Presentation Tips: Listener-centric Messaging

I just returned from an engagement during which I was asked to give partners in a professional service firm 10 minutes to pitch the firm to a brand new prospect, played by another partner sitting across the table.

Most partner/presenters were tentative at the start. They began by asking the prospects what they wanted to get out of the meeting. Since the exercise was only ten minutes long, the prospects gave a 30-second overview of their needs and asked the sales person to, “Give us your pitch,” or said, “We use a lot of firms like yours. What makes you different.”

And that’s when the difficulty began. Few presenters were prepared with a brief, interesting headline focused on customer benefits. Most of them hemmed and hawed, drilled down into one particular feature of their services, or provided a summary statement that was fact-based and feature-based, not emotionally strong and benefit-driven.

For instance, the firm is proud of their process, their results, and their willingness to measure and publish those results. But all of those are internal and ambiguous to the prospect. Clients care most about results, and are more than likely indifferent to the process, as long as it gets the job done without too much disruption to their own work flow.

Furthermore, in this case, while my client firm could report their own success metrics, they could not report those of their competitors, so the information was meaningless.

And when they did mention their success metrics, they often quoted a number–“82% of our engagements are successfully completed,”–leaving the prospect to wonder if that number is good or bad, what happens with the other 18% of engagements, what does success mean, and what is the likelihood that I will be one of the 18% who get screwed?

The best guy in the whole exercise opened with three crisp points: we have a transparent process, we complete more assignments than our competitors, and we complete them faster. But he failed to stick to that outline during the subsequent role-play.

I liked what he was trying to do. He made three bold points, or claims, at the start, and he was going to describe how and why those claims were true. But he got derailed by the back and forth, and lost control of the meeting.

He would have done better if his points had been benefit statements–if they had been about what the client gets, rather than about his firm’s attributes. His message was seller-centric (all about him!) instead of customer-centric (all about them!)

Moving to a listener-centric message would have required that he understand why his clients buy services such as his, what they like about such services, and what they dislike.

I asked the group if they had any market research, or any well-founded opinions, that could guide us in the exercise. They did, and we were able to suggest another set of headlines that, if used broadly throughout the firm’s selling efforts, could provide new language, and a greater return on new client interactions.

The bottom line is this: language shapes reality! Some cognitive scientists say that language creates reality for us–that it is generative. Effective presentation of intangible professional services depends on a highly-skilled use of language capable of inducing clarity and trust in the prospect.

It’s worth the time to find the right combination of words that resonate with the target audience.