[CUT TO:]
ANDY What's your response? Let's hear your reaction to that.
JIM [Getting up to get himself a cup of coffee] It sounds pretty boring. That's my reaction to that.
JASON It's very technical.
JIM Yeah, very technical…but, I mean, we are changing the home security industry, which has been very stagnant for 30 years. It's exciting, but it doesn't come across.
DAVE [Glances at his notes] There were some good chunks of language in there: It's nice that I can monitor when I'm away from the house and that kind of thing. But it was all about uControl. What does uControl do? It's almost like a trick question. Because I don't care. I care about what it can do for me.
ANDY You lose them when you're only talking about yourself. People want to know what's in it for them.
DAVE You've got to cut right to it, hit them over the head with it. The magic comes when you can talk like a human being about your business, and when you can really deliver a punch on why this is important to your prospect.
ANDY Do you guys watch The Daily Show?
[CUT TO: Screen in front of the room]
ROB CORDDRY [Daily Show correspondent] In a nutshell, how would you describe the state of elections in California?
JILL LAVINE [registrar of voters] We've got several big issues that are happening to us. The secretary of state just decertified all our electronic voting equipment. We have several lawsuits against us for not having accessible units for the disabled, and we don't have enough manpower to actually man the polls for our elections.
CORDDRY Great. Now could you take that long-ass answer and put it into a nutshell for me?
LAVINE [Stares at him]
CORDDRY [Stares back at her]
LAVINE The elections right now in California are a mess.
[CUT TO:]
DAVE Obviously, that's a little dramatic. But you are trying to grab them by the grapes with something concise. It's got to be something that makes them nod their head or light up or smile or say, "Oh, yeah, I get it."
Now here is a clip from Bono. We love Bono. He's talking about something abstract and technical, debt relief for Africa, and it comes across so well.
[CUT TO: Screen in front of the room]
BONO [In green sunglasses, stubbly face, talking to TIM RUSSERT] In 50 years, when they look back at this moment, they will talk about the war against terror, they will talk about the Internet, and they will talk about what we did or didn't do in Africa, about this continent bursting into flames. It is the most extraordinary thing to watch people dying three in a bed, two on top and one underneath, as I have seen in Malawi. It's an astonishing thing and it is an avoidable catastrophe.
[CUT TO:]
DAVE What do you remember about that? A continent bursting into flames. People dying--three in a bed, two on top one under. It's a really memorable scene.
Now you actually have some pretty good language that you've come up with about uControl. Let's take a look and we'll talk about it.
[CUT TO: Screen in front of the room]
J. BRENT USSERY We are bringing home security out of the closet. For example, with most home alarm systems, the control panel is in the master bedroom closet and installation is the only time they see it besides the keypad. We're bringing home security out of the closet.
[CUT TO:]
[JIM and JASON laugh uproariously.]
ANDY I'll stop the tape.
JASON [laughing] He's been hammering that over our heads for like a year now. And he's got a chance to put it on tape.
JIM [Laughing harder, explains the joke to a mystified ANDY and DAVE] So there are two guys that came to our company from the alarm industry, and one of them came out of the closet, literally, when he joined our company.
ANDY Oh, so there's a backstory. We didn't know that. But it really did jump out at us.
DAVE We thought it was great.
ANDY And we didn't know the back back backstory.
[CUT TO: Screen in front of the room]
JIM Anything you can do from your alarm's keypad, you can now do from the Web: arm, disarm the system, assign new codes, assign a code for your daughter, so when your daughter comes in and types in her code, you'll know she got home safely.
[CUT TO:]
DAVE This is very conversational, very storylike. That's what we're searching for. Now, this was probably one minute, 15 seconds into it. And that is the challenge. Because that is so good, it should not come in at one minute and 15 seconds. It should come in at, like, 15 seconds.
[CUT TO: Screen in front of the room]
CHUCK GRANBERRY [uControl's manager of internal operations] Traditional alarm companies say if you have a problem, call us. They've never empowered their customers to go on the Web and make choices and do things.
[CUT TO:]
DAVE Again, a really nice differentiator, in conversational language, that demonstrates a broader business point.
ANDY And here's a clip you can just send out to your whole company.
[CUT TO: Screen in front of the room]
JASON [Talking about how uControl monitors homes via phone lines, cell phone connections, and over the Internet] We use the word redundant too much. I think we got a little comfortable using technical terms because we had so many early adopters we were selling to, and it was fine to say redundant. But when we get past those early adopters and into the mass market, we could get burned. So I'm trying to stay out of that as much as I can. But I have not gotten to that euphoria of, this is the perfect way to describe what we do.
