4
When you want to impress senior audiences when you haven’t much time
Some communications are career-defining. Amaze your audience and you may never look back; underwhelm them and you may never recover.
Presentations to senior audiences can be like that. You want to impress them. You certainly won’t want to come out with any regrets.
But this isn’t always easy to do. Especially if this happens:
“The agenda’s over-run, so we’re going to have to shrink your 30-minute presentation down to five. What did you want to say?”
Recognize this? It happens pretty frequently, doesn’t it?
But, if you want to impress them, you have to react impressively. And people don’t always. For instance, some reactions I’ve seen – but do not endorse – are:
No, a better option is to present using the four steps “Wallop–Down–Up–Please”:
For example:
Thanks for your time today.
We are needlessly wasting £230,000 per month on X (Wallop).
Even worse, this number will increase over the next couple of months. Projected needless waste will cost £2.8 million this year. This will increase to over £5.6 million in the next couple of years (Down).
We can reduce these costs by over 75% – that’s a potential saving of over £4 million – by implementing X [spend 2–3 minutes explaining your proposal] (Up).
Therefore, given that successful implementation could deliver £4 million of savings, please can I ask you to do Action X (Please).
See how this works? You grab their attention immediately. Your message is impossible to ignore. You stand out from other presenters (who, let’s face it, probably had a first slide saying “Background” or some such).
An added bonus: you get instant, positive feedback, in that you can tell it’s worked because they:
When I wrote this chapter, I wasn’t sure whether to put it in the next section “Persuade More People to Say ‘Yes’ ” or this one “Get More Done More Quickly”.
It could have been either. But, in the end, I chose here because I wanted to reinforce the huge time savings that this approach brings. It takes only minutes to do, which is much quicker than traditional preparation. In fact, a number of my customers always use Walloping as their first “preparation step” because:
Or, of course, you could simply just deliver the same content six times faster!
Walloping’s great for when you want to make a big impact very quickly. Sometimes though, your aim will be to make a permanent impact. This requires a different technique, which I cover in the next chapter.