In anticipation of a new blog.. here is one I wrote in 2009.. watch this space.. comments please!

• Don’t use speaker notes.
• Don’t write scripts.
• Don’t wear white socks.
• Why? Because you will come across as an amature!

Occasionally when presenters use a script they end up concentrating on it more than on the audience, which is a recipe for disaster. Presentations need to be dynamic and audience-centered. A script, almost by definition, prevents dynamism by compelling you to follow it. Therein lies the real problem..

When you use a script you ignore your slides, when you ignore your slides you drive a wedge between phonetic information (you) and visual information (the screen). That prevents Dual Encoding (understanding by the audience of what they hear and what they see at the same time).

Unless you are very, very, very good at presenting using a script won’t work well. (A professional actor can sometimes pull it off, and some TV presenters can read an auto-cue and make it look natural, but one only needs to see the show Have I Got News for You in the UK to see the difference between a professional and an amateur.)

So why do people do it? Well, like a number of things that people do to help when they are stressed, it’s easy. You have been reading since you were 3 or 4, and you can do it in your sleep (well, OK not really but it is easy). Reading is easy, and so using a script to help overcome stress is a popular approach – especially when your brain chemistry is being altered by that wonderful survival drug adrenalin.

Those that can do; those that can’t… read a script.

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.

Last month, I delivered the first webinar of its kind: a live broadcast of the presenter (in this case, me!), delivering a presentation – in front of my slides.

This truly is breakthrough technology as delivering a webinar in this way has never been possible before. Being able to see the presenter as well as the slides keeps audiences engaged, and makes presentations far more effective. This really has the potential to completely revolutionise the way webinars are delivered in the future.

The webinar explained how and why businesses should be using video content to drive sales, and just what the latest technology is capable of. But don’t worry if you missed it – you can watch the recording here!

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.

For fifteen years we have been making clients’ presentations better and then training and coaching them to deliver amazing pitches, but we have struggled to show the world what we do. The problem is that when you put a presenter in front of his slides, and then both presenter and slides in front of a camera, it looks terrible. Screen images aren’t bright. Carbon copies of their slides look terrible.

Your eye has an iris that automatically adjusts to allow the right amount of light to hit your retina, allowing you to see things that are dark, as well as bright. Carbon fibre irises in cameras can’t respond in the same way, and so images that contain two subjects that give off different amounts of light don’t record well with a single camera.

In a TV studio there are a handful of genius lighting experts that, given enough time and equipment, can produce a solution that would allow you to stand in front of a plasma screen and interact with it, but you’ll need a $200k camera, as well as the studio, to get close to what we can produce using Ultimatte’s ground breaking SightDeck technology.

In a nutshell, SightDeck projects a low contrast, dimmer version of your graphics onto a light sensitive screen. The system detects the shadow of the presenter and removes them from the image, projecting pure white light onto the presenter. The system then takes a feed of the presenter on a transparent background and places them over a bright carbon copy of their slides, thus producing an extremely high contrast, high quality composite of presenter and slides… in real time!

We think this is going to revolutionise the business presentation market, and we are launching two new services on the back of this amazing technology: stream62 and view62.

stream62 is to use this technology for the live broadcasting of clients’ content, over IPTV, video conferencing or broadcast systems. We think this is a great solution for webinars, sales pitches or video conferences.

view62 is for recording content for video on demand systems; we see applications for websites, e-marketing tools and sales collateral that will blow your prospects away.

Business presentations just got a lot better.

I’m in an office opposite the boardroom of a client in India, while the team we have been coaching for the past 2 days is doing their pitch. The other members of the m62 team here are back at the hotel asleep, having worked until 1AM to finish the changes to the presentation.

I’m not normally here, I’m normally either in the room or on the way home, this halfway house is uncomfortable, but I guess that’s the role of the coach. At some point the coaching stops and the team play the game. You either did a good job or you didn’t, it’s now up to them.

It’s going to be the same next month for the Under 10 (years old) rugby team I’m coaching, when they step out on the field for the Cheshire Cup competition; except I will be on the touch line watching every move, every pass and desperately trying not to care how they do as long as they enjoy it.

Team versus individual coaching

There are lots of similarities between the two types of coaching, kids in sport and sales people in business:

1. They all want to win
2. They all need positive encouragement
3. Guided discovery is better for them than directed learning
4. They generally all want to be coached but want to pretend they don’t need it
5. Cohesion as a team trumps individual star performances

And my role is pretty similar as well:

1. Share knowledge in a constructive way
2. Demonstrate where appropriate
3. Praise good behavior
4. Identify and correct bad behavior
5. Ask questions to encourage thought

On the whole, coaching is coaching, and the big differences are really around coaching individuals rather than teams. I’ve coached thousands of presenters and hundreds of teams and the role is different. With an individual it’s about being the best they can be. I spend my time refining performance, tweaking and nudging the presentation and the individual until it delivers the optimum result.

Everyone is on stage

For teams in a presentation, the best presentation on the day is all for nothing if one “Cast Member” (a non-presenter who is in the room because he/she is important or knowledgeable) undermines the pitch in some way. A bad facial expression, poor body language or an inappropriate interjection. It’s a team game and the star player won’t win the game for you if the rest don’t support them. As in Rugby or in Life, success depends on your team not just you.

Oh one more similarity between kids at rugby and salespeople in a pitch—if they lose, they all want to cry! Well, occasionally me too!

Almost every time I sit to write a sales presentation for a new client, somebody wants to talk about their pricing. Rarely have I heard a convincing argument for cost being a value proposition.

“We are cheap”

I have two issues with this. The first is you have to be absolutely sure that you are the cheapest. If they have three quotes and you are not the cheapest then their conclusion is going to be that you are either lying (not good) or don’t know your market (possibly worst.) Either way, you’re making the case for them to actually choose the cheapest option. You lose!

Second, you are moving the conversation away from the value you offer to the cost of delivery, which breaks the fundamental principals of negotiation:

You cannot discuss cost until you have determined value.

“How Much?” is a buying sign. You don’t ask this unless you see some value in the product or service you are talking about. Waiting until they ask gives you a clear indication of interest.

How you price vs what you price.

Even when they ask, I’d be tempted to describe the pricing model rather than the absolute cost of the deal—and I would always tie it to the outcomes. For example, m62 STAT is a fixed price engagement to help clients win big pitch presentations. Before we tell the client our price, we ask how much the deal is we are pitching for. I’m working on four at the moment and each is worth in excess of $500 million, even at outsourcing margins (2-3%), the price we are going to charge for a 78% win rate is immaterial.

Cost of doing vs. the cost of not.

In fact, my usual response isn’t about the cost of our services, but the cost of losing. All four pitches will have bidding budgets of close to $1 million, making our fee irrelevant. Winning is the only thing that matters. For our clients, the question is always the same–what’s the cost of getting it wrong, or the value of getting it right?

So when do you talk cost?

Simple. You have to get the client to ask for the price, then you put a value (to them) on the service (a big number compared to your fee) then you share the price (a small number compared to the value).