Getting to the essence

Good, clear communication is only possible once you’ve got to the essence of what you want say.

How many times have you seen a presentation or listened to a pitch filled with data points, figures and charts. What might seem comprehensive to the speaker (who’s spent hours putting together his or her deck) is mostly dense or distracting to the audience.

Dave Trott has a great metaphor for it: ‘If I chuck you nine tennis balls, how many can you catch? You can only ever catch one.’ The point is, you need to do the hard work up front, so that you’re throwing just one ball.

It’s easier said than done. For instance, we recently worked on a healthcare pitch that had 15 TLAs (three-letter-acronyms) in the briefing doc. We looked at the whole brief (there were several more pages) and challenged it, asking “what do you really want your audience to remember?” The answer didn’t include even one TLA.

Working on another pitch for a global audit account, we asked the team what really made them different from the other companies pitching. The list started out the way you’d expect – full of stats, guarantees and pedigree. We kept pressing until we heard the magic words: “our audit process means they’ll be a month ahead of the competition.” Bingo. We’d distilled the essence of the pitch into one line: “We’re going to give you back February”. A simple human way to say ‘we’ll give you a whole month to do new stuff instead of audit!” That’s compelling and memorable. And they won the account.

Getting to the essence requires persistence and asking the right questions – it’s a skill we’ve been praised for at ‘See what you mean’ time and again. And I always keep David Ogilvy’s in mind: “the essence of strategy is sacrifice”.