Context?

Most of us who have sales as part of our job description sell similar product(s) to people who have a similar level of education and sophistication. The pricing model is similar for all clients. We work in a country or a region that shares a language and a culture, so subtle things, like the expectation for a quantity discount, are consistent across clients.

All of these variables, pricing scheme, language, client sophistication, industry culture, infrastructure – something Americans and western Europeans usually take for granted, add up to the context in which you sell. If you sell a related suite of products, and operate within a region or country, your context likely has narrower parameters. When your sales context is narrow there are fewer contextual cues you need to watch for, and they may be more sales cycle or client personality related. For example, part of your sales process is engaging in small talk at the start of the meeting to find people you know in common, but if your client exhibits a no-nonsense, I-have-a-lot-to-do-today energy, you might engage in less. The fewer variables in your context the less you need to deviate from your process. There are exceptions to the process in every transaction. But in the grand scheme, the more consistent the context, the less you have to improvise, and the more likely it is that transaction will follow the blueprint of your sales process. Following your sales process will uncover what your clients need, and demonstrate the usefulness and value of your product. When clients see the value, they’ll decide to buy. And, if your process is solid, and your context is consistent, it’s also easier to train your sales team.

Welcome to Asia! (or Africa)

In December, I traveled to Manila to work with the Oradian customer acquisition team. It was my eighth trip to Asia, my fourth to southeast Asia, and my first time in the Philippines. I had been coaching four of the team members of this software as a service company for about six months, giving me some understanding of their context. Their core product is Instafin, a cloud based core banking system tailored for microfinance institutions. Oradian entered the Philippines market eighteen months ago. The local team built a sales process for the market from scratch, mostly through trial and error. Now they have something robust, and 30% of the Philippines micro-finance market as their client-partners.

Anyone who crosses a border as part of their work knows how much context can change. Both Africa and Asia are places where cultures are all mashed together within a region, even within a country. There are a plethora of languages and identities: religious, ethnic, regional or tribal affiliations can be stronger than any national identity. Regulations vary widely (as does enforcement). Infrastructure- transportation, electricity, and safety, is often unreliable.

This broad expanse of cultural variables is what the sales and marketing team at Oradian faces every day. The team work across a language gap and a culture gap. Infrastructure is a huge issue. Power, connectivity, traffic and travel are all often spotty or unwieldy. Now imagine a sophisticated product which can be disruptive to business processes and even business models. It brings huge value to some clients and less value to others, resulting in a nuanced pricing structure. Some of their potential clients are very sophisticated business people; they have MBA’s from top European and American business schools and a global view of finance and technology. Other lending cooperative board members making the decision to change their software system to the cloud are serving a rotating year on their employee lending co-op. They are assembly line workers or primary school teachers. No matter what your product is, this is a broad range of customer audience.

How many closed transactions in this widely varied context will follow any sales process step by step?

So few that you might ask — Is it even worth having a process at all?

This is what a wild and varied context does to assumptions. It breaks them. It seems obvious that it’s important to have a sales process that the team follow. But if no transaction actually follows the process, should you even have one?

For the next series of posts, we’ll look at some of the paradoxes this team has uncovered through trying to build a process to offer Instafin in the Philippines. These are things we knew were true about good salesmanship until we tried it in the Philippines, and now we aren’t so sure. The first one is…

Always have a sales process.

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A week in Manila with a capable and hungry team. Refining their process to help their prospects recognize the value in Instafin, their cloud based core banking system for MFI’s, rural banks and co-ops. Lots of role playing and mocking up live interactions so the team learned from each other.

Johnny does other things at his job, partly to stave off boredom. “Keep it easy. Keep it simple” he says. He cleans the stores, washes the window and sweeps the sidewalk and parking lot. “But mostly,” he says, “they don’t want me cleaning up. They want me in front of this store, bouncing this sign up and down.”

Huh..

What percentage of the people driving by Johnny are actually looking to pawn some gold; 1 in 200, 1 in 500, 1 in a thousand?

