Make It All About Them: Winning Sales Presentations

6    Speaking the Client's Language

Tradition: Speak in tongues.

Breaking tradition: Speak in plain old English.

I began working at Chase Bank when I was 23 years old. It was my second job. I had been a liberal arts major in college and was coming from what I thought was a very glamorous job in Washington, DC, working for a trade association.

All was good in the world when I was in DC, with one exception: I wanted to be living and working in New York City. A colleague put me in touch with a headhunter who said that she could envision me at either Citibank or Chase. I couldn't imagine what she was thinking at the time; the last place I could ever see myself working was a bank! At the time, I'm not sure I had ever successfully balanced my checkbook, let alone read a spreadsheet. But I went along with it because I was desperate to move to New York.

I had 11 (yes, 11) interviews for my $40,000-a-year job. I was interviewing for a position in a special training function that reported directly to the vice chairman. The mandate was to turn the commercial bankers into investment bankers by training them in areas such as corporate finance, capital markets, risk management, and so forth.

The entry-level position for which I was interviewing was called “training designer,” and my title would be “assistant treasurer.” While I hadn't a clue what that meant (and was afraid to ask), the position sounded appealing; there seemed to be a creative element to it, sort of like an interior designer ...