Presentations for small audiences
My dislike of slide presentations is vehement and long-standing. Even so, my consulting duties often lead me to critique vendors’ slide decks, hoping to make them a little more tolerable. 🙂 Most of the precepts I rely on in these exercises can be encapsulated in “C” words:
- All messaging needs to be Clear, Compelling, and Credible.
- Credibility depends upon, among other factors, Consistency.
- All collateral should be Cleanly Copy-edited.
- A presentation should always be tailored for the specific audience and purpose (it’s not a crazy stretch to call that Context).
And at the risk of drowning in excessive Cs, slide decks are a primary venue for a recent post topic: Short lists of Concise Claims.
Let’s talk a bit about that tailoring. Some things are shown only to very specific audiences. For example:
- Certain numbers are only for internal consumption.
- Other numbers are mainly for investors. (You don’t probably don’t want to show a sales prospect your estimate for Total Addressable Market.)
- Explicit sales qualification criteria are mainly for sales training, although they are occasionally relevant in other internal or investor contexts.
Even so, you’re unlikely to invest in entirely separate presentations for each of press, analysts, knowledgeable prospects, less educated prospects, etc. Rather, it’s often a best practice to:
- Build a slide deck that’s too long for any one particular meeting, and then …
- … pick and choose from it based on the interests of each particular audience.
- Adjust your verbiage greatly on a meeting-by-meeting basis.
Beyond the obvious, such as industry or enterprise size, how do you figure out what to tell each particular audience? In three words: Listen to them!! A good salesperson can and should do a lot of that in preliminary conversations; in influencer/investor kinds of meetings, however, you may rely more on feedback as the discussion progresses. Either way, focus on what the audience cares about, is interested in, or is likely to see as a good reason for (in)action. In any case:
- Don’t make the mistake of insisting that every presentation follow the same script.
- Also, don’t spend too much of each presentation anticipating and answering whichever questions arose in the last one.*
*I have too often been guilty of that error, in my stock analyst and startup CEO periods alike.
Generalities to bear in mind include:
- Different audiences have very different levels of technical depth and interest.
- But with that said:
- Even non-technical audiences should be given some reason to think you have a sustainable technical advantage.
- Even technical listeners should be reminded of the business-benefit reasons that you bother doing what you do.
- Different prospect organizations have different needs, so you don’t want to pitch the same features and benefits to all of them. However …
- … prospects like to hear that you can meet needs GREATER than theirs, so you might want to at least quickly mention why — for example — you’re scalable enough for large web companies, detailed enough for the Fortune 50, and secure enough for the financial services industry and the CIA alike.
Finally, I have some more specific tips about organizing decks and pitches. In particular:
- The most generic and reusable part of a slide deck is its beginning — the “setting the table” part. A natural sequence is:
- Whatever seems necessary to introduce and identify you.
- Some validation as part of the introduction — company size, customer logos, whatever.
- The big business problem/need you’re helping with.
- A little validation about the problem/need.
- Some common difficulties in satisfying the need, which are happily absent in your solution.
- Specifically how you meet the need.
- Only then should you turn to nitty-gritty such as:
- Technical details (in a sales meeting).
- Details of the latest product release (in a press meeting).
- Specific customer success stories.
- Tread lightly when you validate the problem/need.
- Ideally, your audience agrees on the need, so if you spend effort on proving it, you’re just undermining agreement that was already reached.
- Quoting influencers is dangerous. Quoting influencers to other influencers can be downright insulting.
- Quoting market size numbers is dangerous, unless you’re pitching investors. Most other kinds of audiences won’t care, except insofar as they recoil from your display of greed.
- Tread even more lightly in the area of head-to-head competitive claims. If you must make such claims at all, restrict them to conversation, rather that writing them on slides. And by the way, an assertion of uniqueness is a special kind of head-to-head competitive claim. I feel strongly about all this because:
- You aren’t an expert on the competition.
- You don’t want to be on record as saying something wrong.
- You probably don’t want to talk about any competitors except the ones that will anyway come to your audience’s mind.
- In a sales pitch, the nitty-gritty should be heavily tailored to the specific prospect. If you can’t do that in the slides, definitely do it in the voiceover.
- It’s OK to have slides that the audience doesn’t care about — but only if you rush through them at warp speed. Of course, you should dwell lovingly on the parts of your pitch that do resonate with your listeners.
Related links
Some of my previous posts overlap in subject area with this one. Most can be found by following links in the marketing communications blog category or our highly popular strategy worksheet.
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[…] Presentations for small audiences (August, 2014) […]
[…] A number of my posts reflect that reality. Most comprehensive are probably my 2014 post about presentations to small audiences and my 2008 survey of many kinds of influencer. Relevant bits of other posts include: You can’t […]