Adrie's Blog

What is your message?

Presenting your company is a continuously recurring ritual - you have to present when you want to sell your product/service, or because you want to raise funds with possible investors, or simply because you are doing some promotion for your company.

You tailor the presentation to each occasion - specifically for that one opportunity irrespective of what the presentation is for. It should never become a routine job and always has to be relevant to the audience you are engaging with. The fact that you get a lot of time - like 30 minutes or so - doesn't mean that it gets any easier. It has to be dynamic, contain unexpected information, anecdotes and so on.

An extra challenge is when you have to present in Silicon Valley and get 6 minutes to get your pitch across. It definitely requires some thinking around your message. It has to be spot on and as there are 50 or so companies competing for the attention of the audience, you need to ensure that your story is remembered. Nothing can detract from the message, body language needs to be in line with the story. It's always worth getting a few critics to give their input ahead of time, regarding relevance as well as manner of presenting.

In all companies I have built over time - there have been a lot of people representing that company in sales calls, and you will be amazed to hear just what they will tell others about your company. Sometimes, listening in to these calls, I'd almost feel they were talking about another organisation altogether as they happily shared completely incorrect info about our business and our services.

Over the many years of running my businesses I have developed the habit to get people representing the company, to tell me the story of our company. What do we do, why, what are our products and services, why should a client buy with us and so on - the result of many of these sessions is definitely depressing which also reflects badly on the individual's manager in whom you place your trust in the first place.

Each story has to have a natural order to it - step one is always, what is your company and what values does it represent - something each one of you should be able to do in 3 minutes. You have to be able to do this in your sleep - next comes your product/service which takes a little more careful thought and requires a number of variations depending to whom you tell the story.

My policy would always be that you have to be able to tell the basic story down to the final detail before you could start improvising. It is so important that the message about your company and products is told in the exact same way by each ambassador that you should spend a lot of time on that. Have your staff give you a presentation on your own company lasting about 5 or 6 minutes, have one member of staff stand up and share the story during sales or management meetings - until they all can recite it backwards.

Believe me - you will be pleasantly surprised. When they all get it, and are sharing the same theme - you suddenly have a different company.