“Urgent – we need help” is the type of text message you love as a training company. It means the “why now?”, part of the question has a train wreck answer that you can fix. In this case and in many similar cases, it is not the big bosses getting difficult or disgruntled clients acting up. It is a grass roots rebellion against colleagues who are clueless when presenting. At a certain point, the lack of professionalism becomes a restraint on the forward momentum of the organisation.
The road is rocky though for the presenter. There may be resistance from guerrilla groups who feel threatened if others start to make progress leaving them forlorn and exposed. I remember going on stage after one of my colleagues, who had given his presentation to the entire firm. It was a dud and he knew it. There was no excitement and his messaging fell on stony ground. I was an experienced speaker and presenter by that stage and I knew how to rock an audience. I heard later that my persuasion free zone colleague was telling anyone who would listen after my presentation, that I was “all style and no substance”. It was a clever putdown, because it sort of sounds smart. This is the type of nonsense you may have to put up with from nobodies who are threatened by your professionalism. It is better to suffer this invective though, than to stay hopeless and be just like them - a dud when it comes to persuasion power.
The message I received was a case of rebellion. With many retail operations there are seasonal changes of the product line-up and the marketing department have to infect the salespeople with passion for the brand’s latest offerings. When the marketing department presentations are as a dull as dishwater and are failing in the persuasion stakes, then sales suffer. The salespeople go on silent strike. They are not motivated to move sales, because they don’t believe in the selections. The marketing department presenters didn’t engage their internal audience. They didn’t use storytelling to fire up content for the salespeople to use with buyer. They didn’t persuade their listeners to trust their marketing expertise.
Bosses have an uncanny ability to spot trouble early and realise that the next season’s results are not going to make the targets, because the enthusiasm for the seasonal selections isn’t inspiring much confidence in those who have to move the merchandise. Hence the panic message to come and fix this issue.
Marketing departments, R&D centers, and middle management are the groups most often required to have persuasion power. When they are not trained they are under powered for the task. This has a flow on effect and the full potentiality of the organisation’s messaging capability isn’t being maximised.
When presentation training is invested in, it has the immediate impact of fixing the problem at hand, but it has other effects as well. If we are all watching skilled presentations by our internal colleagues, it says a lot about the professionism of the organisation, boosts our esprit de corps and builds our pride in ourselves, to belong to such an organisation. These skills spill outside the firm and show up when we meet clients and give them presentations which persuade and lead to increased sales. When we representing the organisation in a public setting at say an industry event, other groups note that we are doing a professional job and then they extend kudos to the rest of the entire organisation. If we see you are a dud, we assume everyone is a dud. If you are a star, we think they are all stars over there.
Salespeople are like water – they are always looking for the path of least resistance. If the firm relies on them to sell the range of goods selected by someone else, then that internal presentation has to be professional and convincing. In the case of this client, we have known them for a number of years and could have done the training much earlier, but there was no appetite for it. Often the time and money combination conspire to stop bosses taking action until it is almost too late. This is the tension between the “urgent and important” time management quadrant and the “not urgent, but important” quadrant.
These types of fundamental skills are not urgent but important and need to be raised up the hierarchy of priorities for the firm in order to head off trouble before it can ever arise. Who wouldn’t want to work in an organisation where everyone was professional and persuasive when making their report or recommendations.