Let’s say it’s 1 in 500. And even then, that one person driving by has to make the decision to stop at that shop and make the exchange. And that daily exchange has to net the pawn shop at least $80.

Can it really be worth it to spend $80 a day, $400 a week, every week, on Johnny and his sign?

But they keep employing Johnny, and he’s been there for years. So what gives?

Here’s another way to think about it. Old Aunt Nellie lives a few miles from Johnny’s professional perch. She has a lot of gold in her jewelry box. Inevitably, Aunt Nellie will pass, and someone will inherit her earthly possessions, including her gold jewelry. Someone else might get a hand me down gold chain from a major league baseball playing relative, when cousin Sluggo upgrades to celebrate his new contract. At some point in their lives, perhaps 20% or 30% of the people who drive past Johnny will have a trigger event. They’ll either come into some gold, or be in a situation where they need some quick liquidity.

When that trigger event happens, Johnny’s employer wants the lucky niece or cousin (or the unlucky person who needs quick cash now) to think of Johnny, sitting on the strip between the hedge and the sidewalk bouncing his sign on his knee. He wants to occupy just a sliver of that person’s headspace, just enough so that when they do have some gold to sell, and/or the need to sell it, they remember Johnny. They remember where they can turn their gold into cash. Johnny is not trying to attract the one person who drives by every day who needs to exchange gold for cash. Johnny is just planting the locational message again and again so everybody who drives by knows, even if they don’t know they know, where they can sell their gold.

If anyone can be your customer, advertise anywhere, and advertise enough so that you or your product occupy just enough headspace that you’ll be remembered when the trigger event happens for your potential client.

If only a fraction of the population can be your customer, don’t advertise just anywhere, but do ask yourself the question, “Where is my customer, and what’s the minimum I have to do to occupy a sliver of my potential client’s headspace; just enough so that when they have a need I can fill, they think of me?

Whatever your answer, take a cue from Johnny. Keep it easy. Keep it simple. He makes $1750 a month. His one bedroom apartment is a stone’s throw from where he works. He goes home to his rented apartment and makes himself lunch every day. (He’s saving up to buy his own place. Mr. Money Moustache would be proud.) And as he says “This is the easiest job I’ve ever had.”

And if anyone can be your customer, you can advertise anywhere.

The ideas in this post come from Tim’s book Never Be Closing.

We’ve all had “that’s what I should’ve said” moments. After a discussion is already over, the perfect one-liner, ideal comeback, elegant analogy or consummately constructed point occurs to us. The one parlay that would have made our argument. Golfers have a name for the do-over of a shot that didn’t go where they wanted, the Mulligan. In real life you don’t always get the chance for a live do-over. But, being face-to-face with a new client prospect is the most important moment in sales. If you leave that meeting and don’t revisit it again, the most important moment becomes a lot less important. A meeting loses value if you don’t go back and take a thinking Mulligan, a mental do-over of your meeting.

Not Mulliganing your meeting is the 5th and final client-meeting mistake salespeople make. And, it’s a double mistake. The first is not debriefing the process of your meeting, taking a Mulligan on your meeting technique. The second is not Mulliganing the content of the meeting, to determine where you can be useful, and to gather all the relationship building gems you turned up.

The first part of the debrief is the process debrief. It’s the how of your meeting, and it’s about getting better at your craft; so your next meeting is even better.

The Process Debrief

A good process debrief starts before you set foot in the meeting, with some process thinking, and some notes. These notes about your desired behavior and conduct in the meeting are your Before Action Review (B.A.R.) process objectives. They give you something to reflect against as you review the meeting after. How do you want to be in the meeting? What are the behaviors you want to exhibit? For example, do you want to be more relaxed, more intense, talk less, ask more questions, notice body language? What’s the process you want your meeting to follow? Will it be just a conversation, or will there be a presentation component? How much time do you want to spend on each part of your meeting process? For example, you might write, I want to take advantage of small talk to learn some personal things about the people I’m meeting. Remember, while preparing for the meeting, write down what you want to do and how you want to be in the meeting. You measure your process and execution against these B.A.R. objectives.

