What NOT to Say
I want to talk about the importance of knowing what not to say. This isn’t about fancily avoiding hot button topics, but more of a process to zero in on and focus only on what is important at the purposeful exclusion of everything else.
This theme crops up in many materials from Covey’s 7 Habits to Reynold’s Presentation Zen to Cohen’s Great Demo! to Babauta’s Power of Less to Akinson’s Beyond Bullet Points.
I tend to use an amalgamation of recommendations from these resources and others to really hone my presentations. Here is the process I use. It isn’t so much about the specific process you adopt, just that you incorporate the underlying principles.
Qualify, qualify, qualify
If Location3 is the real estate axiom, I propose Qualify as ours. Qualify way more than what superficially appears to be needed.
- Uncover all stakeholders - The needs of a system administrator (for example) should align to other goals in the organization–even in different groups such as Finance and end users. Uncover all areas you may impact.
- Go vertical - The goals of the sysadmin should also always align with specific goals in their management chain (misalignment is a big red flag). Work to uncover and articulate the goal as it pertains to each layer in the management chain.
- Business demography - Work with your rep and the customer to determine not only who will be at your presentation, but also who is calling it, setting the agenda, and the primary audience member(s).
Prioritize
Priorities are always determined by the audience–not you. Here’s what I use to keep me on track.
- Get all your benefits down on paper - Create a list of all the product benefits that you found applied during your qualification efforts.
- Map benefits to stakeholder - With your list of all benefits uncovered, map them to specific stakeholders. Realistically, you will sometimes need to make assumptions.
- Prioritize by stakeholder - Avoid the trap of first trying to prioritize your perceived most important benefits based on your knowledge of the product. For each stakeholder, rank the actual (or guesstimated) priority of benefits this person/group is interested in.
Focus
Up to this point we’ve been greedy with our assumptions and lists. Here we begin to prune our message until it is easily digestible by our intended audience.
- Rule of 3 - Start with the top 3 benefits of each stakeholder that will be attending your presentation. Ignore the others for now.
- Find themes - Because you want to maximize the value of your time with the customer, you necessarily have to service more than one master. Rarely are you only presenting to one audience type. Find broad themes across the remaining benefits you have listed.
- Rule of 3 (cont) - Take the top 3 overall themes. Write each one as a separate statement that characterizes the benefit in a scope that addresses each audience type.
- Add structure - Organize the 3 remaining benefits by overall priority to the group
Support
Telling your audience about the wild and wonderful benefits of your product is boring. You need to show them the “so whats” of your main points.
- Rule of 3 (cont) - Find three supporting product features, proof points, sample reports, customer success stories, etc. Do this for each of your 3 main points. Beyond Bullet Points provides a sample template you can use to keep this organized.
Delivery
- Start with salt - Salt your audience by demonstrating the effort required to get to the final unveiling.
- Have a hook - Don’t put your hook in the middle or end. Order your presentation with the most important benefit up front and work down from there. For each benefit, begin with the most compelling representation (proof point). You want them hooked from the first second.
- Mind your transitions - I always like to add a story component if I can. One example might be the day in the life of the sysadmin going back to my previous example. This forces you to make sense out of your transitions between benefits and give the audience a contextual lattice work for your presentation.
What NOT to Say?
Simple. After you’ve gone through this process you will have a prioritized grid of primary benefits, key support points, and connective story. You can then smile and blindingly ignore everything else that didn’t make the cut.
Superficially it seems like a lot of work, but try it a few times and it gets to be second nature. Plus, you can’t imagine what a stress reliever it is to be able to focus on a handful of well-qualified topics during a presentation.
Related Posts at thesalesengineer.com
Filed under: Demo, Presentation, Proof of Concept
