Member Article

Don't ask me!

With Simon Raybould of Curved Vision

I recently attended a seminar given by a ‘sales guru’. Great, I thought, as I went in - this will be exactly what I need. Well, sort of!

His style was engaging and the audience was invited (even encouraged!) to get involved: what’s more, there was applause at the end and the audience went away happy. But those I spoke to afterwards all mentioned that the presentation wasn’t relevant to them - though they were sure other people found it useful…

I was not satisfied at all. Why not? Well, because the presentation started with 20 minutes when we in the audience were asked as share our specific issues. So far so good - but the presenter’s response was simply to throw that page of the flipchart away and make his prepared presentation in any case. So what was the point of the interaction? I don’t know - particularly not as the presenter ran out of time at the end of his session and didn’t quite have time to give us the free, high-value stuff he’d been promising…

In old-fashioned management speak, presentations can…

• tell
• ask
• sell

…or sometimes a combination of these. However, ask-&-tell is rarely a good idea. Why? Because it’s a betrayal: it sets your audience up for one thing and gives them another, risking leaving a sour taste in their mouths. If your purpose is simply to tell or sell, then have the courage to do exactly that!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of these approaches, so long as you use the appropriate one for the occasion. Like most things in designing presentations it’s not rocket-science, just common sense: the hard part lies not in knowing which style your presentation is but in remembering to ask yourself first.

And if you don’t ask, you don’t know. And if you don’t know, you might have the wrong one!

As always, comments and questions to me at sme@curved-vision.co.uk.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .