So I’m not sure how qualified I am to offer sage advice about winning 9 figure deals but my experience of them is that they are pretty much the same as 6 figure ones… and on those I’m pretty experienced, 76% hit rate on over 150 deals over the last 15 years.

So here are my 7:

1. Don’t bid
2. Don’t present
3. Don’t DIY
4. Don’t trust
5. Don’t play fair
6. Don’t preach
7. And whatever you do: Don’t use bullets

Perhaps I should explain:

Don’t bid

The last $Billion I worked on cost the bidder £4million, which even at a low percentage profit of say 5% is an amazing ROI but for each winner there are at least 2 losers, in the last one 6! And they didn’t get a good return; they got nothing (although I think some of them may have got fired!).

When I’m asked to join a bid team I try very hard to persuade them to No Bid. I rarely succeed, but the last few times I have, they eventually won the deal. Purchasing need to run a process and in order to run a process they need you to bid so especially if you are the market leader saying no generally gets an indignant “Why Not?” which gets us in at the ‘C’ suite to talk about why the bid is flawed and how as it is it will fail and how if they change the plan it will succeed and of course then, we would be happy to bid.

In my experience No Bidding fleshes out the real deals from the smoke screens, gains you access to the right people and allows you focus on the deals that are real and winnable rather than just desirable.

Don’t present

All too often presenting is a one way flow of information. The more dialogue you can get the easier it is to win. If the prospect wants to talk, let them. In fact we plan it, nurture it, manipulate it. People are much more likely to buy a plan they helped develop the more they feel ownership of it the more they buy into delivering it. We have had great success at getting prospects to join in, drawing the solution with the presenter. When at the next meeting the diagram is presented back to them.. the team hit a home run.

Don’t DIY

All that effort, all that time, all that money and you show up with home made slides.. Nothing says lack of commitment like DIY. Get professional help for the presentation, for the RFP, use designers, use coaches, use experts. As I like to point out when a client tells me that my fee is expensive.. it’s a dam sight cheaper than losing!

Don’t trust

Straight out of Sun Tsu, battles are won and lost on the quality of the intelligence you have. You never know the truth, you can never ask too many people for intel. Develop coaches, hire consultants, lobbyists, ex-prospect employees, current employees family; anything that can give you better intelligence. The ones that lose are the ones who think they know the truth.

Don’t play fair

Don’t throw away your integrity but winning is ALL that matters. I used to say “there are no prizes for second” but I now prefer Tiger Woods quote, “Second means you’re the best of the Losers!”

Don’t Preach

So winning a $Billion deal is a big thing, but so is spending a $Billion. The key decision maker probably has an ego the same size as yours. They want to be listened to, they want to talk and they want you to respond. Be wary of being sycophantic and remember you don’t get to the position anywhere where you have to make a $Billion decisions without being Very Smart, Very Ruthless or VERY VERY lucky.

Don’t use Bullets

Clearly doesn’t need an explanation, bullet-points are best left to the competition.

You can’t have not noticed the rise of YouTube. From nothing 10 years ago to 2 billion views a day now. On average humans watch 15mins a day of YouTube content and a recent Forbes survey showed that 75% of senior decision makers in business are watching more video to inform their decisions than every before. Why?

Why do humans prefer to watch a video than read text? For surely its not in doubt is it. I would rather watch a short 3 min video about a company than read 3 mins of webpages. More people would rather watch a 90 min movie than spend 8 hours reading the book.

And that’s the first reason we should all be using video as a sales tool, you can impart more information in 3 mins of video than you will ever get in 3 mins of written content and decision makers don’t have the time to read for hours to make a choice. When we are coaching bid teams we counsel them against believing that the audience for their pitch have read the RFP, some will have but it’s a minority, who has the time to ready a 100 page proposal. They glance through it, look at the costs and maybe a few pictures and then turn up to your presentation ready to make a decision.

So it’s faster, its also more effective. Video requires the use of two separate areas of the brain; it processes information simultaneously on different modes, Sight and Sound or Phonetics and Vision. It reduces the effort needed to assimilate information and therefore is a significantly more effective communication tool, which is why we all want to go and present rather than call a client

So why aren’t we using it more

Apart from viral marketing (Look at the Tippex Bear advert on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8CFMPpzjBc ) there is very little corporate sales making it to the platform. That may be the problem, YouTube isn’t really the right platform for corporate. It’s not secure, it’s not controllable and unless your careful once your content is up, they own it! But even more reliable, more secure video platforms like Kulu Valley (the guys Apple use) don’t really get used for sales pitches.