The ideal fodder for a debrief would be a complete video of the whole meeting. Think how much you’d learn about how you orchestrate a meeting, and how you conduct yourself if you could see all your behaviors, and hear and see again everything you and your client said and did. Alas, a video of your meeting isn’t usually an option, which is why your meeting notes are critical to leverage what happens in a face to face meeting. (For more on notes see mistake #4 Total Recall).

Your notes from the meeting will usually be more about the content of the meeting than the process. You’re probably more likely to note content like ‘line issues in pre-production’ than you are to make process notes like,’leaned forward and made strong eye contact here.’ However, reading your notes will help you recall what you and your client did or said to get you to that content point in the meeting. This is also why a Before Action Review is so important. It tunes your radar to pay attention to your behavior and your process while you’re in the meeting. (You can also bring a colleague to the meeting and tune them to the process points at which you want to get better.)

The Content Debrief

Part two of the debrief answers the question – What did you learn that you can use to build touchpoints to your client?

Review your meeting notes, ideally with someone else who has a stake in your success, with an eye on generating reasons to touch base again with the person with whom you met. Debriefing the content of the meeting with someone compels you to explain what you learned about your client. And, you have another brain to help make connections between what you learned in the meeting and reasons to re-connect with your client. Imagine the content debrief goal is to create a touchpoint calendar with seventeen, or twenty-six or fifty-two reasons to touch base with that client again over the next several weeks or months. Do a thorough Mulligan and you’ll find ample opportunities, business and personal, to make contact again with your client. Legitimate reasons to stay in touch are the recipe for creating some relationship headspace in your client’s mind. You want to occupy just enough headspace so that when they have a need, they think of you.

When it comes to meetings with prospective clients, always take a Mulligan. Do a do-over of your meeting. You’ll get better at your craft, and all those ideas for getting in touch with your prospective client will get unearthed and on your calendar.

The ideas in this post come from Tim’s book Never Be Closing.

The best client sales meetings don’t feel like a formal meeting. They feel like a conversation between the client and the salesperson, because they are. The best meetings have the ebb and flow of a dialog.

In a training with some salespeople a while back, one of the salespeople, Carl, was receiving feedback about his recent meeting with a client. A meeting that was observed by the salesman’s boss, Don. The gist of Don’s feedback was that Carl’s ardent note-taking, copiously capturing everything the client was saying, had taken him completely out of the conversation. Boss Don pointed out that there were uncomfortable pauses in the conversation where Carl furiously scribbled down what the client had just said, while the client sat waiting for the next question. It wasn’t a conversation, Don noted. It was more a disjointed interrogation.

Sam, another salesperson in the room then boldly stated. “I never take notes in a meeting. I want to pay attention to my client. Taking notes distracts me from being present.”

Sam’s is an admirable sentiment. Being in the conversation with your client is important. A meeting with an empty pause at the end of each question answered makes for an odd meeting.

The face-to-face is the most important part of the sales process for a reason. The reason is that everything that your client tells you, every opinion, preference, piece of information they put forth, every question they ask, is an opportunity. (Carl didn’t want to miss any). The (giant) problem with not taking notes is that if you don’t, you lose the ability to mine the meeting for the dozens of opportunities that surface during the pace of a meeting.
What opportunities? The opportunity to follow up after the meeting with a piece of information, a suggestion, an article, an idea. If you don’t somehow capture the nugget of what’s said, the touchpoint opportunities evaporate like mist in a Las Vegas July. Keep a record, and when you re-read your notes with a creative eye, you’ll discover dozens of touchpoint opportunities; most of which didn’t occur to you while you were in the conversation. This is why face to face conversations with potential clients are so important. We learn. Every drop of information captured in the meeting can help feed the flow of a relationship.

The takeaway is not to not take notes. It’s to capture the information that springs from the chat without checking out of the conversation with your client.

