- Hi everyone. Welcome to episode 10 of my podcast. In addition to making a very important milestone in my podcast series, namely being the 10th installment of my virtual interviews, this episode also signifies a tremendous opportunity for all viewers and listeners to improve an important skill in which we all have deficiencies.

- The skill I'm talking about is being an effective communicator. Almost 10 years ago, a coworker and I attended a two day course called Advanced Messaging Design and Delivery. The company organizing it was called Oratium. After the first day, my coworker looked at me and said, this is the best training I've ever been to. And I believe him wholeheartedly because I came out of the training with a redefined understanding of what messaging, design and delivery should be.

- Fast forward to today, and I'm extremely pleased to announce my guest for this episode. Tim Pollard is the CEO and founder of the company that organized the training. He has worked with countless top executives at some of the largest and most successful companies in the world.

- Today he's joining our podcast to talk about the three ways we are most likely going wrong about our presentations, and he will advise us on how to strike a balance between content and delivery. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tim Pollard to the virtual stage.

- Hi, Tim. How are you?

- I am well, Emil. Good to see you. How are you?

- I'm doing well, thanks. I appreciate you finding time to speak with me. I know it's a very busy time of the year almost, you know, at the end of the year, only a few weeks left of this quarter. So really am happy to have you here tonight. I have so many questions to ask you about presentation styles, effective communication, but I guess one good way to get started is first of all, to draw people's attention to a call to action at the bottom of the screen, letting them know that they can go to Cerebrations.info to find out more about you and Oratium, but also find any other episodes that we have on this podcast. And then to dive directly into the conversation. I know that you've done a lot of studies on effective communication, and there's a lot of talk about how presentations are failing, and even the most impactful leaders in the world are having a hard time with communication. So what's the general state of communication? Where do we start? Like what do you have to say about that?

- I think it's a good question. I think it's not good. I think if you look at data, no matter what type of survey you look at it, it consistently shows that maybe 1/3 of business presentations are ever deemed good or better by people who attend them. Usually, you know, kind of 2/3 are deemed as as sort of mediocre or worse and usually about 20%, really pretty horrible. And given, you know, almost any time we make a presentation, something important is at stake. We're after some important action from our audience. That is a really evident problem. I mean, it is not as if you'd happily, you know, run a company where you were getting safety right one in three times or, you know, accuracy of accounts right one in three times, and yet we seem comfortable to get presentations right no more than one in three times. And so, there is a serious problem there. A lot of it is tied, as you know, to these kind of monster slide decks and a certain amount of behaviors and even laziness that can lead to that. I think the other thing that's really, really interesting is what happened when we moved into a virtual world. I mean, when we moved into a virtual world, the dynamic became so narrow, and if I just draw it for you here, we know the audiences are far more distracted than they've ever been. You know, if you're on a Zoom call or something, you feel this permission just to go and play with the dog or make a cup of coffee or something. And so that really compounds things if your material is not very clear. We know, interestingly enough, that people experience a loss of mental bandwidth. There's actually really, really good science on this that when you are in a long series of Zoom meetings or WebEx meetings, you're focusing really intently. This chemical builds up in the brain called glutamate, and that slows you down cognitively and actually worsens your decision making. And I think the third really interesting thing in the virtual world, when we're in virtual presentations or communications, you experience kind of a loss of feedback or social cues. And again, if I'm making a presentation and I'm trying to get a customer to buy, or my boss to back a project or a budget, I need to know how he or she is responding. I need to be able to, you know, act on their response. Like, if, you know, what is the thing that they're struggling with and deal with that, in sales, you'd call that objection handling. And I really can't do that a lot of the time in a virtual environment. So virtual communication sits at the confluence of these three forces, and they've made a bad situation worse. So, tremendous amount of people we talk to, both executives and often sales professionals are really struggling. I mean, they were only getting it right a third of the time, and the current sort of social environment is actually making it even harder. So I think a lot of people are struggling to communicate effectively right now in a world where people are generally highly polarized, highly sensitized. I saw last night that the chancellor or president, I think it was Purdue University, this is last night I saw on the news, is resigning over a racist comment. And I didn't, I wasn't able to read the full comment. I didn't see any actual intent of racism in there. He said, oh, maybe this is the Asian version of that. But I'm like, my goodness, it did not feel to me like an overtly racist comment. My point being that we're in a society of extraordinary hypersensitivity, and even to some extent polarization. So communication's just getting harder and harder for that reason as well.

