Personalized Presentations Persuade Prospects to
On a Monday morning, more than twenty-five years ago, I sat in the office of Mr. Marshall, my bank manager, watching uncomfortably as he studied a sheet of paper filled with numbers. “Mr. Steel,” he said, carefully replacing the paper in the folder that bore my name. “I wonder whether you and I could agree to return to what some might call… an old-fashioned style of banking.” He paused, studying me as I pondered his words. I was unsure what he meant by old-fashioned banking, and unsettled by his use of the name, “Mr. Steel.” The only “Mr. Steel” I knew was my father. “By old-fashioned banking, Mr. Steel,” he continued, “I mean the kind of banking where you bank with me. I’m sure you’ll understand that I get nervous when it’s the other way around. Does it make you nervous?” I tell this story in part because more than a quarter of a century later, Mr. Marshall’s exposition on the theory of effective personal financial management remains the one and only presentation I have witnessed from a financial institution. I also tell it because it was effective. I left his office with a plan that I acted upon immediately to restore financial equilibrium, and while Mr. Marshall retired long ago, my account, which has expanded over the years to include all kind of financial products and services – remains with his bank. The objectives of any presentation should be to persuade individual members of an audience to think differently, and act differently, than they might have done without the presentation. With me, Mr. Marshall succeeded on both counts. Of course you might take issue with my description of our meeting as a “presentation” (I was an audience of one. He had no slides, not even a laptop and projector), but that is the point of both this article and my latest book, Perfect Pitch. I was persuaded to change my financial ways at the age of twenty-one, not by a slick multimedia presentation, but rather by a few well-chosen words. Later, when I proposed to my wife, I didn’t prepare a deck or provide an electronic leave-behind; I wrote, “Lynda, will you marry me?” in the sand and hoped that the tide wouldn’t come in before she saw it. And if you want an example of formal presentation, ponder this: why is Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address so famous when it comprised fewer than three hundred words, took only two or three minutes to deliver, and contained not one key visual? I worry that in today’s business environment, far too many presentations are made according to some strange notion of how businesspeople are supposed to communicate with other businesspeople. At the mere hint of the need for a presentation, someone hits the PowerPoint® icon and starts producing slides. Efficient one-size-fits-all slides that can be projected onto conference room walls, printed as leave-behinds, and shared electronically. But this isn’t persuasion – it’s distribution. And one size rarely does fit all: most PowerPoint slides contain far too much information to be considered true visual aids, and not enough information to tell a clear story. Successful presentations do not rely on technology. Ask any management consultant about the “elevator pitch,” or a Hollywood writer about the way they typically pitch a movie, and they will tell you that success depends solely on having an idea simple and powerful enough to be stated quickly, understood, and passed on. Successful presentations are simple, surprising, and personal. Steven Spielberg once said, “I make movies for the masses, but I talk to them one at a time.” So too it should be in a presentation. When my bank manager talked of the “old-fashioned style of banking,” he aroused my interest. The idea of me banking with him for a change, held my attention. When he asked if being overdrawn made me nervous too, he succeeded in personalizing his message. He didn’t just understand money, he understood me. My message is that selling ideas and winning new business means convincing people, not businesspeople. It means convincing them in the way that as children we convinced our parents to give us money, in the way we got dates, in the way that a great preacher raises a congregation or an attorney secures a conviction. Which is by understanding the audience – in particular the barriers to them accepting our proposal – and then telling a simple story that is as much about them as it is about us. A story that informs and surprises in equal measure, and that doesn’t tell them what to think but allows them to draw their own conclusions. As the writer Saki once observed, “When baiting a mousetrap with cheese, be sure to leave room for the mouse.” That’s how you win new business.
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