The fourth mistake salespeople make in client meetings is note-taking ineffectiveness. What you capture is the life spring of a nascent relationship with your client. What you don’t record, you lose.

Your notes serve another purpose, in real time. They serve as the improvised meeting agenda; the list of topics that come up that you want to come back too and explore further during the face to face meeting. If your client hints at a problem they’re having that’s different from the one you’re currently exploring, make a note. This is a topic you come back to while you’re together, especially if you or your product or network can help. Understanding your client’s issues is the fertile ground to find opportunities to help. If you don’t make a note, there’s a good chance when the conversation pauses you won’t remember that thing you wanted to ask about. Note it, and it becomes an agenda item for the rest of the meeting.

It’s admittedly tricky to take notes you can later decipher while carrying on a conversation. In it’s simplest terms staying in the conversation means you want to write as little as possible and capture as much as possible. There are a number of tactics to do this better. Bringing a second person to your meeting to be the note-taker or developing symbols; or organizing your note spatially so different quadrants on the page are reserved for different things, are all techniques so you can write less and capture more.

Unless you have the gift of total recall, capturing information during the meeting is critical to making you useful to your client, so you can build a relationship. Plus, good notes are what you need to clear stumbling block #5. Don’t do it, and you don’t even make it to the next hurdle, let alone get over it.

Look for the next post on hurdle #5: The Mulligan.

The thoughts in this post are from Tim’s book Never Be Closing.

Here are the watch-outs for monologuing:

a. Spicoli-ing. I can fix it! When you think you know how to fix the problem your client just finished describing, you stop asking and start telling. This can be especially deadly early in a meeting.

b. Over-scripting – One way to get credibility at the start of the meeting is by using one of your scripts – the things you say again and again because they effectively summarize important points of uniqueness about you, your product or your company. Use a script or two as a tool to get enough credibility so your client will answer the questions you ask. But don’t over-script. As soon as you’ve established credibility, make yourself stop scripting and start asking.

c. Space-filling – You hit the first conversational dead-end, your first empty lull in the dialog, and you jump to fill it up with words; by talking about something you know, rather than asking about something you don’t. It’s more comfortable to talk about what we know than to explore what we don’t. We get to put on the status hat, be professorial and demonstrate our experience. This is all okay, even useful if you do it at the right time. But start ‘lecturing’ too soon, or just to fill a lull, and it often takes some superpower to make yourself stop.

The simple remedy is to wait to do your talking until the end of the meeting. In the middle, ask, listen and learn. Then, what you say at the end will be super.

The next post addresses stumbling block 4: Total Recall.

Stumbling block #2 during meetings with new potential clients (read #1-No Traction) takes on the business mantra: “It’s not personal, it’s just business.”

If you lose a piece of business with a client to a competitor, does it feel personal? When a startup entrepreneur gets angel funding, do you think it feels personal? When you’ve invested ten years building a team, does it feel personal when that team succeeds or fails? No matter what we think or say, part of being human is that most things that happen to us feel personal.

Here’s the important thing to remember. It’s almost always personal, and so should your meeting be. You can have all the right business answers, but there’s someone else out there with those same answers, whom your potential client likes. Most of us prefer to do business with people we like. If your client doesn’t have a feel for who you are as a person, you’re the robot.

In Never Be Closing we call this “kicking the door open to you”. To give someone the opportunity to be interested in you, put a little bit of you into the conversation. Offer a sense for what you find interesting, what you love to do and think about.

There are many natural ways to nudge the conversation in an appropriate personal direction. Here are two…

When you see something in their lobby or on their office wall, a painting, an award, a photo that makes you curious, ask about it. For more read this.

A second way to open the door to you is to make analogies to describe your client’s situation. Analogies draw on your personal experiences and reference how you look at the world. They invite your client to ask you about the analogy, and why it occurred to you.

Don’t be a tin man. They don’t call them business relationships for nothing.

Look for the next post on stumbling block 3: The Lex Luther.