- I see. Thank you. So is that the reason why even the most extremely savvy business leaders of the world, the CEOs of the largest corporations out there are having a hard time communicating is, is it a problem for everyone?

- I mean, most leaders rise up to the top of their organization normally on the back of functional excellence. You know, you don't get to be CEO because you are a great communicator. You get to be good CEO because maybe you're a genius financially or operationally. Like, you know, Jack Welsh was at GE. So I don't think all senior executives are automatically outstanding communicators. I think that's why we notice it when it happens. As someone like a Steve Jobs was an extraordinarily good communicator, but he's in a tiny minority, most senior execs when they communicate, communicate very, very poorly. And that actually undermines their leadership. So I think executives do struggle with this. We're working with a few, I think I think of three CEOs we're working with right now. They've gotta deliver difficult messages to their companies, which will be delivered in virtual meetings. And just as we're starting to work with them, you can see just how hard they're finding it. It is not automatically true if you're senior, that you're a good communicator.

- I see. Okay. So then, you know, let's go back into where people make the most mistakes. I watched one of your recent TEDx Talks, and there you spend a lot of time talking about the main ways that people get their presentations wrong. And what I found especially interesting is that you actually compared those to sirens from ancient Greek mythology. And you identified, I believe, three sirens. There was a siren of slides, siren of style, and a siren of success. So I think it's very interesting way of describing the problem, hopefully something that will also be very memorable. So my audience here may actually use it as a way to remember these problems and be aware of those. So if you don't mind, let's go over though these three. So let's start with the first one. Can you please describe the problem with the siren of slides?

- Sure. So the idea of the sirens, well, you know, the ways you got tempted, you know, seduced, lured onto the rocks, lured to your destruction. I think the first way we're often lured to do something really stupid is by being overdependent on PowerPoint or keynote. Now you gotta do a presentation. You just automatically open up PowerPoint and you, you start typing click to add title, click to add bullets. And you are like laying bricks on a house before you've even thought about what the house is gonna look like. And what that will often do is two things. One is it completely bypasses any thinking. So really important questions like, well, who is the audience? What's their composition? What do they really care about? What are the biases, the cognitive biases they're gonna bring into this meeting? Where are they likely to agree with me? Where are they likely to disagree with me? What is the heart of the idea I'm trying to get across? It's really easy to bypass those questions in slide building mode. We just tend to start vomiting and that shows up when these slides are created. The second problem is almost always, this leads to too much information. You've seen, you know, decks like this, you've probably had them inflicted upon you. You've probably inflicted 'em on other people, 50, 60, 70, even a hundred slides, really dense often, I mean, just cognitively overwhelming for the audience or the customer, and completely beyond anyone's ability to comprehend. And that's usually driven by an overdependence on slides, we literally conflate two things. We say that communication equals slides. Well, it doesn't, I almost never use PowerPoint slides. And if I did, my working rule is no more than five slides for every hour you're gonna be presenting or communicating. 'cause the moment you're over that you're gonna become too slide dependent. Most speakers get up, they just start plowing through a slide deck, and that audience is gone in a hot minute. And that's the seduction of being too focused on slides.

- I see. Interesting. I can relate to a lot of these situations that you just described. Most recently we had a strategic offsite where one of my colleagues brought 35 slides, and I joked that that's gonna take the whole day. And there, there we know, four hours later, he was still on slide 32. So I can relate to that. Let's switch to the other siren. Let's talk about the siren of style.

- That's really interesting. This, I think, ties to the way communication's traditionally been taught. Almost everyone watching this is probably at some point in their lives, been to some stupid presentation skills course. And they're told, you know, have great eye contact and body language. I mean, there are courses on power posing, but objectively, nobody ever ultimately evaluates a presentation based on that. You never leave a presentation and go, I didn't like Amelia, you didn't make good eye contact. You leave saying, you know, I didn't understand his argument. He was packing too much in, I got lost in the middle. What we're really actually always doing is critiquing content where we are affected by content, we like or dislike content. It's extraordinarily rare that we're ultimately affected by a presenter's style, but there's a whole industry that's gonna spend most of its time talking about style. And that's the deception because people, honestly, you could leave that training and go, well, if I have great eye contact and great body language, I'm gonna do fine. You're not gonna do fine. You're gonna have the best style in the world that won't even begin, won't even begin to redeem lousy content. Again, if I look at a deck like this, which I would define as really, really awful content, I could present this in the most sparkling, breathtaking way. It's still a horrible presentation and it's still gonna be viewed very badly. So the seduction here is that we believe presentation style matters, really actually does, there are aspects of style that matter and we can talk about that, but it does not trump substance. And the deception is, we don't think enough about substance, which is clearly true 'cause the overwhelming majority of slide decks are an absolute nightmare.

