They don’t teach you this in business school. But they’ll still give you an “A” for it.
The textbook teaches you how to draft a presentation. It doesn’t teach you how to deliver it. Here’s what happened in real life:
The MBA course focused on communications. It wasn’t a marketing course; it was a corporate governance course. The professor assigned a final project requiring us to form teams, with each team offering their presentation to the class.
We had a week to complete the presentation. It was the week I was away attending my company’s annual strategic planning meeting. I couldn’t help craft the presentation. This was OK. I was the only one on the team willing to give the presentation. I’d be back in time for that, but not back in time to rehearse.
One of my teammates didn’t like that. She was nervous about the grade. The other teammates apparently trusted me and let me go in front of the class.
I gave the performance you’d expect from a former AM disc jockey. It mentioned all the facts, but it was animated, entertaining, and completely different from what the class expected. My nervous teammate fumed.
The professor gave us an “A.”
Here’s the funny thing. I may have hit it out of the park in front of the large group, but if the grade depended on me going out into that crowd and selling them on the product that was the subject of the talk, I would have received a big fat “F.”
That’s when I realized something important. I’m a promoter, not a closer.
Which one are you?
That simple promoter vs closer distinction explains more about success than most people realize.
When both work in tandem, they can produce exceptional results. Working solo, the results are far from optimal.
Think of a promoter as the Air Force and the closer as the Army. Alone, the Air Force rarely takes territory. Alone, the Army takes it, but at a higher cost.
Together, however, things go much more efficiently. Just like promoters and closers.
Promoters represent the spark plug. They create the buzz that grabs attention, excites the crowd, and opens the opportunity. Known for their personality, storytelling, and ability to paint a compelling picture, they are the sirens that bring people into the tent.
Think of carnival barkers (a role I admit to having played at one time), politicians, and evangelists. Without people like these, nothing new starts. Of course, except for the few self-starters in the audience, the momentum promoters create can lead to frustration when it fails to generate significant sales.
That’s where the closer performs best. Closers turn interest into commitment. They bring deals across the finish line. This takes a discipline focused on getting buyers to sign on the dotted line. To say they have confidence under pressure is an understatement.
You see these traits demonstrated in the real world by sales professionals, diplomatic negotiators, and quarterbacks in the red zone. Often, if you don’t have a closer, nothing gets done. On the other hand, closers don’t necessarily know how to fill the pipeline. In which case, they have nothing to close.
What I’ve just described is the difference between marketing and sales. Marketing promotes. Sales closes. It’s the classic promoter vs closer divide.
Unfortunately, many mistakenly believe they are the same. They operate under the false assumptions that “If I build excitement, sales will follow” or “I can sell anything to anybody.” Because of our cultural bias toward visibility, the attention promoters get misleads many into thinking they drive the sale.
That’s the trap.
People confuse activity with achievement.
That confusion sits right at the heart of the promoter vs closer problem. Closers get results in mainly private settings. The only people who see them are their customers and their managers.
This confusion pops up in other areas as well. Have you ever worked for a company whose culture gives greater credit to those who come in early and leave late while ignoring actual output? What signal does that send when management rewards the clock instead of results?
But that’s another topic for another day.
Businesses generally award the finishers. Audiences, however, remember those who start. Rarely is that the same person. Which one do you think is better?
Be careful. That last one is a trick question.
Back in that classroom, the applause earned us an “A.”
In the real world, it wouldn’t earn a single sale.
The real secret here isn’t whether one is better than the other. You need both. And it’s usually better to rely on two different people because of something called “comparative advantage” (yet another topic for another day). All that means is that some people are better at promoting while others are better at closing.
Together, they don’t just work.
They win.
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