Free Peggy Klaus by Brag!: The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It Page B

themselves and their accomplishments.”
    Bryan, a fifty-something financial consultant based in New York City, is working on a new business pitch for the director of a family foundation in the Boston community. I asked Bryan to let me hear how he was going to introduce himself and his team members. After he finished, I wished I hadn’t asked. What I got was a three-minute, nonstop chronological recap of where and with whom on Wall Street he had worked since college. After Bryan brought me up to his present job, he then tortured me with another two minutes devoted to the other members of his pitch team. It had to rank as one of the top-ten most boring introductions I had ever heard.
    I asked Bryan how what he just said related to the potential client. In other words, why should this person care? “Well, obviously it shows that I’ve been in the business a long time and worked with a lot of good firms and people, and that I have the experience,” he replied.
    While all that was true, I gently broke the news that the excellent recall of his career didn’t speak to who he was, how he collaborated with clients, and how his past successes directly related to the prospect’s situation. And worse than all of that, he left out the most important fact. The prospect wanted a financial adviser with strong ties to the Boston community, but Bryan forgot to mention that he was a native of the area, that he had attended both graduate and undergraduate school in Boston, and that his ninety-three-year-old mother, as well as all his relatives, lived within a fifteen-mile radius of the foundation’s office!
    “Geez, how could I have overlooked something so simple?” Bryan asked with his head hung low. He took a deep breath, straightened up, smiled, and started again:
    Hello, everyone. I want to thank you for having us up here today. My ninety-three-year-old mother, who still lives in my childhood home in Waltham, says thank you. My coming here on business means that she now gets to have her son take her to her favorite restaurant. Actually, many of us are natives of the area. I went to Brandeis and got an MBA from Tufts. Henry grew up in Wooster, crossed the state line to go to Brown for a few years, and he heads up our office here. Both of us have had a lot of experience working with private family foundations of varying sizes. We have helped families who are in the beginning stages—as yours is—in determining the focus, setting up the organization, hiring the personnel and acting as consultant once the foundation is up and running. This is all in addition to our financial responsibilities of…
    It’s amazing to me how often people dash off to new-business presentations without spending the time to really think through how what they are going to say is of benefit to the prospective clients and customers. ‘Your bragging campaign will completely flop if you don’t serve up yourself and your credentials in ways that have specific value and meaning for your audience. If something in your history has no benefit, then drop it and rework your bragologue to focus on the most compelling points of your background and successes.
    THROW KISSES
    “I thought that my co-workers would think I was kissing up! So I never approached the director at the dinner.”
    I always thought peer pressure went out the window once adulthood set in, but amazingly it is alive and thriving on the playgrounds of corporate America. A client named Denzell, a twenty-six-year-old insurance executive in the initial stages of his bragging campaign, had been angling for months to meet up with someone powerful at his firm whom he had targeted as absolutely imperative to get to know. Mr. Higher-Up was on the road nearly nonstop, and it had been difficult for Denzell to connect with him.
    A perfect opportunity, however, presented itself at the company’s Christmas party. Mr. Higher-Up was not only there, but was seated alone at his table for a large part of the evening.