- Interesting. Then I'm actually gonna get back to this topic a little later. I have a question that I specifically wanted to dive a little deeper into, the balance between style and content. But before we go there, I obviously want to cover the three sirens. Just one quick question before that. Why do you think there is a whole whole industry on style and not so much on content? Is it just because it's easier for people to pick on style, like to through their style?

- I have a pretty radical view here. I think the thinking that's been captured by the this industry has been very, very weak. You can find the first reference to kind of eye contact and body language as early as like the 1950s. I could literally go online today and find courses that reflect 1950s thinking. It's also, I think, tied to misunderstanding of data. How often have you ever heard it said that, you know, 80% or 70% of what the audience responds to is your body language and 20% of your words. And then only 10% of what you're saying. That's nonsense. That is a misunderstanding of a 1970s study. And in fact, what that study was looking at was likability, not effectiveness, likability. And so the study was saying there was some correlation between likability and physicality, but that is not the same as saying the audience responds primarily to your, you know, eye contact and body language. It's just complete nonsense. And so I think there's just been a lot of me tooism and bad thinking, you know, somebody with without other job prospects decides to become a presentation skills coach. They buy a couple of books on presentation skills, they find this nonsense and then they just replicate it. We literally have dozens of clients where the communication skills training they had before they brought us in was this complete nonsense that nobody liked. Everyone thought it was stupid, you know, and they left being told, don't jangle your keys in your pockets. I think, I think thinking has been calcified in the communication space. And I think that's why so much of what's done there is so, so utterly worthless.

- Okay, all right. Well let's go back to the sirens. We kind of got distracted a little bit lured away from that, but let's go back to the three sirens we're talking about. So the last one is the siren of success. What about it, can you elaborate on that?

- I think this is the most interesting one. This is the one that nobody thinks about. And it's probably easiest if I draw it. So imagine, just for the sake of simplicity, this is you and you are making a presentation to your boss. Just real simple. And let's say there's this big project you want to get funded. Is that meeting important? Yes. Do you want the meeting to go well? Yes. Is that the most important meeting? No, it's not. Why? Because your boss is not gonna make the decision on his own or on her own. And that decision's certainly not gonna be made then and there, sometime later there's another meeting and it's a meeting you don't get invited to. And this is the meeting where the decision making body, whatever it is, the budget committee, the management committee, the board, the executive committee, whatever you wanna call it, is deciding what projects get funded. And when we understand that this is always true in communication, this is always true in communication. This could be a buyer, this could be a buying group. This could be you are making a grant pitch to a nonprofit. This is the grant approval committee. There's always this subsequent buying or process. And what that means is we start to realize this is the siren of success. We tend to think that success is nailing that meeting, first meeting success, that is flat wrong. Because in fact, success in communication is whether this individual can effectively retell your story later. So in fact, the key word here, I would argue is the most important word in communications. And it is the word retell ability. And so the siren of success says we fixate on the first meeting. So this is classic in sales. You come out of a sales meeting, you're like, yeah, we nailed it. And then two weeks later you get a phone call like, yeah, yeah, you didn't win. You're like, what happened? Well, because what happened is it doesn't matter how well this meeting goes, what matters is how well this meeting goes. And is the message so crisp, so clean, so compelling that this person isn't just motivated, but in fact they're fully able to retell the story. And spoiler alert, it is inconceivable you will get retell ability when you're doing this kind of awful toxic slide driven messaging. This goes in the trash. Someone would never even try to represent something like this. So our argument is you've gotta pivot and you've gotta think about second meeting success. Is your meetings, is your message so good, crisp, clean, powerful that this person can effectively retell the story? You've gotta reorient your definition of success. The other thing that this means is when we build messaging, when we build communication, we all build it with the goal of persuasion, we build in order to persuade. Nothing wrong with that, I'm trying to persuade you, but the other thing we need to do is build not just to persuade, but also to equip. And nobody thinks about that. I could ask a thousand executives, you know, when you're making a pitch to your team to back a project or your boss to support a new initiative, whatever it is, do you build a message to try and persuade them? They'll say yes, but if I said, do you build a message to equip them for this subsequent meeting, they'll say, I never even thought about that. So this I think is the most interesting of the three seductions, we're seduced into thinking that this is success. But in fact, when it comes to communication, this is success.

