Background: I recently attended a conference by Grow Rich, Stay Rich (GRSR) with the intent not of making a fortune but of learning about speaking from a direct sales pro. This is part of that series, telling why I have no business writing this series in the first place.

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The wise general acknowledges his limitations as does the wise evaluator. I doubt that I’m wise, but I do try real hard. So I will acknowledge my limitations in doing the series on this fellow in the first place.

I am clearly not his target audience, which is people legitimately interested in the financial services that he was selling (how to do pre-foreclosures, tax liens, and etc). I’ll naively assume that blogging Toastmasters are not high on his list of people to impress. Second, far worse, is that I’ve never been to a direct sales talk like this before and therefore don’t have any other salesmen to compare this man against.

Guess what? It’s not stopping me from evaluating him. How do you evaluate someone on some subject outside your knowledge? Suppose a friend wants you to evaluate an engineering talk or your kid wants you to evaluate their school report on the Incas and you’re clueless.

• Know Your Limits - I walked into the room knowing what I could and couldn’t evaluate this man on and don’t pretend watching a ninety minute sales presentation makes me the expert.
  
• Fake It - To be fair, I pretended that I genuinely was interested in the GRSR products. It should be clear from my first post I’m not, but I really did try.
• Know Their Objective - It’s not fair for me to evaluate this guy as if he were giving a lecture on the history of Roman Oratory at Harvard. His job wasn’t to wow me with his speech making skills, it was to sell a product. If I were “really” evaluating him, it would be a straight “Good - these five things you did well will help sales” and “Bad - these four things you did will hurt sales.”
• Universals - Microsoft hires professional speakers to evaluate and coach engineers before we give talks at major conferences. The coaches don’t have technical backgrounds but it doesn’t matter. They’re not going to tell me, “John, the registry key for the Web Server on slide 6 is wrong.” But they can see if I’m talking too fast, have bad posture and even evaluate content they don’t understand the specifics on such as whether I’m organized and if I risk boring an audience. Even the direct salesmen has to follow some basic rules.

I tried to apply all this in my evaluation of this speaker. I tended toward the universal and away from sales specifics since that’s where my strength lies. And I acknowledged his main fault from a pure oratorical perspective - namely being an ungodly fast talker - was probably OK for direct sales.