One of my clients hired me to speak to their clients. They needed another speaker, and I recommended my friend, Jeb Blount. Jeb spoke on Sunday. I spoke today. We did a closing “keynote” together at the end of the conference.
While Jeb and I were together, I watched him do a keynote and two workshops.
Jeb is an exceptional speaker. He is one of those speakers that doesn’t have to work hard to connect with people. He’s got this authentic, laid back Southern thing that just makes it easy to like him. He’s also a terrific storyteller. He may work hard on his stories, but you’d never know it; it sounds like he is telling you the story personally, and for the first time. When he is hyped up, he is entertaining. When he delivers a serious message, you feel compelled to act on it.
But Jeb also has deep, deep content. He weaved the five big questions from his book, People Follow You, into a keynote and 2 hour and a half long workshops. The questions are 1) Do you make me feel important 2) Do I like you? 3) Do you listen to me? 4) Do you get me and my problems 5) Do I trust and believe you?
What Jeb does so well is create engagement with the content. Some people can deliver content well, but not in a way that pulls you into the content. Jeb pulls you in. Listen, I am biased about the content in People Follow You because it is so aligned with what I believe. That said, I watched and listened to Jeb help people through complicated problems with human relationships (commercial and otherwise) with the simple framework he created in People Buy You.
If you didn’t do anything but view your relationships through those five questions, you could massively improve your sales results and your results as a leader. It was powerful stuff.
Here’s Jeb’s site. Follow him on Twitter. Buy his new book, Fanatical Prospecting here.