- This is very interesting actually. When I watched your TED Talk, that also caught my attention a lot because when I think about the three sirens, the siren of slides, there's a very easy visual cue for me to know that I'm doing something wrong. If I'm, first of all, if I start by typing stuff first before having spent time thinking through it, then obviously I'm falling into that trap. I'm going for the siren on the slides. So if I'm creating multiple slides without really expressing anything, again, style again, you know, if I care more about the look of the presentation and less about the substance of that presentation, I know that I'm doing something wrong. But this one, the third one is to me at least hard to quantify or to measure because I only get cues from you whether you understand what I'm saying, whether I'm pursuading you. But I don't necessarily get a lot of cues and feedback, especially on the virtual meeting, whether you equipped to go and present the message equally persuasively to someone else. So do you have any advice about that?

- It's really funny. When we do our live trainings, we will often say at the end of the course, we're gonna do a round the room. Tell me what you got out of it, what was valuable. And what we find unfailingly and I write this on a flip chart and I'm smart enough to write them in a particular way or in a particular sequence. At the end of the day, I am almost always able tto point out that every single big idea that we taught had been picked up. In other words, our training model is also a model of good communication, which is our audience is picking up what we wanted them to pick up. I think the number one driver of retell ability is tied to this number, which is 10%. In human beings, unaided recall of any content will never exceed 10%. We've known this for 30 years. I could present to you, if you have no document, no handout, you are just gonna remember 10%. Well, 10% is a disaster in retell ability. You know, you're gonna go into that meeting with what you remember and it's this rather random 10%. So what in fact we believe is when you build a message properly, one of the hallmarks is that you should build a document specifically for the purpose of retell ability. So this is some messaging we help Cisco systems build for their platform, their excellent platform, which is WebEx. This used to be a hundred slides, it's now this a four panel document, which captures the essence of the argument, which is what's wrong with the way collaboration is happening right now? Why is our approach to collaboration superior to solve that problem? And then how do we move forward together? That's a very strong narrative architecture baked into a document. Now, if you bake it into a document, you're no longer trying to fight a battle you can't win or what we call unaided recall. Now, you are fighting the battle you wanna fight, which is aided recall. And I guarantee we could play this game. I could make this pitch to you right now, Emil, I could make this pitch to you. I could give you five minutes to make a few notes and grab a clean copy of this. And you would almost perfectly be able to remake that presentation later. And we've demonstrated this hundreds of times, particularly in our sales training. And so the key to retell ability, you wanted to dig in on that is always in any presentation or communication, go for aided recall. Give them the document that summarizes what you said in a really good way. It doesn't have to be particularly pretty, but it has to be from a content standpoint accurate. That is really how you get the thing you are looking for, which is that person you've met with is perfectly capable of retelling the story subsequently.

- Okay. Okay. So that could actually be even an email that summarizes the conversation after that. I see.

- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The reason it can't be that is you have to have it in the meeting. If I'm in the meeting and walking through, let's imagine we were doing something like this today, and I'm gonna walk you through some data I'm gonna ask you now has this problem shown up. You're gonna be making notes on this. You're gonna be capturing the learning as you go. It's not good enough to do a follow up. The follow up email is disconnected. When I walk through a document with you as the campfire, if you like, that we're sitting around, in fact I'm gonna use a great acronym for you. It creates something called RICE that as we go through this document together as we make the document the center, which is no different than making slides, but just it's a better way of doing it. It will create engagement, comprehension, intimacy, and retell ability. You're more likely to engage if it's in your hands. And it gives you something to look at, particularly in a virtual setting. Vastly increases comprehension. We've done some scientific tests with a cognitive neuroscientist presenting using a traditional slide deck and then presenting using a good document. We had 10 times the level of error rate on a factual test when people use slides, it boosts comprehension, it creates intimacy. We're just talking right now. But if we had this shared document that gives us the sense of shared problem solving and the number one thing it does is retell ability, all of those are lost if you send just an email follow up. That does not give you what we're talking about here, it wouldn't be bad, but it would give you 2% of what the document in the meeting would give you.

- Okay. Thanks for clarifying that part. I guess the onus is on, if we are having a virtual meeting for us to create a document and then ask the person on the other end to print it so they can actually take notes or engage with it as we're representing.