Credibility is often overlooked by salespeople; partly because usually you have it. When your client agreed to meet with you, they extended you enough credibility to ask questions. When your meeting goes wrong due to a lack of credibility, you can’t put your finger on why.

How much credibility do you need? Just enough credibility so the person sitting across from you is prepared to answer the questions you ask. The No Traction mistake is not taking the steps to help your client trust you enough, and relax enough, to answer the questions you need, so you can help.

Credibility has two parts. The first is professional trust, your potential client’s perception or belief that you might be useful to them or provide some value. They trust that you have the skills and the tools to help them move forward on their business interests. The second is a sense of comfort and connection. You appeal to them as a person to whom they might enjoy talking. They believe you have their interest in mind, that you care. Most people need a little of both, faith in your acumen, and connection to you, to be willing to open up. But everyone has a slightly different mix. (For specifics on the building blocks of credibility in these two domains, read this article.

Enough credibility to get your questions answered is a critical to understanding your client’s situation, so you can figure out how to be useful to them. Their perception that you are of use is the key to removing stumbling block #1 that separates potential clients from clients.

See the next post in the series on Stumbling Block #2, Robots!

“What are you talking about?” said my future client.

“In the second half of the 19th century,” I continued, “the annual Paris Salons controlled the commercial art world. If you didn’t go to the academy and paint in the traditional romantic style, you couldn’t get an exhibition at the Salon. The Realists were the first to upset the institutional apple cart, by painting real people doing real things. They painted moles and goiters and missing teeth. The Academy, the establishment, hated it. Then photography came along and photographers had the inside track on realism. Painters began to experiment with light and color. Monet and the rest painted a swirl of messy smudges and dots, and when you stepped back a few feet, voila it was the cathedral at Rouen, painted in the morning light, or in the fog, or at sunset. Impressionism was born and perhaps to prove it’s fruitfulness, Monet painted the same cathedral from the same perspective, but in different light, more than thirty times.”

“Your firm is like Monet. Technology, like the first cameras, has made an entire market less relevant. What used to be an art is now machine made. But that has opened up a new niche for tailoring product, and your company is the first to make the shift. Your prototypes are like Monet in Rouen. You’re experimenting and the early adopters are finding you.”

“Oh,” says my client. “When did you get interested in French Impressionism?”

“I lived in Paris for a while.”

“My husband and I visited Paris last year. We took a lot of pictures. We love photography. Man Ray is one of my heroes. I loved Degas’ paintings of the ballet dancers in the Musee D’Orsay. I’m happy you’ve associated us with the Impressionists. That’s a description of our industry niche that I’ll use with my investors. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Does this sound like a sales conversation to you? If it doesn’t it should. A good sales conversation, like any good conversation, is interesting. And analogy makes conversation more interesting.

An analogy is a comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and usually for the purpose of explanation or clarification.

Here’s why analogy is valuable…

1. Analogize, and you illustrate for your client that you have a brain in your head and can make connections that aren’t just linear. You show your capacity for creative thinking; a trait most clients want in the salespeople who represent them.
2. Analogy is a form of disclosure. And disclosure invites disclosure. You now know more about your client; Paris visit, photography, Man Ray, Degas. You have lots of opportunities to get in touch again, like when their city’s art museum has a Degas or Man Ray exhibition.
3. Your client knows more about you. You’re not just some business robot. You are an interesting person, who might be fun to hang out with.
4. The analogy you offered could be useful when they think about their business or talk about it to stakeholders.

Analogy and Sales. They go together.

Happy Analogizing.

The ideas for this post come from my book Never Be Closing.

I was driving from Miami to Orlando on the day after the Super Bowl. My rental car had satellite radio. Midway through the drive, I realized I could listen to Super Bowl sports talk radio to my heart’s content. So, a New England Patriots fan since 1970, I did.

The radio host cut off the caller, in order to comment uninterrupted. “Malcolm Butler made one great, smart football play that won the game for New England. He picked off the pass, but you don’t give the MVP to a player for one play.”

