G Gordon Liddy was on the Howard Stern show this morning and said the following:
“The difference between a good speaker and a great speaker is if you’re a good speaker, people come up to you after and tell you what a good speaker you are; If you’re a great speaker, armies march.”
If you’re in sales, your job is to influence others to act. What makes your army march? The only way you can connect and influence someone is to be authentic.
You must be authentically interested, empathetic and on their side.
On a side note, I love my SIRIUS satellite radio. And although we bought it for Howard, we love the music channels. My favorite part-they scroll the name of the song and artist, a great benefit for me since I can never remember the name of a song.
That particular nugget has been around for years, maybe millennia. It’s been passed down as ‘when Aeschines spoke, they said, “How well he speaks.” But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, “Let us march against Philip.”’
I’ve also seen the first half attributed to Demosthenes and the second half to Pericles, so who the hell knows. Tape recorders were notoriously unreliable in ancient Greece.