💃 Would You Use This Simple Management Consulting Tool for Salesforce? 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! The only thing better than being famous is being ChaCha-famous.

Here’s what we mean -

💰 Peter Thiel co-founded Paypal, which made him $50MM when eBay acquired them. And then he founded Palantir, which is currently trading at a $47BB market cap!

🏈 Peyton Manning won a ring with the Colts. And then he got himself another one with the Broncos!

🧠 Barbara Minto invented MECE. And then she developed The Pyramid Principle!

Rarely does lightning strike twice, but when it does, it strikes big!

And unlike Peter and Peyton, Barbara is the only professional to have TWO frameworks in the ChaCha. She is ChaCha-famous 🙌!

And so, welcome to today’s topic - The Pyramid Principle.

WHAT IS IT?

The Pyramid Principle

First, some background👇

Barbara was the first female MBA hire at the vaunted McKinsey consulting firm. This was in the 1960’s, so there were partners at McKinsey who were analysts when the 19th Amendment was passed…

Barbara had to earn her keep at McKinsey. And earn it she did.

As the story goes, she was stationed in the UK office where labor strikes closed businesses early.

And as consultants do, when they have spare time they get drinks 🍻!

The social time with her structure-loving, management consultant coworkers became booze-filled ideation sessions. And with her day job of analyzing stacks of papers and reports, she had an infinite sandbox to refine her craft.

And what she found is that when structuring reports, they became visually alike. They all looked like pyramids!

👉 The Pyramid Principle, at the highest level, is the objective, the big question, or THE THING.

👉👉 The thing is supported by 3 primary points. Ideally, each point is mutually exclusive, and altogether are collectively exhaustive.

👉👉👉 Each primary point is supported by 3 secondary points.

Physically framing this out creates a perfect pyramid ▵ !

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

The Pyramid Principle Slaps!

Three incredible progressive outcomes of effective Pyramid Principle’ing-

^{Say that 3x fast!}

🤔 Structured Thinking

This is for yourself. You have to understand it so that you can present it 💯.

It nurtures MECE thinking.

It’s like a 1000 piece puzzle- you know it’s gonna be a square shape. So, you also know it’s not gonna be a circle, hexagon, or rhombus.

🕍 Structured Structure

Piggybacking off the above point - knowing what the end product is gonna look like before you start is basically a cheat code!

You can brain dump until your heart’s content, and have prepared categorized and sorting mechanisms in place.

🖥️ Structured Presentation

As enthusiasts of presenting, having a well-organized deck and clear and concise talking points are no-brainers.

The Pyramid Principle was born to present. It would basically be no effort to convert your Pyramid content into a deck.

In fact, you may have started with the deck as your template 🧠.

HOW DO YOU GET IT?

Pyramid Principle Applied

Let’s walk through an example to imprint this into your brain 🧠.

As a Salesforce professional, you are familiar with the sales process?

What if you needed to present the sales process to your technical manager who breathes integration architecture but has managed to avoid sales her whole life?

🖥️ Slide 1 - Sales Process - 1. Presale | 2. Sale | 3. Post-Sale

🖥️ Slide 2-4 Presale - 1. Inbound Lead | 2. Nurture Lead | 3. Convert Lead

🖥️ Slide 5-7 Sale - 1. Oppty Nurture | 2. Oppty Closed/Won | 3. E-Sig

🖥️ Slide 8-10 Post-Sale - 1. Fulfill | 2. Customer Service | 3. Cross-Sell

It looks like this 👀

The above is an example of using the Pyramid Principle to teach your audience a business process.

Other example uses of the Pyramid Principle include-

🔥 Presenting a Problem or a Solution

🔥 Presenting 3 recommendations for a solution (the “crawl, walk, run” model, for example!)

And it’s not just for presenting! Use it for your own understanding.

Like Barbara Minto did - if you receive material from your stakeholders that is chaotic, has no structure, and you are responsible for the solution, then you need to bring your best tools to the table to set yourself up for success, so that you can set up your stakeholders for success 💯.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Minto’s Pyramid Principle is timeless, simple, and brilliant.

You can use it to structure your thoughts.

You can use it to present to leadership and frontline, alike.

You can use it to bring order to chaos for you AND your audience!

With a framework this powerful, the questions becomes why wouldn’t you use it?

SOUL FOOD

Daily Principle

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