Gathering Material for Customization


To customize your presentation, you'll need to arm yourself with useful information and materials. It's a process that you should begin during your preparation period, days or even weeks before the presentation, and continue right up until the moment you approach the front of the room. Here are some steps your can take:

Prior to Presentation Day

  • Research your audience. Learn all you can about who will be attending : their knowledge level, key interests and concerns, and personal or professional biases.

  • Learn the names of some key audience members . Know the names of several key influencers in the audience. Learn the names of the highest ranking company officer, the most respected technical expert, and the manager with the most authority to make decisions.

  • Get current on industry news and trends. During the run-up to your presentation, diligently search out news and media stories and Internet items related to the company and the industry to which you'll be presenting.

On the Day of the Presentation

  • Customize your Opening Graphic. Produce an initial slide that names the audience, venue , and date of your presentation, and tee it up to launch your program. Microsoft PowerPoint has a specific function that changes the date automatically. (On the toolbar, click Insert, then click Date and Time, and then click Update automatically.)

  • Search for ways to Contemporize your presentation. When you awaken on the day of your presentation, watch the morning business channels on television, read the daily newspapers, and log onto the Internet; browse all of these sources to find items relevant to your presentation and your audience.

    The New York Times runs a daily feature called "This Date in Baseball" with memorable milestone events. Since competitive sports are an excellent metaphor for business, you could choose one of the events to analogize and illustrate your situation.

    On a broader scale, an Internet Web site (www.scopesys.com/today/) lists significant events on any given date in history. On the day you present, find an event that parallels your story and incorporate it to add dimension to your presentation.

  • Prior to your presentation, mingle with your audience. Go out into your audience and chat with several individuals (this is also called "schmoozing"). Choose strangers as well as people you know. Ask them questions. Listen to their conversations. Gather valuable information as well as names and facts you can incorporate into your presentation.

Don Listwin, now the CEO of Openwave, was for many years the executive vice president of Cisco. I first met Don when he was a junior product manager at Cisco. You'll recall from the Introduction that after Cisco's IPO, Cate Muther, the then-Vice President of Corporate Marketing, required that all her product managers take my program. Don was in the first wave, and a diligent student was he. Before long, his advanced presentation skills earned him a plum assignment: He was chosen to announce the launch of a major new Cisco product alongside then-CEO John Morgridge.

This was a highly mission-critical task. Since its inception, Cisco had been engaged in a fierce competitive battle with Wellfleet for leadership of the router market. In 1992, Cisco produced a new integrated router that would strike directly at the heart of Wellfleet's strength, hardware, and exploit the vulnerable underbelly of Wellfleet's weakness, software, which happened to be Cisco's special strength.

Don crafted his presentation for the media using all the techniques he'd learned in my program, and then spent the weekend before the scheduled Tuesday launch Verbalizing in front of a mirror 40 times. On Monday, Don did a trial run in front of an internal Cisco audience, and went into autopilot. His presentation had become dry and robotic.

He called me and said, "Jerry, I've gone stale! What do I do?"

I reminded Don about the Customization techniques and he seized upon Direct References and Questions. The next day, just before his presentation, Don went into the audience and chatted with several people, asking them what they were hoping to hear from Cisco. Then he stepped up to the stage and began his presentation. Right after his Opening Gambit, Don looked at one of the people with whom he'd chatted and addressed him by name . The man smiled, and Don could feel the spark of recognition radiate through the crowd . (Later, Don likened this effect to what happens when a student is called on by a professor, although I had never told him the story of Professor Drake.)

Then Don raised one of the questions someone had asked him during his schmooze, "Will Cisco continue to upgrade the performance of this new router?" Don promptly answered it by describing how Cisco planned to migrate the new product forward. Once again, Don could feel the energy from the audience, and it energized him in turn . He rolled forward with a full head of steam .

Less than a year later, Cisco's new router product was the clear market leader, and a year after that, Wellfleet disappeared in a merger.

Several years later, I was delivering my program to a group of new product managers at Cisco. When I got to Customization, I referenced Don's example. One of the men in the group exclaimed, "Oh yes! I was with Wellfleet at the time, and I was in the audience for that prezo ." He shook his head ruefully. "After I heard Don speak, I knew that the game was over."

Don still practices these techniques to this day to keep his presentations fresh and to connect with his audiences.



Presenting to Win. The Art of Telling Your Story
Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition
ISBN: 0137144172
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 94

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