Recently, I attended a sales conference trying to promote interest in a relatively new technology trend. This was a large production – I am guessing over 1000 technologists enjoying the hospitality of 3 of the very largest international technology companies (together their market cap is just short of $200B.) –The companies flew in some of their best sales stars from abroad, so we assumed that we were in for a real treat. Unfortunately one of my main take away messages was that the skills of being an effective presenter are in short supply.
I want to focus on one unfortunate presenter let’s call him Jim (not his real name) who had flown through 10 time zones to be given the middle slot in a 3 person breakout session – just before a late lunch. So Jim has my every sympathy – he got a really rotten deal – I just hope that he was really in country for some excellent one on one meetings, to at least justify the time it took him to get here and return home.
However, Jim made pretty much every possible presentation error known to the PMM world – no small feat in only around 15-20 minutes. Let me state at the outset that I and at least several others only managed to figure out what the presentation was about in the last slide or so. It was very informative seeing Jim up there - here are a few of his mistakes – I hope it gets you cringing with shared embarrassment, find some sympathy for Jim who sacrificed himself for the greater good, and please firmly resolve not to make these mistakes next time you are up there.
Know your Audience & Speak to Them – Jim assumed that everybody in the room knew about his company, its product and the reasons why it had just been acquired by one of these huge companies hosting our lunch. WRONG – most of us had never heard of them; and were either passively learning or intrigued by title on the agenda. This is a really common problem that happens in webinars, at sales meetings and at internal briefings. Unless the session is very clearly understood to be at an advanced level you probably need to assume a much less savvy audience than you would like or intuitively expect – you need to find a way of getting them interested without insulting the people who have the background.
Never, never start a presentation with the Competition – Its negative, very negative and completely pointless until I understand who you are – tell me what you do, why you are good and why you are what I need – at the end maybe tell me about the other guys – but generally why give them free advertising?
Get me Interested at the Beginning– Jim’s last slide was a case study & it was wow! If only that had been the first slide he would have captured our attention & to be honest he would have got 90% of his message over whilst people were still in the room and still listening.
Timings – So we all do it – we need to share our knowledge and passion and give a complete picture. We need to share everything right now. I don’t know what Jim expected and what he really got in terms of timings, but he was literally panting from slide one, in a desperate rush to get through the slides. He wanted to get through the slides – what he should have been doing is focusing on his message. In any meeting like this you need to be ruthless in trimming the presentation and ideally you should have an emergency plan in mind about how to cut it even further if you are left racing the clock. Less is really more in these situations.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words – So we all know this one too – but for most of us it is so much easier to throw down 1000’s of words. The problem that Jim had was that it was a large room, a huge projection and he had a small font so for most of the room it was like trying to read the newspaper of the guy 20 rows in front of you on the plane – it was just not happening. We all like having the info on the slides – it reminds us and lets the audience read and learn for themselves. WRONG – you need to know your message and the audience should be listening to you – that’s why you travelled half way around the world! For further information on this I recommend http://www.presentationzen.com that has many interesting tips and refreshing ideas on skills and approaches to presentation. Explore the ideas of the naked presenter. Guy Kawaski (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html#axzz1637iAUyr) who has a rule that the smallest font should be no smaller than half the age of oldest person in the room (and ideally 30 points).
Bob spoke after Jim – he was the session that should have been lunch and he was a techie and clearly also not a gifted public speaker, but, he was really engaging – he had some pictures, in the first couple of slides we understood the main messages and he used humour – not the stand-up variety, not vulgar, but just basically dumb engineer jokes. But most of the audience were there in their capacity as engineers and so he vey successfully connected with the audience, he got their attention and made an impact.
So Jim – thanks for being such a good sport (if it is any consolation you were not the only lousy presenter) and for giving us this opportunity to remember the principles of good presentations – it’s all about clarity of messages, good graphics, effective time management and speaking to your audience.
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