Don’t Retreat; Advance & Grab Market Share!

In a downturn, management has to reduce expenses. But, when it comes to sales and marketing the goal isn’t to retreat, but to advance your company’s visibility. Remember, if you disengage from customers, they will move ahead without you!

While your competition is retreating, re-tool your marketing and sales efforts to grab a bigger slice of the market pie. Get out more often and more effectively. If your pre-recession message is perfect, raise the volume; if not, discover the message customers in 2009 need to hear. If your sales people need aren’t producing the results you need, consider providing them with the training that each needs for extraordinary sales performance. Then, when the business cycle upturn begins, your team will be hitting the ground running – and delivery great results for 2009!

Leadership is What Makes a Presentation Powerful

In their classic “Reengineering the Corporation”, Michael Hammer and James Campy observe that leaders “articulate a vision and persuade people that they want to be part of it.” Think of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and President Roosevelt’s line that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”. Each articulated a vision and focused on the (risky) next-steps people needed to take to achieve it.

Every presentation has a call-to-action, and the degree to which it is taken by the audience depends, in part, on the extent to which the presentation incorporates this leadership quality. Does the presentation lay out a vision that the audience can aspire to – whether it’s committing to a corporate initiative, buying a product/service or making an investment? While the content of a presentation is important, it’s the delivery of the message that ties it all together that’s the key to success.

All too often, we find that presenters want to “update, inform, and/or introduce themselves to” the audience, rather than empower the audience to act. The difference is classic: the former presentation becomes a long-winded, data –dump driven list of facts and ideas on overloaded PowerPoint slides, that don’t tie together well for the presenter – and even less for the audience. As a result, the passion of the presenter is zapped. Further, he/she sees the impatience in the audience’s eyes as they glaze over the slides and begin falling asleep, encouraging him/her to rush through the end or use jokes to break the monotony. What a waste!

A leadership-driven presentation focuses on giving the audience what they need to know NOW so they can enthusiastically move forward. Make it succinct and compelling (with a sense of urgency) with concrete action-steps so the audience can immediately adopt the desired action, rather than “have to think about it”. Remembers, leaders give audiences justified-for-action information, and get the results they want.

This Month’s Presentation Tips:

Every time you plan to present, review these key questions – because situations change!

• Goal: Deliver New, action-oriented, compelling information; they’ve already seen the old, repetitive stuff.
• Audience Readiness: Will they be able to make measurably better decisions or take better actions now?
• Context: At 8AM, it takes an interactive speech to keep everyone awake and launch a successful day.
• Presentation: From beginning to end, is it easy to summarize the point of it all in one sentence?
• Speaker: Are you excited to be sharing information that can lead to a highly interactive Q&A session, or just delivering the material so you can say they heard it presentation?