Hi everyone. Welcome to Ask Avalanche.
I'm Amy Holloway, President of Avalanche Consulting.
Today I want to talk to you about sales.
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to
speak at Area Development's Consultants
Forum in Chicago and they asked me to
talk about sales techniques and
share ideas with the audience on things
that they could do to become a better
salesperson.
As I started developing the presentation I
started thinking to myself
I don't really want to talk about sales. What I really want to talk about is a skill that I
think every economic developer should have and
that is being a great facilitator.
Facilitate information flow between
site consultants and your community 
and back and forth like that
or facilitator meetings within your
own community to build buy in to your initiative
and build support for product
improvement that you need to
make your community more attractive to companies and site consultants.
Meeting facilitation requires a different
set of skills then just sales skills.
To be good meeting facilitator you need three skills and today I'm going to focus
on the first one and then in upcoming episodes
of Ask Avalanche I'll share some other tips.
Three skills to be a great meeting facilitator: 
First you need to be a good speaker and be
comfortable speaking in front of different groups.
Second you need to be a good listener. This
isn't just a one-way conversation that
you're having where you're sharing
information and not listening to anyone else.
Every sales process needs to be a
back-and-forth between you and the
prospect and the prospect back to you. It's a give and take. You need to have great
listening skills.
Third you need to be a good
facilitator of meetings  and manager of meetings,
controlling the flow of meetings, making sure you're staying on agenda,
and those sorts of things.
So today a couple tips for you
on how to become a better speaker.
I personally am a big fan
of taking improv classes.
I've taken a lot of improv classes here in Austin over the years to feel more comfortable
getting up in front of the people and
talking to people.
Also being comfortable with uncertainty.
As consultants and as economic
developers you're never really sure
what's going to happen on a day-to-day
basis: you land in a city you've got a bunch of
meetings, you don't know if you're going to be
asked to get up and give a presentation
or share information with the client
in a variety of different formats.
So take improv.
What improv teaches you, we'll give you a couple
little fun
facts about improv and things you're going to learn when you take your improv class.
"Yes and"
That's the notion of
when you receive information you build
on that information by saying yes
and you contribute something.
Don't be a blocker.
Don't be a "No, but".
Conversations go nowhere when you block ideas so keep an open mind and be a "yes and" person
Always build up the people around you
and make them feel comfortable and confident.
Part of being on stage in improv is that
your fellow actors are up there with
you and trust you that you're not going
to block them and you're going to build on the conversation and you're going to make them 
look great.
If people feel like you're making
them look great they're going to reciprocate that
and everything's going to move forward in a positive fashion.
There's two ideas
from the improv community.  I suggest
that you look into taking improv classes
They're really fun.
They're very very helpful and it's one of the better things I've done for my career in the past.
Thank you so much for tuning in and I look forward to next week with some tips on
becoming a better listener and a better meeting facilitator
Have a great day!
