Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival for 21 nights. He won the bet!

Some new feedback:

“Marc was a perfect speaker for our Selling Cruise Conference. As a fantastic communicator Marc was able to engage and inform all delegates using humour to really drive home the key messages that were well researched and highly relevant. One of our most successful speakers we would definitely use Marc again.”

Andy Harmer - Director, CLIA UK & Ireland

Tweets from the Audience

Marc Hogan….comedian who gets the point across. Excellent #cruise2013
Raj Mistry ‏@rmistry23 23 May

Funny man Marc Hogan takes to the stage #cruise2013″ absolutely hilarious
Ann-Marie Brooks ‏@AMSBrooks 23 May

Marc Hogan doing a brilliant and amusing presentation on ‘selling at #cruise2013.
Jo Rzymowska ‏@JoRzyCruise 23 May

Marc Hogan, very funny presentation #cruise2013
Lee Hayhurst@leehayhurst:

The very entertaining @Marc_Hogan Learn while you laugh! Presenting #Cruise2013
Steve Dunlop ‏@DunlopPhoto 23 May

Brilliant session from @Marc_Hogan laugh while you learn #cruise2013
Shane Riley ‏@ShaneRileyPCL 23 May

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival for 21 nights. He won the bet!

Last week Kirsty and I went to see The Great Gatsby. Afterwards whilst discussing the film Kirsty claimed that original novels are always better than their film adaptions. She’s wrong of course; she’s clearly never seen The Muppet’s Christmas Carol…

Let’s face it, having Kermit play Bob Cratchit, and Fozzie Bear play Mr Fezziwig is no less innocuous than having Jay-Z and Beyonce playing at a 1920’s party.

In The Great Gatsby (spoiler alert) characters pursue visions of the future that are determined by their pasts.

Whilst in A Christmas Carol Scrooge learns that our pasts though important do not have to define our future.

As Gatsby says “Can’t repeat the past…?  Why of course you can!” – the question is do you want to?

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival for 21 nights. He won the bet!

Some new feedback:

“Marc Hogan delivered a highly entertaining and professional presentation to an international audience during our week of sales training. He effectively mixed humour with business messages, causing members of the team to laugh out loud. His messages about “Editing the Editor”, taking little risks and reading body language were very relevant to a sales audience. Marc’s session gave the team a little light relief while still being on message.”

Clare Collett - Director Business Masterclass, Givaudan

“The group loved Marc’s opening session and kept referring back to points he had made throughout the two days. It was a huge plus point that it was interactive and it was a fantastic way to start their Buying Managers conference. Thanks again!”

Louise Hawkes - Learning & Development Manager – Buying & Merchandising, TJX Europe (TK Maxx & Home Sense)

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival for 21 nights. He won the bet!

I’m writing this from the beach and I’m feeling quite sleepy. My wife says it’s because of the ‘sea air’, but I don’t buy it. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a narcolepsy epidemic on the south coast, all of Brighton’s revellers don’t suddenly think, “well its 11pm, I really should be in bed all this sea air has made me really tire…zzzzzz.”

There is not a horrifically low birth rate in Portsmouth (trust me I’ve been to Portsmouth and the one thing they are not short of is babies) because all the sailors come ashore and say, “all I want is a really good nap.”

Thousands of Cornish fishermen are not going out to sea at midday because they want a lie in, and what about fish? I’ve never seen a sleepy fish. In fact I’ve wiki’d it and as most fish don’t even have eyelids they apparently don’t sleep, although they do daydream…

Which brings me back to communicating with passion. If you are at a conference near the seaside, there’s always a risk that all your delegates might drift off because they had a quick whiff of the briny air outside, that might be Ed Milliband’s excuse anyway… But if you want them to sit up and take notice:

Have a clear goal and share it

When communicating with passion you must have a clear goal that everybody can easily understand. Look at NASA. During the race to put a man on the moon if you asked a cleaner, a caterer, a technical director, or a pilot at NASA what their job was, they would all say the same thing “my job is to help put a man on the moon”.

My question to you is do your people all know what goal they are working to when you have finished communicating?

Clear instructions

But a goal is not enough; you have to provide clear instructions. A great communicator provides step-by-step guidelines for their team members to follow. There is no point having a goal if no one knows how they are going to get there! People do not like vagueness, they want to be told specifics.

Transfer Emotion

In business, it is rare to see committed communication, by which I mean communication with heart and soul behind it. It is scary for many of us to communicate in this way – it is a vulnerable place to go to. Most of us don’t even like putting a little emotion into the voice – let alone using our whole selves to transfer emotion to the other person. But using emotion really carries passion.