The answer lies in the fact that YouTube content works because its amateur in nature. Kids, webcams and PC video editing, its cheap, quick and easy to create content if you don’t care about what it says about your brand. But if you do then it’s far from cheap, definitely not quick and often as complex as hell.

Until now! We decided to build a TV studio at our offices so that we could produce videos of client’s presentations quickly and easily but as we did the research we found that technically it isn’t easy to do. I thought that a good camera and a large plasma screen would work but it doesn’t, something about lights resolution, exposure but for whatever the reason it’s a non-starter. So we looked at green screen technology but while it delivers a good video, it’s amazingly difficult to use; looking at things that are not there, is counter intuitive and takes practice. We found that a 20 min video needed a day in the studio and at least 2 days in post production (sooo expensive!) to get a reasonable result.

Then we found Sight Deck!

OMG! Its fantastic, just a screen and projector, step in front give your presentation as normal and stream the result to the web. No post-production, no retakes, no hassel but OMG!

It’s the future though; once you’ve used it you want it. The content is professional, slick and takes minutes to record, it is everything you need to make great content.

We think its about making great presentations better.. take a great PowerPoint and broadcast it to the world..

See mine here https://www.youtube.com/user/m62net

• Credibility.  Sell yourself, your company and then your product in that order.
• Empathy.    Show an understanding of the audience’s needs, desires or issues.
• Rational.     Here’s why you should act, here’s evidence that acting will work.

The mistake we find more often than not is an over reliance on credibility. A presentation that last 45 minutes and spends 44 of them telling the audience how great the presenter’s organisation is. Sure it may in fact be interesting that you have 300 delivery trucks but do I really care? So What?

Most of our clients’ presentations (well the 15000 that are B2B sales presentations) follow this structure:

• Who are we?
• What do we do?
• Why do you need it?
• Why do you need it from us?
• Can I have your business?

The credibility comes in the first section and usually fits on one slide. “What we do” is not normally a service description but more a results description (Improve your sales conversion rates by 30% rather than produce PowerPoint presentations) and then the presentations become about the audience not the presenter. Ethos followed quickly by Pathos concluded with logos.

We find presenting the emotional argument prior to the rational argument more effective since to quote Nixon “When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow”

So humanity hasn’t changed much in 2300 years, same old same old. My problem is I can’t now read the name Aristotle with out hearing John Cleese and Michael Palin singing “Aristotle Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle, Socrates himself will be particularly missed, a nice little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed”

http://youtu.be/PtgKkifJ0Pw   Philosophers Song.. Live!

Staying fresh, when you’re not!

Last week I was in New Jersey delivering a training course for a medical services client and ran two courses back to back. This is something I hadn’t done in a long time and I had forgotten how hard it was to maintain enthusiasm for long periods of time.

Groucho Marks famously once said “if you can manufacture sincerity you’ve got it made”.  In a presentation I think this should be “if you can manufacture enthusiasm you’ve got it made”. Audiences respond to enthusiasm better than any other presenting characteristic, but it is hard to maintain. Adrenalin can help but four days on your feet in front of an audience, continually practicing what you are preaching is exhausting even when you love what you do.

Here are my tips for marathon presenting.

• Take a break (find time away from the delegates)
• Good night’s sleep (don’t stay out late the night before)
• Change the delivery of the material slightly each time

Best advice is to plan a days’ break in between. I am beginning to forget what I have said during each course as they are all beginning to run together in my head.

