#4 Question about presentation/demo prep

Question 4 again seems simple: how much time do I have for the presentation?

You may think this is an easy one; just look over the agenda and see how much time is allocated! However, let’s be honest, how many presentations or demos have you attended that actually stick to the time allocated??

In my experience we need plan for the allotted time, BUT we also need to plan for two other scenarios:

Scenario 1: The elevator pitch – even if you have been given an hour for a presentation you should be able to summarize in a minute or two. Imagine you meet a senior executive on the way to the presentation or a senior manager “puts their head round the door” to check what is going on - can you summarize in a minute?

This need became clear to me when we were presenting to a company’s IT team. The CTO came in “just for a minute” and asked where we were. The presenter was flummoxed and talked some jargon from the slide he was on. I could see the CTO’s eyes glaze over and they left. If the presenter could have quickly given a summary of the presentation, I feel the CTO might have stayed a bit longer and the sale would have been completed faster.

Scenario 2: This is the old “I know we planned for an hour, but I only have 20 minutes.” How do you decide what is important? What should you leave out? You should plan this before the presentation.

To prepare for these eventualities we use a template of 3. Take the key messages you defined from question #3 and put them in the first column of the template, then add talking points for the 18-minute column and then 3 again for the full blown 45 minutes. Voila, you have your structure and it’s ready to summarize as you wish!

See the example in the header of this post.. it has worked for me time and time again.