Watching National and Internation Portfolio Calls, hearing the presentations by our sales and management personnel pretty much boils down into a boring tirade of buzzwords and numbers.
They all start with at least 15 minutes ob blah about our company and who we are. > Trust me. If you’re presenting in Germany, they know who we are. Outside of Germany there should be a short 2-5 minutes of explanation, but not more. Next would be the obligatory praises and back patting for everyone in management, who ever had to read through the summaries in any of the documentations. Even as an employee of the company I couldn’t care less at this time.
Usually we are now 20-30 minutes into a presentation and haven£t hear a word about:
- What it does
- Where it will generate customer value
or - How much does it cost
I’ll skip the “Is it internationally available” because… well 90% of our offerings really aren’t, so why bother?
Do we hear some of these key fact now? Probably not. Instead we focus on the WHERE IS IT LOCATED … which might be great news, but is totally irrelevant for the solution. Well.. unless you need to rent a data connection from you customers network to an individual T-Systems data center in order to even sell this service… oh… I forgot, you’ll probably need to.
We’re now heading into a short and very rough description of the “what it does” followed by pages of UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITIONS. In my view some people really should learn the menaing of the word: UNIQUE.
- First there rarely more than one a single company can claim for it self
- If you have a competitor, that offers the same service, you simple are not unique
So please, call it whatever you like “Competitor Comparison Chart” for example, but please spare me the pages full of logos and commodities that we have a unique selling proposition for. We simply don’t.
Now we get down and dirty with numbers of seats, ressources, customer references and the lot… and very likely on one page of Powerpoint.
aaaand.. times up.
What have we learned in 1 hour of presentation?
- I can do a lot of emails while they are talking
- I can make some phone calls on the side
- These office chairs are comfy
- something about blah
Because, let’s face it: Most of these presentations are boring as hell.
I actually hang up on a very interesting topic in the NPC yesterday because I couldn’t stand the presentation anymore. If you’re f**king Product Manager of a new cloud based solution the go on and sell it to me!
- If you’re talking 10 minutes of “Ah”, “Ähm” and “Uh” to me, I’m not listening.
- If you’re not prepared to present I will notice.
- If there is no structure in what you say I won’t follow.
It’s very much Presenting 101. Build a storyline and be prepared for what you want to say. Simply building a slide set won’t help you.
Take a look at:
Great Speakers Tell Stories from Slides That Rock.