Use your imagination – your audience won’t have thought about this as much as you have, they have not got excited about it as you have. They have not (yet!) thought through why they should –personally – get committed to this. How can you bring this alive for them? How can you tailor your message to the person in front of you at that moment – where are they coming from?

Always have an open door

Once you have done all this, people should feel fired up, ready to go out and take on your ideas. But occasionally they are going to have questions. A great communicator always has time to speak to anybody. The moment people think they can’t talk to you is the moment that things can start to go wrong. Now I’m not saying be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But what I am saying is communication is a 2 way process – you have to set time aside to listen to people as well – and to reassure them if they have doubts or a lapse in their belief in themselves to deliver for you.

Passion – underpinned by solid planning and preparation is a very powerful tool – but because it pushes people outside their comfort zone it is very rarely used.

So if your audience keep nodding off at conferences or meetings, or worse have got their eyes open but they are clearly daydreaming you can’t blame the sea air, you can only blame yourself…

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival for 21 nights. He won the bet!

I’m typing this rather gingerly, because I’ve burnt my fingers while toasting some pitta bread. Is there anything hotter in the world than the inside of a pitta bread? Forget wind farms, nuclear power or wave energy, it seems to me that the answer to the world’s energy problems could be solved if we could just figure out how and why the inside of a gently toasted pita bread generates enough steam to remove the prints off my fingers!

Clearly the pain has addled my brain because today’s blog is about communicating with passion.

Last week whilst I was presenting in Paris, one of the delegates asked how I presented with so much passion? While two cans of Red Bull might help, I think she wanted a little more detail.

In my mind if a communicator needs to do one thing, it is to transfer emotion to the recipient.

When you see a great speaker they tend speak with the utmost conviction and belief.

Now if you are Bob Geldof, Nelson Mandela, or indeed Chris Huhne (topical!) speaking with passion and integrity may come easy to you. But how do we communicate with passion in the workplace?

Gather information

This is not about spin and fluff – or delivery over content. The first thing is to gather information from all relevant individuals and sources. Then to analyse it, without doing that how will you know what direction to go in?

Once we’ve decided on a course of action, we know we are making an informed and well rounded decision which means we can argue passionately about it – from both the heart and the head.

If you’re looking to get buy-in from your team, or a senior manager, then having thought out all the different options will provide you the foundation of credibility.

Give Them Reasons for Your Decision

Whenever you try to present a new idea, a really good way to open the conversation is to tell your audience the problem that you are trying to solve, whom you have consulted, and the various options you have considered.

“I’ve spoken to everyone in the team, and consulted our sales and technical directors, as well as asked our main customers, to see how we could increase the efficiency of our products. There were a number of different options that emerged, but the two things that everyone agreed we must address were…”

Alternatively you should explain the results of your analysis and then tell them exactly why what you are suggesting is logical and thought out and the best way to go.

In an age of spin and quick fixes, when people realise you’ve done your homework and you’re not making a rash decision they’ll instantly become more interested in what you have to say.

Let them Know your Credentials

Don’t be afraid to gently and subtly use your experience and your achievements to convince others that your ideas and proposals are good. You can use others to set this up for you if that is easier. But it is important that people know the authority that you bring to the table. For example I will always have the person introducing me stress that my 7 Keys were proven at the Edinburgh Festival before I get up on the stage.

The audience react differently to me what I am going to tell them when they know this.

Belief is everything

Now that’s all very well and good but great communicators also do something else, they truly believe in their course of action. A great salesperson truly believes in their product. A great business leader truly believes in his vision.

To communicate with passion you must truly believe in your ideas and your words because when you truly believe people will also believe. However, the moment they see you doubt your own words, even if for just a second, that will be the moment you’ll lose them. Remember, a great communicator is also prepared for any questions that could be asked.

Passion is authentic. Just like the pitta bread an audience can always tell when a person is just full of hot air…

I’ll cover more in part 2 next time.

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival for 21 nights. He won the bet!

Some new feedback:

“Marc, thank you very much for your presentation on Friday afternoon to our 500 managers. Everyone very much enjoyed your presentation, it was very much in line with our conference message, it was lively, engaging and gave us plenty to think about in a way which felt like we were being entertained – rather than lectured. Thank you once again!”

Diane Martyn - Group Managing Director, Staffline Group PLC

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival for 21 nights. He won the bet!

