As a warm up question, I start with the foreign secretary. An easy one, I think, but the roomful of students stare at me, unconvinced.
“Jack Straw!” they cry.
Good, but not right. We move on and score a direct hit with Ed Balls as children’s secretary.
“What if,” I ask the guests at careers event Bright London, “the prime minister decides he’s fed up with the politicians in the cabinet? Who should he replace them with tomorrow?” This, I know at once, is a more interesting question.
“Richard Branson, Alan Sugar,” come the replies.
“What if it could be anyone, though?” I ask.
The answers start to fly: “Will Smith! Beyoncé!”
Finally, the question I’ve had in mind all along: “What about YOUR cabinet? Your special group of advisers? Who’s in, who’s out?”
Well, as far as Gordon Brown’s concerned, his foreign secretary is still very much in. So when an invitation arrived to meet him recently, you’d think I would have jumped at the chance. The problem was, it clashed with a meeting I’d arranged with my accountant, so I politely declined. Cometh the day and, of course, my trusty numerical magician cancels the meeting.
This is an example of the old maxim that you can do anything you want, but not everything. Some of the time, I make the right decisions about which invitations to accept and which to decline. Clearly, by not jilting my number cruncher for the foreign secretary, I had chosen unwisely.
Apparently, Eden Project founder Tim Smit accepts every third invitation, however humble, that lands on his doormat. One such modest missive invited him to speak at Hestercombe Gardens in Taunton, Somerset – a gathering that his assistant assured him would be made up of 10 people and a dog.
The crowd was modest, but the talk went well. Fast forward several years, and Tim is pitching for money at a European level. A question is raised as to his commitment to supporting the whole of the South West, beyond just Cornwall. At this moment, a steady yet influential voice intervenes.
“I saw Tim Smit speaking to a very small group in Somerset once,” it says. “And I know that a man without a deep commitment to this whole region would never, ever have accepted such an invitation.”
That single vote was worth millions of pounds. But how can you get people to accept YOUR invitations? It’s another one of the questions I put to the Bright London students. Although I break the news as gently as possible, I tell them that most of the time, businesspeople will not say “yes” or “no”, but simply nothing. Bright London dims momentarily as the news sinks in. “The trick,” I elaborate, “is in how you respond to the sound of silence.”
Whether you’re pitching to an investor, potential partner or future boss, the choice is yours. Most people reply to nothing with nothing. It’s the few, who ferret into their sent items and resend the original email with a snappy one-liner who eventually succeed.
A student wonders if there is a special witching hour when you’re most likely to get an acceptance. “There are two,” I reply. “My extensive research has shown that for maximum impact, strike between 7am and 8am, and 11pm and midnight. You never know who will be just beginning or just ending their day with a ‘yes’.”