Poison Or Profit?

Is your presentation style helping or hurting your results?

In traditional philosophy, there's an old saying:

If the roots are poisonous, so are the leaves.

If the roots are medicinal, so are the leaves.

Much like plants communicate directly benefit or harm to the recipient, so do presentations. Presentations communicate and can either harm or help your ultimate goals. Take a look at how this works.

When you are presenting, what are the roots of your presentation? Often, these roots are not questioned--they fall in the dark hole called, "this is the way we've always done things around here."

Unexamined 'roots' can hurt you! Let's shed some light on the roots that may be helping or hurting your presentations and sales pitches.

Poison: "I hate presenting." This underlying attitude is obvious to your audience. It comes through no matter how professional or polished you think you are. If you hate presenting, people in your audience can tell.

Profit: "I enjoy presenting." This positive attitude is equally clear to your participants. People can see, hear, and feel the difference. They sense it in your openness, authenticity, and genuine sharing. They can tell you enjoy what you're doing, are passionate, and caring about their benefits.

Poison: "I don't need to do special research." If you try to slide by without investigating your client, their business, and their values, you are poisoning your efforts. It would be better to stay home and call in sick than show up without having done intensive research.

Profit: "I have done extensive research and understand their needs." When you put in the time, you can reap the benefits. By doing your homework, you can easily adapt your message to reach your audience. This is always worth your time!

Poison: "I have a high-tech presentation describing our high-tech solution." Bad. Bad. Bad. When you only use technology to describe technical solutions, you are overloading the scales. It's lopsided. People are thirsty and longing for human connection. An all-tech, bells and whistles presentation can infect your sales presentation with a deadly inhuman disease.

Profit: "I am guiding discussion at a whiteboard about our high-tech solution." Good. Good. Good. When you sell at a whiteboard, you are inviting discussion, conversation and opening up the room for questions.

This makes everyone feel invited into the conversation. People who have technical expertise feel included. And so do non-technical experts. Everyone can see themselves in the picture you are describing at the whiteboard.

Poison: "I don't need a story. The data says it all." A perilous and dangerous approach to presenting. Without a story, non-experts will not step into the data.

Data is necessary. But a story breathes life into the data. If you want other people to understand the significance of your data as much as you do, wrap a story around your data. People will remember the story--and see the relevance of your research.

Profit: "I have a powerful, simple story to explain the data." This is the way to go. A story is what makes your data stick. It simplifies extremely complex processes or technology terms that are easy-to-understand. To increase your profits, tell better stories.

Poison: "I don't need a picture. The numbers are the picture." Well, for some folks, this may work. But for the majority, endless Excel slides projected on a screen are impossible to read and dilute your message.

While it's tempting to think of numbers as the ONLY thing you need, it's more accurate to think of numbers like the poison apple in the Garden of Eden. If you serve only numbers to your clients, they will leave the garden of buying from you and go elsewhere.

Profit: "I have awesome pictures. The pictures show why the numbers matter." This is the path to profits: visual selling. People think in pictures and make decisions faster and easier with charts.

Show your numbers using colorful charts, graphs, and photos. Make your message undeniably clear, and build your own Garden of Eden--with more customers.

Finally, there's the dark hole of doing what you've always done…

Poison: "I start with 400 slides. Then, I whittle it down to 200. And finally go through the grueling process of getting it down to 25." This is extremely time consuming, and the opposite of productive.

If you have an untested method for creating presentations, ask yourself one question. Is it helping or hurting your sales?

Processes like this may be what you've always done--but it will get you what you've always gotten. Time consuming, labor intensive, and painful presentation planning spell disaster. This is a formula for poison--for your team, for you, and ultimately, for your client.

Profit: "I use a storyboard to quickly organize my message. This method helps me build a great presentation 50% faster." With a storyboard, planning a high-quality presentation is easy and fast.

Follow a step-by-step system to build or adjust a presentation. You'll be ready to go in record time. Imagine the impact on your sales. Faster planning means you can expect to present customized pitches for any client--even when you are short on time and short staffed. You can be ready to go at a moment's notice. Now, this is the formula for profit.

Poison or profit? Whether you are totally new to presenting, or have been doing it for years, you can make smart choices. At the end of the day, you have to decide.

Will you push poison just because 'that's how we've always done it' is the norm where you work? Or will you switch to higher profits and get a whole lot more business as a result of remarkable presentations?

The choice is yours.

When I survey my clients, the #1 thing they tell me about why they don't make better presentations: Endless confusion about how to give remarkable presentations. The feeling of having to juggle organizational norms with new input creates a disturbing sense of confusion.

But what's so confusing about the simple distinction of profit vs. poison. I think it's a no-brainer.

The tools to help you make a for-profit choice in your presentations are readily available. These concepts are not rocket-science. Once you learn them, you will be ready to 'rock 'n roll' in any type of presentation or sales pitch.