Aug 20 2012
Creativity, Presentations, Professionalism, Tools

Tip: Culling Presentations down to size

It’s easier to edit than to create.

It’s also pretty clear that our peers in Marketing, Product Management, and Engineering have time on their hands to create, judging from the long, detailed, generic presentations they provide us.  Let’s take advantage  of all this raw material.  If we know what we specifically want to say to our audience, we can start pruning.

Here’s a tip:

Open up your 127 slide master deck and grab a pen and paper.  As you scroll through the presentation, jot down the slide numbers you find relevant. 3, 5, 7-10, 22, 30-34, etc. Create a new, customer-specific deck, and start copying over those slides.

The next hour or so can be spent adjusting (improving?) the grammar and phrasing of the copied slides to your needs.  I’ve found that removing  half the words improves clarity.  Less is more.

Yes, there’s a completely separate debate about PowerPoints:  Why not Prezi? Why slides with bullets? You don’t read presentations, they’re a backdrop; just use pictures.  All that is fine, but sometimes a PowerPoint is a PowerPoint.

Let’s bang them out efficiently, shall we?

Tagged
Jul 23 2012
Learning, Presentations

Do we really need 10,000 hours?

Malcom Gladwell makes the case for a ten thousand hour path to expertise in his book Outliers.

Simple math tells me, with forty hour weeks, fifty weeks a year, you’ll reach that plateau in five years.

We’re in Pre-Sales.  We haven’t got five years.  We’ve got until the demo date, likely set by the sales rep.*

What can we do with one hundred hours?  Invest it wisely.  Now go!

*With an eye towards return-flight scheduling convenience.

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Jul 20 2012
Leadership, Positioning, Selling

Frontrunner

Everyone recognizes the leader- he’s the one in front.

But is it in your customer’s best interest to pick the frontrunner?

There are so many ways of getting to the lead; some deserved, some not:

  • Being there first
  • Staying close and passing at the last moment
  • Carrying on when everyone else gives up
  • Being pushed to the front
  • Cutting the line
  • Standing still while everyone regresses
  • Building an insurmountable lead and then resting
  • Running your own race

Which are you this time?

In golf they don’t ask how, they ask how many.

In business, your customer might be wise to focus on how the frontrunner got there.

Tagged
Jul 18 2012
Presentations, Professionalism

Too many TLAs are a PITA

And poorly placed pronouns are puzzling.

We owe it to our audiences to be clear, not confusing.

Clear:

When we start using Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) and pronouns because we assume the audience knows what the TLAs mean or because we’re too rushed to type or speak the words out, we risk confusing them.

Confusing:

When we start using TLAs and pronouns because we assume the they know what they mean or because we’re too rushed to type or speak them, we risk confusing them.

We learn sequentially, getting stuck on what we don’t understand until we resolve that problem. If your audience is still working out what you’ve said and you’ve gone down the road, they’ll abandon the journey.

Jul 18 2012
Leadership, Professionalism, Selling

Why so competitive?

Because we like to win

or…

Because we like to compete

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Jul 03 2012
Leadership, Tools

You can’t collaborate without labor

Enterprise solutions are embarking on a collaboration train, offering improved and very usable tools for notifying, sharing, messaging, and decision-making right alongside the traditional business transactions of orders, returns, credit-checks, and reports.

Unfortunately, having the right tools doesn’t fix the bookshelf. You have to use them. You can’t collaborate without some labor. The collaboration journey requires an investment of time. You have to be the I in the team who does the heavy lifting. Let’s call that investment, oh, leadership.

Eventually, another person will benefit from your collaboration efforts* and they’ll join in the conversation, multiplying the collaboration value. Collaboration spreads grass-roots, individual by individual. This is good; you can’t force collaboration any more than you can force labor.

*They’ll also recognize your leadership and you’ll have gained a fan.

Jul 02 2012
Leadership, Learning, Positioning

Some ‘Splaining to do

We’re not here to teach, though we are here to explain.

We take our user interfaces, technology stacks, business processes, data, and reports and present a tasty jambalaya to our audiences.  We take complexity and convey simplicity through a memorable theme and three bullet points.*

We take an audience from “I don’t get it,” to “I want to get it.”

It’s some ‘splaining we do.

*because two aren’t enough and four is too many

Tagged
Jun 22 2012
Creativity, Humor

A Friday Pre-Sales Haiku

demos completed
cocktails at the airport bar
flights and the drive home

Jun 22 2012
Learning

Schooling is the Opposite of a Desire to Learn

Schooling is someone forcing an agenda of information upon you.  “You must know this and this.” Hence the term: you’ve been schooled.  You’ve been taught a lesson.

A desire to learn is at odds with this.  You can only come to knowledge by seeking information and using it to expand your current understanding.

By asking questions, the learner can get to the point with the teacher.

By asking questions, the teacher can quickly gauge where the learner is.

Is it any wonder the best teachers (Socrates, anyone?) ask questions rather than dictate?

…

Questions are the currency of communication.  Information is worthless without the curious mind.

…

Discovery meetings are the time to ask questions.  If the customer insists on telling you their agenda, teaching you, how will they know if you’ve  understood them?

Jun 21 2012
Humor, Professionalism

Rest Stop

When you pull off the highway for a quick rest stop…

Do you feel like you have to catch back up to traffic when you get back on? (guilt)

or

Do you notice that you’re now with cars that you’d passed a while back? (enjoying the journey)

Enjoy the journey.  Take some time off once in a while.  You run hard in Pre-Sales;  give the rest of the world a chance to catch back up.

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