you see that he started with the customer experience and then worked back towards the technology. So I wanna go over his 1998 iMac presentation.
So he starts out by saying, we made this computer, this iMac, for the number one reason customers tell us that they want a computer, to get on the internet simply and fast.
He starts with the improvement that his product makes before he even introduces his product. He says, we went out and looked at all the other products out there. We noticed some things about them pretty much universally. They are all using last year's processor.
Secondly, they all have pretty crummy displays on them.
These things are ugly.
What that means is they have lower performance and they are harder to use. So what he just did there, that is called drawing a verbal roadmap for your audience. I'll go into more detail in section number two on actually how he does this. But if you look at what just happened, he starts with the problem. It's 1998 You want to get on this new thing called the internet. You want a simple and fast way to do so.
The problem is all the products, all the other computers out there, they're complex, slow and ugly. And he uses very simple words, words that are unusual, which we'll talk about more in a little bit. Crummy. That is a simple but unusual word, especially in a business presentation. And then he didn't say ugly. He said ugly. And then after those two sentences, he tells you what that means. What that means is they have lower performance and they are harder to use. That is drawing a verbal roadmap for his audience. And then he goes into the solution to that problem. The solution is the product that he made. So let me tell you about iMac. The new iMac is fast. It screams. So when I got to this part, no, I left myself. Do you think any of Steve Jobs' competitors describe the speed of their products with that same phrase?