Serving different segments
Splitting INSPIRA in two
Today: The origin of our new workshop on brevity, clarity and precision while presenting
👋 Hey, it’s Andrés. Welcome to Astrolab’s weekly newsletter on how to become a better communicator at work. We write for knowledge workers that don’t want to wait for their turn
Here are my three points for today
Expecting too much
The perfect Pepsis
Let’s be Clear and INSPIRA: two products under the same brand
Expecting too much
This past year, we had a revelation at Astrolab: we were expecting too much out of INSPIRA, our storytelling workshop.
Let me explain.
INSPIRA is truly an amazing experience—practical, entertaining, useful—, and consistently receives great reviews.
Still, for the past ten years, 5% to 10% of its participants have always suggested changes:
The workshop was great, but I missed X topic
Which topics?
Better Slides
How to fight anxiety
How to structure a basic presentation
What to do with your hands
How to negotiate
How to build better relationships
How to have a difficult conversation
How to use storytelling to inspire change
How to introduce yourself
How to use AI to come up with better presentation ideas
Every semester or two we reviewed this data, and went back to the drawing board: OK, let’s include this topic, let’s let that one out, let’s talk about this…
As you may guess, it’s has been a never-ending task.
Recently, we were tempted to just ignore those outliers, and stick with what was working.
We decided something different, though: to split INSPIRA.
Exactly as Howard Moskovitz suggested to Pepsi a few decades ago.
Howard Moskovitz, Pepsi and Prego
In 2004, Malcolm Gladwell delivered his first TED Talk. There, he talked about Howard Moskowitz, a man famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce through what he called horizontal segmentation.
At that time, the food industry was trying to find perfect dishes, platonic products that satisfied everyone. The problem with this, as you can easily guess, is that “the average” ends up not satisfying anyone.
Moskovitz started thinking about horizontal segmentation while working for Pepsi in the 70s. The company approached him and asked him about how much sugar they should put in Diet Pepsi: it had to be between 8% and 12%.
Moskovitz went out to test different samples, and after seeing that the data was all over the place, he had a revelation:
They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, while they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis.
Pepsi was not interested, so Moskovitz went on to help Prego find out that most Americans fell into three categories regarding spaghetti sauce:
plain,
spicy and
extra chunky
Extra chunky’s success was a surprise. People weren’t asking for it, but when it came out, almost one third of Americans immediately became consumers, as Gladwell explains:
Over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra-chunky sauces.
So, back to Astrolab.
For the past decade, we’ve been trying to find the perfect INSPIRA, but that has been a mistake: there should be at least one or more additional workshops, according to different jobs-to-be-done from our audiences.
Our first effort in this direction is called Let’s be Clear.
Two products under the same brand
In the next few weeks we’ll tell you more about Let’s be Clear, but here’s the gist of it, and how it is different from INSPIRA.
(Even though I mostly talk about workshops, Let’s be Clear and INSPIRA are more like product lines in the sense that we’re preparing different offerings for each of the brands.)
Let’s be Clear
Audience: knowledge workers that want to grow their careers faster
Problems that tries to solve
Not being able to choose a point
Not being able to capture attention
Not being able to be brief while presenting
Not being able to structure an idea
Not being able to design easy to follow slides
Content
How to find your point
How to differentiate it from context
Two ways of structuring your idea
Basics on slides, preparation and performance
INSPIRA
Audience: knowledge workers that lead a team or a project (or soon will…)
Problems that tries to solve
Not being able to connect with others
Not being able to inspire people
Not being able to challenge beliefs
Not being able to move to action
Content
Understanding influence
The ethics of influence
Understanding how relationships shape communication
Storytelling tools to drive influence
Presence and gravitas
Listening tools and styles
The cool news is that they go great together. Even though we think that Let’s be Clear will naturally cater to more junior audiences, and that INSPIRA will be a perfect fit for professionals with more people-oriented tasks, they reinforce each other.
If you’re good at explaining things in a clear and brief way (Let’s be Clear), you’ll have more opportunities to grow, and eventually will become an influential figure in your organization that makes things happen (INSPIRA).
We’ll be soon announcing public workshops of both, and we’ve already started closing deals to run both workshops for the same audiences in big companies.
If you’re interested in knowing more about Let’s be Clear, let me know.
Briefs
DC 🇺🇸: In a couple of weeks I’ll facilitate an INSPIRA for ALPFA, a professional association for Latinos. It will be the first in the nation’s capital
Astrolab <> IPADE 👩🎓: Gerardo has been facilitating a communication workshop for the one of the best ranked MBA programs in LATAM
Narrative Work: Every semester we do a couple of strategic narrative projects where we help the C-Suite get aligned, create a narrative, and learn how to drive change with it. Ana Fer is starting one of these projects with a huge beverage company in Mexico
That’s all for today. See you next Thursday!
Andrés