If you finally get the chance to make that critical presentation to a room full of high level decision makers, you want to make sure you make the most of it. You have a captive audience, you are the center of attention, and you get a platform to sell your product or service to people who really matter. It’s a rare opportunity, so why not make it last as long as possible? After all, the executives who come to listen to you are bored with the drudgery of their tasks, and are eager to bask as long as possible in your brilliance.
Here are seven guaranteed ways to ensure that you captivate their full attention for as long as possible:
Give an infomercial: Make sure you tell them about every cool feature of your product.
Tell your “corporate story”: You are justly proud of your company and they should know why.
Fall in love with your slides: Someone, maybe corporate marketing or you, put a lot of work into them, and besides the animations are awesome!
Show them in painstaking detail how you reached your conclusions: If they don’t know how difficult it was, they won’t appreciate it.
Tell long stories: Stories are good in a presentation, so long stories are even better, right?
Think out loud: It’s important that they know without a doubt how smart you are.
Don’t practice or prepare: Why detract from the spontaneity that makes you such an interesting person to listen to?
As I said, strategic sales presentations are rare and valuable opportunities, and if you follow these tips, you can’t help but make them even more rare and valuable.
In a conversation I had recently with one of my coaching clients, she asked me how to handle a request from a senior level executive for a report on a particular topic. Although she had an idea why he needed the information, she was not exactly sure, and for various reasons was not in a position to probe further for clarification. She was in a quandary: how much should she pack into her response. Her question for me was, is it better to cover all possible contingencies to ensure he got what he needed, or to focus on her own guess?
I’ve fielded this question in various ways many times in the past, because it’s a common issue I see when experts interact with generalists. I’ve also heard many times form the generalist side, those at senior levels who need information to make informed decisions or recommendations higher up their own chain of command. Typically, their complaint is that when they ask someone what time it is, they’re given a tutorial on watchmaking. In general, they prefer less rather than more; if they need more they will ask for it.
On the other hand, those providing the information, because they know so much about the topic, hesitate to give a simple yes or no because they see so many shades of grey. More selfishly, they are afraid of being caught short by not giving the questioner what they need, or they think they can bolster their own credibility by showing off their command of a difficult and nuanced topic. So, they give more rather than less, and expect the recipient to glean what they need from the mass of information. Recipients may not have the time or inclination to dig through it for what they need, and the consequence is inefficient and ineffective communication, which helps neither party.
Because she works in software development, I asked her if she was familiar with the concept of a minimum viable product, and she instantly caught on to what I was proposing. Basically, an MVP is a way of getting to market quickly with a product that works, that just does what it’s supposed to do, rather than delaying launch to pack in features to try to please everyone. In effect, an MVP is a best-guess hypothesis about what the market needs. It’s not a stab in the dark, because it’s based on your knowledge of the “customer” and your analysis of the situation.
Give them what you think they need. Answer their question directly without hedges, caveats and circumlocutions. Most of the time, you will give them exactly what they need, but if they need more, they will ask for it. The payoff for them is time and clarity; they won’t have to wade through a swamp of excessive detail to get exactly what they need.
The payoff for you is time and credibility. Make this a habit, and others will find that you are a clear, prompt and credible source of the information and judgment—and that will make you a different sort of MVP!
In lean manufacturing, making work visible is about organizing work so that everyone involved is clear at all times what the status of work is, and the most important next steps are obvious. As I’ve written earlier, the core of lean is the development of awareness of value and waste, and you can’t be aware of what you can’t see.
In lean communication, it’s about structuring your message so that a) you can see clearly what you’re saying, and b) your listeners can too. You need a clear structure that exposes your logic so you more can easily spot flaws and gaps, and correct them before someone else does for you. That structure also makes it more likely that listeners will get the meaning you intend, not the one that they might infer.
If it means outlining a long message or presentation, so be it. Mindmapping might also help, but a traditional outline is usually better because you still have to speak sequentially. Besides outlining as you prepare your remarks, you can “tell them what you’re going to tell them.” (But I don’t recommend telling them what you told them, if you can see that they got it—that would violate the pull principle of lean communication.)
If it means following a template, there’s nothing wrong with that either. Templates keep you from reinventing the wheel every time you speak and ensure you don’t miss anything critical. The best template is the one that systematically answers the likely questions in the audience’s mind.
Besides having a clear structure, it helps even more to make the structure visible by having signposts and highlights while you’re speaking. For example, if someone asks you what could delay your project, you might say: “There are three possible risks. The first is…”
By making it easy for others to follow you’re adding value, reducing waste, and making yourself appear more credible at the same time.
Give them what they want when they want it
In lean manufacturing it’s called kanban, or pull. Rather than pumping out tons of inventory in the hope that someone will buy it, the producer makes what’s needed as needed, when the customer asks for it. This prevents the buildup of inventory which costs money, takes up space, and leads to frequent mismatches between what’s needed and what’s available.
The same thing happens in communications. Most speakers, whether presenting or in a conversation, give their listeners more than they need. For example, how often do you read to the end of an article such as this one? One indication of the amount of waste in the typical communication is that most people don’t “consume” 100% of what is expressed. But here’s the problem. It’s like what John Wanamaker said about advertising: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
How do you know what they need?
You can try to narrow it down by knowing your audience, but you will never know for sure. It’s like a company that introduces a new product. Despite focus groups and pilots, most new product launches fail. The only way to know a product will work is to put it out there and see what sells. As a speaker, you want to follow the same approach, but the good news is that it doesn’t cost you as much, and you can pivot quickly when you note that something isn’t selling.
How does pull work in communication?
You give the bare minimum needed for the listener to get your gist, and then add as necessary. It’s like a newspaper article. The headline gives you the point of the story (if it’s written correctly), and then the first paragraph (what journalists call the nut graf) encapsulates the story in one easily digestible piece. Sometimes that’s enough, but often it sparks curiosity or drives additional questions. You may worry that too much pull will cause you to lose control, but that’s a lot less likely if you are perfectly clear about your main point and structure right up front.
When I coach clients on how to present to executives, they often complain that they barely get past the first slide of their carefully crafted presentation before they are peppered with questions from the audience. I tell them that, within limits, that’s a good thing. It’s kanban communication in action—they know that they are targeting what their audience wants and needs to hear. Especially when presenting to impatient senior executives, you should always be prepared for them to take control of your presentation. When they ask the question, you can bet they will listen to the answer.
Pull communication solves the problem of tailoring your presentation to the knowledge level and interests of your listeners. You may begin with a detailed explanation of the problem only to find out that your audience already knows about it and is impatient to get to your recommended solutions, for example.
Pull also affects the level of detail on your slides. Keep it limited to headlines and a few keywords and visuals for support, and have additional detail available on backup slides just in case. Nothing makes you look better prepared and more considerate of your audience than responding to a difficult question by pulling up just the information needed just when it’s needed.
Of course, pull won’t work if you’re not actively paying attention to your listeners and inviting questions as you’re talking, which of course is another reason to keep it simple at the start.
In the early 80s there was a major controversy between advocates of supply-side and demand-side economics, and I’m not even sure which side was proven right. I do know, however, that demand-side works wonders in lean communication.
