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.

Nick

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

I am traveling home after a grueling week of UK pinball, meaning I have spent three days this week in London and therefore made 6 trips up and down the country. Today’s trip to the big smoke was to rehearse a bid team for an m62 STAT. Their presentation is on Monday and today was the final dress rehearsal stage of the process. As sometimes happens the team had decided to remove the clicks in the presentation, feeling that it would be too distracting for the audience for them to constantly be clicking during the presentation. This happens a lot. Making the shift from old style bullet point presentations (Presentations With Visuals) to modern visual communications (Visual Presentations) is difficult; but on the whole, worth the effort.

The Audience Visual Assimilation Control Device (or clicker) is the tool we use to control the pace of visual information flowing into the audiences’ visual cortexes. Our voice is the primary source for phonetic information and one would hope we are already in control of that! By putting the presenter in control of both visual information and phonetic information, we encourage Dual Encoding, which is where the Working Memory (Central Executive) processes the same information on two channels simultaneously. This is what drives the increase in both attention and retention that marks our presentations as different from the old style of death by PowerPoint. I guess that makes the presenter the Audience Phonetic Assimilation Control Device!

While it’s clearly more effective (we have measured recall to be 3-4 times that of old style Death by PPT) it is a new skill for many of our presenters. It often takes a leap of faith to trust us and abandon their anxieties and their prejudices. It does at first feel uncomfortable having to make all those clicks – but only the presenter is really aware of them; to the audience it just becomes a seamless flow of information. If we get it right the audience shouldn’t be able to recall whether the information was visual, phonetic or both.

Happily, after 18 years of coaching people through this we are pretty good at convincing them that it’s the right thing to do. I am not sure that makes it any less terrifying for them, but it does mean we have to re-animate the slides overnight tonight… Thank God for designers who are prepared to work long hours…

So I pointed him to an old blog of mine from October 2008.. yup 6 years ago right at the start of the credit crunch..

Guess what.. still relevant!

See the post here

PS.. Oceanaire is still as good as ever…

If what you have to say isn’t more beautiful than silence… Shut up. Confuses for Presentations and tweets methinks.

Tweeted 25 Apr 2012

I’ve been looking through my twitter account, which is largely a soliloquy  (for an audience of 1.. me) and thought I might occasionally share a collection of related tweets here.. so here is the first collection of 17

11 Feb 2013

Those who think they are good find the need to state it. Those who know don’t.

10 Jan 2013

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

19 Oct 2012

What they hear and what you say are not always the same

10 Feb 2012

Win with dignity, Lose with grace

6 Sep 2011

Never underestimate # of people capable of spending 8hr transatlantic reordering bullets\slides & believe they spent the flight working!

17 Aug 2011

Presentations are what happened to the audience, not what was intended by the presenter.

22 May 2011

Presentations without structure are not presentations they are ramblings; occasionally interesting often inane always inadvisable!

9 Nov 2010

Simplifying Complexity is genius (& hard); Complicating Simplicity is foolish (& easy); which presenter are you, Wise man or Fool?

9 Oct 2010

Knowing your philosophy is right isn’t important. Knowing it’s wrong is more productive.

8 Oct 2010

Re-ordering slides isn’t presentation preparation, it’s a diversion tactic

5 Aug 2010

If the best thing about your presentation is the design… You’re screwed!

10 Jun 2010

What people feel influences what they do.. Not what they say..

26 May 2010

Audiences don’t often care about what you want.

21 Sep 2009

It’s difficult to over prepare for a presentation. But not impossible.

30 Apr 2009

Strive for effective communication not just impressive presentation

24 Mar 2009

Here I tweet, only started, wrote two lines, now departed

Anybody who has attended either one of my seminars or a training course will no doubt be used to me talking about Plato and Socrates.. Socrates believed that the only way of improving our intellect was verbal rational debate; his love of philosophy (the love of wisdom) was driven from a verbal discourse base.

In the UK our political system is based on the same idea, stand up and debate your case. Prime Minister Question time for those who watch TV late at night! Written arguments, white papers, even blogs are not as persuasive nor as revealing as the cut and thrust of a debate. Having to make your case, justify your arguments and think on your feet is central to our political system; our education system and, I would argue, human relationships. I am in agreement with Socrates.

Well I am in agreement with what we think he believed, clearly we don’t really know ‘cos he’s dead! In fact the only reason we know anything about him is that one of his pupils Plato disagreed with him and felt that art of writing your arguments down helps you orgainse them and think about articulating them well. If he didn’t he wouldn’t have written about what Socrates said and we wouldn’t know about it 2362 years later.

So Plato’s quote above about practice applies to debating skills and the art of writing. I struggle to write (probably dear reader.. evidently! lol) and so blogging has always been a bit of a challenge for me. I am mildly dyslexic and don’t (unlike my kids) touch type.

I don’t believe that scripts work for presentations; I do believe that writing a script is a valuable exercise but learning it and repeating it verbatim is counter productive. I coach people to write the script to organize their thoughts (Plato) and then throw it away and get to their feet and practice (Socrates)

And what is funny is that the more we practice this.. the better we get at it. Most people put time and effort into avoiding practising (we call this practice avoidance.. clients often call it playing with PowerPoint!) but at some point the writing has to end and the practice has to begin.

I’ve been thinking about the benefits to teachers or trainers of making their presentations more effective. Clearly for sales people it’s about winning more business, more profitably with less effort, but what about if you are not selling? I know, it’s a strange concept for someone like me who finds it difficult to open his mouth without pitching something, a project, an idea, or a joke but its true some people have to teach.

So why would you want your presentations to be more effective if you are teaching? Better attention from your students, higher levels of engagement, better levels of comprehension, shorter lecture times. Or how about a more erudite approach:

“Less extraneous cognitive load increases the students available free cognitive load for information synthesis thus allowing better and faster building of schema necessarily increasing information retention and recall”

But the thought train led me to recall the best lecture I have ever had. Professor Smith at Nottingham University in September 1987 gave a lecture on standard distribution.. I know I didn’t want to go either but.. he started by having an orderly bring an armchair in the lecture theatre and said it was for later (Visual Cognitive Dissonance ™ at work dear reader, we all listened ) and then said he had two proofs to show us and proceeded to show us a premise and through a process of Induction (one type of mathematical proof the other principal one being Direct) and 6 chalkboards of equations that ended in the proof with a large QED written next to it.. “et voila” he said.. 45 mins into a 50 min lecture.

“Everybody got that?” He said and then rubbed out all but the first and last lines and said “and now for proof number two, For this you will need an armchair”, he pointed, “and a large brandy” which he revealed from under the counter, he sat in the chair took a sip of brandy and said.. “After an hour or so of contemplation like thus.. you will in actual fact discover that the conclusion is entirely obvious.. class dismissed..”

OMG..  Best lecturer I have ever seen and the best lecture I have ever seen and makes me think that actually the question ‘So why would you want your presentations to be more effective if you are teaching?’

Is the wrong one, it should be:

So why wouldn’t you want your presentations to be more effective if you are teaching?

And the answer is:

“After an hour or so of contemplation like thus.. you will in actual fact discover that the conclusion is entirely obvious.. class dismissed..”

Ineffective teaching is an oxymoron.. or perhaps the practice of morons!

• 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.