Malcolm Butler sealed the deal for the Patriots. Sniffing that play out and stepping in front of the receiver. Indeed, knocking the receiver off the ball to do it, was the defining moment in the Patriots victory. It was the Most Valuable Play.

But, I agreed with the host. You don’t give the MVP to a player for one play, no matter how extraordinary or important that play is.

…All he did was pick off one pass…

That phrase was repeating itself in my head. It reminded me of something. Something my intuition was nagging me to think more about.

As I ruminated further on my three and a half hour drive, another story in my life began to play itself out in my head.

When I first began my professional career; long before the New England Patriots had won any Super Bowls, I occupied a cubicle on the 13th floor of an office building in downtown Boston. From one side of our floor plan, you could look out over the South East Expressway, now underground, courtesy of Boston’s twenty-year Big Dig construction project. From the other side, the office looked out over the Fort Point Channel and the Boston Tea Party ship. Down the hall from my cubicle was an empty office. Well, most of the time it was empty. Once every two weeks the salesperson, Ernie, who occupied it, would be there for a few hours. The rest of the time, he was out playing golf or dining at fine restaurants. One day, I was searching through some file cabinets outside his office as he hung up the phone. He sat back at his desk with a big smile and waved me in.

“I just stole the Mecklenberg deal from our competition.”

“How’d you do that? I asked.

He grinned and pointed at his desk.

“All I did was pick up the phone.”

Thirty minutes later Ernie took a victory lap. In fact, Ernie hadn’t left his office in those thirty minutes. I had unwittingly prepared Ernie’s victory lap by mentioning Ernie’s coup to one of the senior analysts, as he knew I would. The news spread from there. A victory lap makes it sound athletic. It wasn’t. Ernie had a big belly and a soft body. By the time he was waddling through the hallways enough people knew about the Mecklenberg coup that he was shaking hands, fielding questions and slapping backs, as the rest of my colleagues learned of Ernie’s interception.

The company buzzed for three days. Ernie had meetings with the President and the CEO and even ownership to iron out the details of execution. During that time, Ernie took at least one victory parade a day around the office.

From my perch in cubicle #137, it seemed like Ernie had a great job. He had admitted to me, that all he had done was “pick up the phone.” The rest of the time Ernie was golfing, eating or so it seemed to me, basking in the limelight of “picking up the phone,” and making a lot more money than the rest of us.

Ernie had his own analyst who was a friend of mine. Dan was always busy, even if Ernie wasn’t. I resented Ernie. He got the glory for answering the phone, and Dan got the work that needed to be done. A few days later, while Dan and I were having a sandwich together at a local deli, I shared my thoughts on his boss. I expected that once someone empathized with Dan’s plight, the floodgates would open, and I’d hear all about what a lucky, lazy guy Ernie was.

That’s not what happened.

Dan said, “I love working for Ernie. He doesn’t sweat the small stuff, and he enjoys life. But he is relentless. And I don’t mean in his pursuit of customers. I mean in following his process, preparing, and finding ways to be constantly in touch with clients. Then figuring out ways to help them get what they want. After every meeting with a prospective client, even clients we’ve had for years, Ernie and I have at least an hour phone call. He fills me in on everything he learned, and together we build ideas for what to do next. Then we decide who’s going to do it. I do most of it, the bridge building. That’s what Ernie calls it. Building bridges to the client, over and over and over.”

Dan sat back and looked out the window at the crisp blue Boston winter sky. “It’s really a repetitive process in its execution, and a creative process in the moment. It’s being prepared and doing the work as best you can. Ernie has taught me a ton.”

I told Dan, that Ernie admitted to me that all he did “was pick up the phone.”

“Yeah. That’s Ernie humor. He wasn’t being serious. I assure you. There’s a reason he was in the office that day to field that call. He knew it was coming.”

Like most New England Patriots fans, I watched the Super Bowl a second time. And then I watched it again; the third time with an eye on Malcolm Butler.