- We have clients particularly in sales who actually create really, really good physical documents. They mail them to the customer. You've got a $50 million deal. It's a $1 document and a $1 stamp. I mean, mail it. A lot of the time though, you would email a simple one pager. In fact, we do a lot of work with IBM. IBM are moving to one page documents because of home printing. So the bifold is a really, really good format for, you know, when you can get a physical copy in the audience or customer's hands, the one pager is a great alternative for home printing and you email it to 'em and say, hey, if you can print this out ahead of time, that would be great. I do a lot of keynote speeches. If it's a virtual keynote, we email it ahead of time and we strongly encourage people to print it out. Now do they all print it out? No. But just 'cause you don't win every game doesn't mean you don't play. If I had a hundred people at a keynote and 70 of them printed it and 30 of them didn't, that's a win because the alternative is they don't have anything and you are back to this 10% unaided recall. So in communications you're always, it's always trade offs. You're always trying to win small battles. So yeah, they might not all print it, they might not have a home printer. I don't care. What you wanna do is win as often as you can. So this is a formula for how to win more often than you lose.

- Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So let's go back a little bit to that, the style question, well, the second siren that we talked about. Yeah, I promise that we're gonna come back to that. So many veteran executives and sales leaders like to say, speak to express, not to impress, but we know that the impressions are sometimes important. So how do we strike that right balance between content and delivery slash style. What are the manners of impression that matter in delivering an effective presentation?

- Yeah, so that is a great question. Let me just create some space here. As I said earlier, there's been an absolute overweighting on delivery, delivery, you know, this eye contact body language nonsense. I think you've gotta think of communication as two things, right? There's message design, have you build a message that's really crisp and clean, compelling, it contains all the right information, it's rooted in something the customer or the audience cares about. It's got a well articulated argument, you know, essentially created using a small number of big ideas. There's a logical flow and it's sort of based in a great document that's a very quick tour through the hallmarks of getting it right. It's five or six hallmarks of getting it right. And then the second thing you wanna master as a communicator is effective delivery. So I personally believe that in communications, just my opinion, at least 70% of the value comes from design, come from getting the message right. So what have we talked about that we talked about really crisp, really deeply rooted in a problem that the audience wants to solve. That your narrative is based more on ideas than lots of facts and data. That it has a very logical sequence and you also want a great document. So those are kind of the hallmarks of design. I think that 70 to 80% of success lives there. In delivery, there's the thing you're trying to make sure is the message you meant to deliver or you know, is actually what you delivered. In fact, the number one word we use here is the word gap. You know, mind the gap if you designed a message, but you get up on the day and you are very imprecise, it doesn't come out of your mouth the right way or a conversation breaks out and you don't control the conversation well, that's how a delivery can fail. And so when you think about delivery, the three things in fact that you really, really want to get right is you actually really need to think about for any meeting of any importance, is rehearsal, there's nothing more valuable than precise articulation. Saying something in exactly the way you wanna say it. And in the fewest number of words needed, there's a million ways of articulating any thought. There's a few good ones. There may only be one exquisitely perfect way of saying something. Your mind will never find that in the moment. So for any presentation of any importance, then rehearsal is really important. The second thing you really want to get right is just good communication mechanics. That's not eye contact and body language, but there are some interesting things in there. How and why and when should you use humor? When is it inappropriate to use humor? How do you use questions to get an audience to interact? How do you then manage the conversation once you've got it started? It's a really important mechanics, but it's not eye contact and body language. And then the third one is how do you develop a presentation style that will actually drive up trust? If I'm asking you to do something, in part, you'll do it based on my factual argument, which kind of lives here in the content. But you also have to trust me. If I am sending signals that that lead you to not trust me or even worse not like me, then you do have a problem. So the 30% that you want to get right, which is in delivery has nothing to do with eye contact and body language. I think it's to do with style persona that drives trust, good mechanics and real precision. So we have training on all this and we teach design and then we teach delivery. So the meeting, sorry, the message and then the meeting. And as I said, this is what's so funny, the overwhelming majority of traditional presentation skills training has really only focused here. And it hasn't even focused on the right stuff. It focuses on this stupid stuff about eye contact. That's not what matters. What matters is getting, making sure the gap between the message you built and the message you delivered is down to effectively nothing. If you get that right now, you have an an incredible formula for success. And this is what we teach companies how to do and they're generally incredibly happy with it.

- Yeah, great. That's actually a very good segue into what I was gonna ask you as my next question. How does your company help business leaders overcome their communication deficiencies?

