Pitch Factory Limited’s Post

Transcript

Hi, my name is Tony Tracy and I'm going to do a blog post on how to make a presentation more impactful. We all want to make an impact. Who wouldn't be focused? Keep to the subject. Don't waffle, Don't overcomplicate. This is good advice, but it's not enough. It doesn't make you more impactful. What impact means is that the client you're presenting to remembers what you've told them, and more importantly, what you've told them is going to influence what they think it's going to shape their opinion of you and what your business offers them. Which must be clear is what you want. If I was working with you to create a presentation for one of your clients, I'd start by explaining how your relationship with the client has two states. I'm going to call the first the current state and the second the future state. Now the current state describes your relationship today. The Future State is the place you want to push your relationship to through delivering the presentation you're currently writing. So let's consider the current state for a moment in a bit more detail. The current state encompasses everything the clients already knows about you, who you are, the company or business you work for, what you do for a job, the products and services your company offers. Who you work for and what you're good at. Your skills and capabilities. Anything and everything. The current state is what they know. So by definition, imagine if you were to look at the topics you intend to include. And where to find that everything you planned to talk about the clients already knew? Then it would be obvious, wouldn't it, that if you go ahead then you won't be impactful because your client isn't going to learn anything new about you. And this, believe it or not, it happens quite often. You wouldn't believe the number of times I've seen presentations from pitch factory clients that are a rehash of the same old stuff that they've resented before. So if you were to make a list of topics or points that the client knows about you, you've now got a list of things not to cover in this presentation, and you can instead start the job of identifying things the client doesn't know about you. This list of topics will fill gaps in the client's knowledge. It will build on what they know about you already and deepen their understanding of your capabilities. This list of topics will enable you to explain the benefits of working with you, and it might deepen their understanding of complex and technical issues. Now the meeting goal. By that I mean the reason you're creating the presentation in the 1st place is to move your relationship forward, and this list of topics is going to help you achieve that. Armed with the list of things to talk about, you're then able to start to plan the presentation story. What needs to be struck out because it isn't relevant? In what order do we talk about the topics? So there's a narrative to the presentation that flows nicely and makes sense. Ask yourself, does it make sense to cover these topics in this order? Does this approach make it easy for the client to understand what you're trying to get across, or does it all seem a bit disjointed and confusing? Good stories don't jump about from topic to topic randomly. Instead, the story should leave the client in a way that seems logical. Both the topics themselves and the sequence makes sense. The points being covered belong together and there is a rationale for covering them in a particular order. And then of course, the focus moves on to preparing to deliver a presentation that will inform and illuminate your conversation with a client that will move you from the current state to the future state. That's what impact means.