Where to stand in relation to the screen. During the courses I ran a few weeks ago in New Jersey, I was asked by delegates where the screen should be and where should the presenter should stand. Firstly, we recommend that the screen is in the centre of the audience’s focus, and not off to one side, even though some AV and set designers like this layout. You need to make sure that as many of the audience as possible can clearly see most or all of the screen. In general try to get the biggest screen you can. However, screens can be too big. We once ran a presentation for Jaguar Cars in the factory and built a screen 12m wide. In hindsight it was too much. In most situations you are limited by the height of the ceiling and so too big is unlikely to be an issue. You want the audience’s default focus to be on the screen. Looking at the screen needs to be comfortable for the audience; heads craned back or to the side can become uncomfortable, and people will fidget and stop listening. Make sure that the bottom of the screen can be seen by those in the back row, always ideally placed in the vertical centre. In the West (and some of the East) the human eye moves across a still image in a ‘Z’ – top-left to top-right to bottom-left and finally bottom-right. So on the whole we suggest that you stand on the left hand side of the screen (viewed from the front). You will find that the audience will then look at you just before they look at the screen each time. This makes it easier to judge the information flow. Occasionally with multiple presenters we have run shows with them on alternate sides which works well. My pet hate however is dual screens. So difficult to manage. From a set design point of you they look great but from an audience focus point of view they are a disaster. The presenter can only be close to one and so if I am looking at the other how do I see their cues? We sometimes setup for repeater screens but then we generally use picture in picture with a camera on the presenter so that the audience have a fighting chance. I know this wasn’t a simple answer it does depend on a lot of factors: size and shape of room, acoustics & sound system, size of audience, available technology, lighting, time of day, duration, presenter size, skill .. the list goes on but if in doubt use one screen as large as you can and stand on they left of it.

Just because good presenters are confident, does not imply that confidence makes good presenters. And yet most people, most presentation skills courses and, regrettably, most presentation coaches believe this to be true.

It is in fact a lie. Clearly a complete lack of confidence is a bad thing, but so too is complete confidence.

Darwin on presentations

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”

The confidence you derive from a well thought out, well prepared, well rehearsed presentation is seductive to audiences, but the confidence felt out of inflated self-belief is often perceived as arrogance.

I watched another presentation coach “help” a presenter. This consisted of a series of platitudes and sycophantic ramblings that had as much to do with massaging the coach’s ego as that of the presenter. While the exchange was enjoyed by both, I’m pretty confident it did nothing for the audience that had to sit through that presentation. Which, as far as I could tell, was just as bad as it was before the coaching–but now it would be presented with an air of arrogant self confidence instead of the (quite rightly) caution that it wasn’t really good enough.

Advice is cheap

But good advice is invaluable (as it is rare.)

For what its worth, my advice is that there is a time and place for boosting confidence and that time and place is after the hard work of producing a good presentation has been done.

• Know your audience
• Know your material
• Know how to engage your audience
• Know how to interact with your audience
• Practice the delivery

The confidence you get from this will see you through the event. Its ok to feel anxious, use it to fuel your performance. Anyone who says they don’t feel scared before presentations is either lying or dead.

Confidence is a double-edged sword, too little or too much can kill a performance. To quote Bertrand Russell,

“Those who feel certainty, are stupid.”

To misquote Bertrand Russell,

“Those who feel absolute confidence, are stupid”

What do you think? Ever seen a supremely confident presenter deliver a supremely bad presentation?

Right Pitch, Right Time!

First, let me pose a question. Think back to the last time you purchased something that involved choosing between two suppliers. How about a kitchen or a carpet? Did you confuse the need to buy this item with the choice of who to buy it from? “I haven’t spoken to Bob for a while, what can I buy off him? Oh, I need a new carpet” is, let’s face it, an unusual train of thought. The normal thinking process would be: decide I need something, decide what I need, then select the vendor.

When we are doing an m62 STAT project we often run up against this issue; salespeople prepare presentations and don’t recognize that the first question that needs to be asked is, “What are we selling and to whom?” For example, I am working on a pitch for a client in the IT sector, who is hoping to be selected when a client outsources a critical part of their IT infrastructure. One option is for the audience of this pitch to do nothing (i.e. not to outsource at all), however, a more likely option is to select a partner and outsource it to one of four companies who are capable of doing it.

The $6 million question (or in his case $60 million, since this is the value of the contract) is ‘has the audience decided that outsourcing is the only viable option or not?’ Clearly, ‘why outsource?’ is a different argument to ‘why outsource to us?’ We always treat them as separate questions and usually separate presentations dealt with in order. The major point of discussion is usually concerned with who the audience is for each presentation, since the pitch to Senior Management is different from the pitch to the senior IT people, who are probably not going to like an argument that says, “we can do this better and cheaper than you have been able to do :)”

It often makes sense to link the two value propositions. In this case the answer to the first question may be ‘cost savings’ and ‘an improvement in service levels’. It may be fairly easy to see how the outsourcing company would get the cost savings from outsourcing at all, but it may be dangerous to argue that this is the reason to select the vendor unless the difference between us and the competition is sufficient to make a difference, (e.g. ‘in house option $100m, outsource $60m, outsource to us $59m’ doesn’t really work). If they do argue this, the proof is different in each presentation; in the first presentation the proof is that they can do it cheaper than the in-house team, in the second they need to demonstrate that they are cheaper than the competition.