- I mean, basically we are a training and consulting firm. We help companies build messaging. If they just need us to build it for 'em, as long as we have access to the subject material, we can do that. What we really like though is transferring the skill. We can train salespeople or executives how to build a great message and then how to deliver it in a really effective way. In fact, I think if we have it on the screen, if you have the, we're we're actually rolling out something right now, which is really cool. It's the Compelling Communicator Academy. It's this very foundational course about, look, why is most messaging going wrong and how do you fix it? And then there are these four other courses. There is the core skills of message design, and then above that, advanced skills of message design, then the core skills of message delivery, and then advanced skills of message delivery. And there's kind of two ways you can go through this. The obvious one good enough for most people is just that horizontal path. If you were to take the core, you take foundations anyway, you always have to take foundations. But then if you took the core skills training and design and delivery, that would be absolutely transformative. Now, if you like that, you want to get really advanced, you get into the deep, deep end of the water or deep end of the pool with the advanced training. So things like advanced use of language and rhetoric, visualization of data, things like that. But this is the academy. We're in the process of building the foundations courses are built, the core skills courses are built. And then we're just beginning to work on the advanced courses. And you know, we're gonna probably in the next couple of weeks these will go live and we're gonna have some kind of launch pricing. So people are interested, they can shoot me an email and then we'll put them on the launch list, we're gonna do some really kind of cool launch pricing when that comes out.

- Interesting. So is the academy gonna be a virtual self study course or is it gonna be something that people have to sign up for and invite you to their offices?

- It could be both, we've always done our training live. So the academy is a live training, which we already use at companies like Disney and IBM, Salesforce, Cisco and others. But that what we just saw on screen, those are online e-learning versions of that. By the way, there's an entire academy for executive communications and there's an entire academy for sales messaging. So if you were a seller, then it's about how do you build and deliver, how do you build a sales message and execute a great sales conversation. If you are an executive, it's how do you build an executive message and deliver an excellent executive presentation. So those are all our e-learning. So by probably mid late Q1 of next year, the whole academy of both academies will be finished. Right now, the foundations and the core programs, we're just wrapping those up. Those will go live quite soon.

- Great. Okay. And I'll be on the lookout for those. And like you said, if anyone wants to get in touch with you and get on the wait list, I encourage all my viewers to do that.

- Yeah, I think you wanna put this in the show notes or whatever, but my email's very simple. Tim@Oratium.com, if anyone wants to shoot me an email and just say, hey, can I just get informed when these courses go live? No obligation, obviously, we'll just let you know when they go live, but probably the first, you know, 500 people that sign up will probably get a fairly substantial discount. So if people wanna do that, that's great and it doesn't commit them to anything, we'll just let them know when the courses go live.

- Great, thank you. I appreciate it. I'm sure all my viewers are also gonna appreciate that chance to get to these courses with some sort of a discount. We are getting very close to the end of this podcast. I just wanted to ask you, I always ask every guest to wrap up with a few key nuggets that they would like people to remember. So any last words of advice to my audience, especially considering that most of the people that watch this are sales and marketing leaders?

- Yeah. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think if you are in sales and marketing particularly, it's incredibly important to start thinking through the concept of retell ability. Sales and marketing is always trying to influence people. But even in a consumer market, you know, you might be talking to a husband who may go home to talk to a wife or a wife to a husband or a boyfriend or girlfriend. There's always a retell ability moment. By the way. Sometimes retell ability is to yourself, when you leave a car dealership with a really nice glossy 16 pager of that car, why do they give you that when you've just driven it? Because they want you to retell the story to yourself later on. So if I could go back 30 years and think about being a better marketer and seller, I think retell ability is everything. Who is the buying group? What are their issues? What are their positions? What are their interests? Am I building a message merely to satisfy the person I'm meeting with? Or am I smart enough to build a message that indeed addresses all the issues of the buying group? You crack that code, you'll see your sales conversion rate double or triple, which is quite common for what we've seen. And then I think the second thing probably and helpful that I have it here is when you think about communication, we always tend to obsess over delivery and we also tend to obsess over the wrong things. If you want to be a great communicator, the primary thing you've gotta learn how to do is architect messages properly that align with the way the brain consumes information. That's the underpinnings of our whole model. Once you've got that, it is then important to understand delivery. But delivery is much more than about the execution of that message, which is why things like rehearsal are more important because they really get to ideas like precision. So I think probably those would be maybe two big takeaways just based on the conversation we had.

- This is really great. Thank you. I really appreciate the word of advice that you provided today and all the concepts that you covered. Like I said, I know it's a very busy time of the year for you and your company. I appreciate your time, thank you very much, Tim.

- Thank you Emil. Good to see you. Thanks for the time.

- Thank you. Bye-bye.