From just under three minutes to go in the 3rd quarter until the end of the game, Seattle runs sixteen offensive plays (not counting kicks). Malcolm Butler figures prominently in seven of these plays. He makes a positive impact eight times in those sixteen plays. Malcolm Butler was all over the field in the last two quarters, relentlessly making great football plays.

Here they are..

1. On first down with 2:37 to go in the third quarter, Butler stuffs Marshawn Lynch on a run up the middle.

2. On the next play, Kearse catches a ball in the right flat and is immediately taken down by Butler, forcing Seattle into a third down.

3. On third down, Seattle targets Butler again, sending Kearse down the left sideline. Russell Wilson throws a perfect pass. Malcom Butler is stride for stride with Kearse, and grabs Kearse’s right arm just as the ball hits his hands. Kearse doesn’t make the catch.

Seattle punts.

On it’s next possession, New England scores to move within three points of Seattle.

4. On the first play of Seattle’s next possession, Wilson throws a twenty-yard pass over the middle to #83 Lockette. Butler is on the coverage; he falls down. But as Butler is hitting the turf, he extends his arm just far enough to catch Lockette’s heel. Lockette trips. The pass is incomplete. I’ve watched the play seven times at full speed and I never see Butler’s hand hit Lockette’s heel. Watch the play in close-up slow-mo, and it’s clear that Butler makes contact with Lockette’s shoe on purpose. It is pass interference. But Butler does it in such a way that it looks like he’s reaching only to break his fall. He brilliantly disguises the trip. If Lockette makes the catch, he has only one Patriot to beat and he’s in the end zone. It’s a decisive play.

Two plays later Seattle punts.

The ensuing possession ends when Brady connects with Edelman in the end zone to give new England a 28-24 lead.

5. On Seattle’s final possession at midfield with 1:50 remaining in the game, Wilson throws another perfect pass straight over the middle to Kearse in the seam. Butler is running stride for stride again. He leaps just as the ball arrives, tipping the ball away from Kearse, negating a thirty yard Seattle gain.

6. Then the miracle catch- Streaking down the right sideline, Butler gets his hand exactly between Kearse’s outstretched hands and Wilson’s thirty yard pass, and tips the ball up and away from Kearse. Kearse winds up on his back on the turf at the five-yard line; the ball bounces first on one knee then the other, and Kearse corrals the ball while on the ground. He jumps to his feet, and races towards the goal line.

7. Butler stays with the play and takes Kearse out of bounds at the four-yard line. The announcers point out that after a crazy catch that appears to have been an incompletion, the receiver often skips into the end zone before the defenders know what happened.

8. And finally, The Interception. Butler sniffs out the goal line crossing pattern and beats the receiver to the ball, sealing the deal for New England.

Eight heads up football plays in Seattle’s final sixteen plays of the game. Any one of which, if Butler doesn’t make, could change the outcome of Super Bowl XLIX. If Malcolm Butler isn’t on the field for the fifteen Seattle plays that preceded his interception, the Patriots have already lost.

In the post game interview Malcolm Butler is too emotional to go into much detail, but he does say it was all about preparation. This seems like just what coaches tell athletes to say in interviews. But later interviews with Butler and Coach Belichick reveal that the goal line pick play was something the Patriots had prepared for. Indeed, Butler was burned on the play in practice. And Belichick reportedly said to Butler in one of the final play stoppages to “watch out for that pick play.”

Butler later admitted something like,” When I saw the formation I was ready for the pick play. Actually, I was so ready for it, if they ran something else, I was in trouble.”

So, not only did all the work Malcolm Butler do in the last half of the football game put his team in a place where the play could even happen, his focused preparation in the weeks leading up to the game were critical. Malcolm Butler worked his ass off to put himself in a position to pick off that pass.

I no longer agree with the radio host. Malcolm Butler is the MVP of Super Bowl XLIX.

Perhaps, it’s a stretch to say that his interception was a foregone conclusion. But Malcolm Butler’s work was responsible for the Patriot’s still having a chance. Because of his preparation, he knew where the ball was going to be on that play. All he had to do was be there…

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