Improved service levels are just as difficult for the same reasons, for each of the global outsourcers are pretty good at delivering a service, it is after all what they do. Proving they can do it better than in-house is fine but proving they can beat each other is difficult. Much better to play this in the first section but to make a different argument in the competitive pitch. For example, we can provide much better analytics than the competition, which gives the in-house team more control over the service quality, a win for everybody.

Or we could just sell them some carpets…

The art of competence

What are you good at? Chess, cooking, squash, sailing, wine appreciation, business, presenting or perhaps selling? One thing is for sure – you are probably not the best at all of them.

How good do you need to be to deliver an effective presentation about any of these subjects? Certainly not world class. Competent is the word that springs to my mind. You don’t need to be the best – just better than the average of the group. I have given presentations on all of the subjects above, but I am clearly not the best at any of them. The secret is to know that you don’t need to be.

• Don’t pretend you know something you don’t – the expert may be in the audience
• Don’t start by saying you don’t know something (they don’t know you are not an expert)
• Explain why you have credibility in the subject

Most of the time when we are asked to coach presenters, particularly presenters for large pitch presentations, they are far from experienced expert presenters. In fact, more often than not, they are not even the content experts. They do however know more about their company and its products and services than the prospect.

I recently delivered a seminar for a client of ours, during which I talked the audience through before and after slides and an explanation of why we’d changed them. They asked us to record the slides, so I thought I’d also record a copy to share with you! The presentation slides focus on the modernisation of HR, and how 3 separate areas are key to driving this.

This is how I helped Ceridian move away from using bullet points and start using audience-focused, effective visual slides.

So a few of us spent 5 days last week at a huge Broadcast Exhibition in Amsterdam, IBC 2012. We were there primarily to support our Strategic Partner, Ultimatte, but also to announce our partnership to bring high end video production values to the corporate presentation market.

The interesting thing is that wandering around this huge event (14 halls and 1300 stands), there wasn’t much selling going on. Lots and lots of technical people having lots and lots of technical conversations, but the sort of conversations I would expect to overhear at a trade show were largely in the minority.

What I mean by this is that there are lots of questions from the visitors that ask, “How do you do that? How do I do this? I need to do this – what do you have that will help?” and almost exclusively the response is a detailed technical explanation of HOW to solve that problem.

But the inner salesperson in me wants to avoid answering these questions and ask WHY: “Why do you want to do that? Have you thought about what impact it would have if you did this?”

Our new Partners at Ultimatte are engineers through and through, and are really comfortable having the ‘This is how it works’ conversation. As a result, they are very cautious of my approach of stopping passersby and asking, “So do you ever have to record amateur presenters?”, before proceeding to deliver a case for SightDeck if they say yes. Inevitably they want to know how it works and I have to pass it off to someone who actually knows. I’m clearly in the minority here, perhaps everywhere – I really don’t care how things work, I care about what they can do for me!

So I write blogs but I have no idea how to publish them, I drive cars but don’t know how to service them, and now I record presentations on our SightDeck but I… Well actually after 5 days of listening to the experts I do know how this thing works and can definitely say it’s very cool. But still not as cool to me as what we can do with it…

For the first time in 15 years we can actually demonstrate what we do on the web. We can record us presenting our slides. We can take clients and record a version of their presentation for training, for marketing, for sales, even for fun! SightDeck will not only revolutionise how we market, but how we sell, and how we deliver our work to clients. It’s the most significant breakthrough in presentation technology since InFocus launched the first Data Projector.

Technical selling has its place. Most people won’t buy something they don’t understand, but when it comes down to it you don’t often buy a piece of technology just because it’s cool… OK that’s a lie, I just bought a GoPro camera with absolutely no application in mind – I just got excited on the GoPro stand… And come to think of it, I might have spent $200k on a SightDeck because it’s cool, but I did have to make a business case for the loan… which meant a lot of commercial selling as well!

Check out our IBC 2012 presentations using our brand new SightDeck here.