Some new feedback:

“We’ve had so much great feedback following Marc’s presentation. Our 200 managers loved him, just the right level of humour and thought provoking content, perfect. He kept our audience rapt , he was “quite funny” (you had to be there!) inspirational and thought provoking. Our Managers left the room inspired and motivated after a jolly good giggle. We would highly recommend.”

Cheryl Creaser – Divisional Director, Busy Bees Ltd.

“Thank you so much for your talk it was a great way to end the day. I just wanted to let you know that I have received some lovely feedback from the managers on their evaluation forms – everyone so far has stated your slot as their most enjoyable part of the day – some of the words used to describe your talk were ‘funny, inspirational and motivating’.  I really appreciate that you took time to arrive early and listen to some of the other speakers at the conference and how you tied this in to your speech.”

Karen D’Aguilar – Head of Sales & Marketing, Busy Bees Ltd.

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival 21 nights. He won the bet!

It’s Sunday, March 17 9:47 AM otherwise known as St Patrick’s Day. The day where my proud people celebrate their national saint, their country and losing to the Italians, by dyeing our drinking water green, dancing maniacally while keeping our arms completely rigid and getting plastered.

So before I get dressed in green from head to toe, and enjoy my breakfast of sausage, egg and 2 pints of Guinness and then suffer from a three day migraine (definitely not a hangover) I wanted to talk to you about Sophistication Bias.

In his book “The Advantage” Patrick Lencioni highlights that many well educated managers and leaders believe that real improvement can only come from complex, sophisticated management theories. They tend to discount ideas if they appear too simple. This phenomenon is known as Sophistication Bias.

From my 10 years experience as a business speaker I’ve found that neither complex management theory nor the intelligence of the management board is the deciding factor in whether an idea works. Instead it comes down to courage, discipline and persistence.

This applies in business and personal life. We all look for the next fad diet or next breakthrough in exercise, but the reality is quite simple to get fitter or lose weight it’s simply a case of eat healthier and move more than you sit. It requires persistence and discipline. If anything the more complex an idea is, the harder it is to follow or achieve.

Look at performance management. Each year you have a bureaucratic system of record keeping and documentation to protect managers from lawsuits and unfair dismissal claims, rather than focusing on motivating and improving performance of employees. In fact, if we are honest, how many of us have a team of people that we hate doing annual performance management for because it takes up so many hours of our time requires so much documentation and doesn’t actually result in any fruitful results. As managers we often find the process mostly adversarial, fraught with nervous negotiation rather than clear communication.

What if we cut down the required paperwork to a page, but undertook regular performance management, provided employees with clarity about what was expected of them, delivered regular and specific feedback? This wouldn’t be a sophisticated solution, it just requires persistence and discipline.

Right I’m off to the pub to celebrate my favourite saint. Probably best if you call my assistant Alyson over the next few days as I can feel a migraine coming on…

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival for 21 nights. He won the bet!

Marc Hogan was bet £1 that he couldn’t become a stand up comic in less than 12 months and perform a one man comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival 21 nights. He won the bet!

To understand what your customers really think of you, here is a simple exercise.

First of all you need ask your customers to use a scale from 0 to 10 to rate how likely they would be to recommend you to a friend or colleague.

Customers who give you a 9 or 10 (well done, by the way) are what we call, “promoters”.  They’re the ones who would generally recommend you to a friend or colleague.

People who score you 6 or less are known as “detractors”.  They are likely to make negative rumblings about your brand. A score of 7 and 8 would come from the “passives” they don’t have strong positive or negative feelings about you (a bit like how I feel about Sweden).

Once you’ve asked the question, you can use this information to calculate your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS).  Simply take the percentage of your customers who scored you 9 or 10 and subtract the percentage of customers who scored you 6 or below.

Lego, Apple, American Express and HSBC are amongst 48% of large companies (with more than $500 million in revenues) who use NPS to improve customer satisfaction, retention and growth.

I like NPS as a tool. The reason it’s popular is it allows you to measure customer satisfaction and to benchmark against other companies.  By asking other probing questions you can get to the bottom of underlying reasons and make the necessary changes.

The thing is I bet there are a lot of companies out there who don’t actually know why their customers are their customers.  Sure they can give an educated guess, but they don’t actually know why.

The only way you’ll ever find out why a customer uses your product is to ask why, and then more importantly use that information to drive your company, your employees and your communication.

Click here to watch Marc’s showreel. If you would like to find out more about Marc, visit www.marchoganlive.com or to book him for a speaking event please contact your favourite speaker bureau.