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:

  • Deliver the same content six times more quickly.
This just ends up a mess.
  • Give handouts and say “please turn to page 8”.
They don’t. They flick through the pack and don’t listen to you.
  • Offer to come back another day.
This might work. But how do you know things won’t over-run then? And, how do you know you’ll be a priority to them? If you aren’t, you won’t even get on the agenda.

No, a better option is to present using the four steps “Wallop–Down–Up–Please”:

1. Wallop: start with a big bang (often this will be showing the impact of not changing – the rationale: people buy to avoid pain).
2. Down: make this impact worse.
3. Up: show you have an alternative which will improve things.
4. Please: ask them to do something.

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:

  • Agree to your request; and/or
  • Show interest and ask questions; and/or
  • Give you longer than 5 minutes!

Why Walloping Is a Time-Saving Tip

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:

  • It quickly gives clarity on key issues.
  • They can present their “Wallop version” as is, if appropriate; or can use it to help shape their next iteration.
  • It guides them on impactful visuals. For instance, in the above example:
    • The first visual could be a slide which only had one thing on it – “Needless cost: £230,000”.
    • A click would change this number to £2,800,000.
    • The next click would change this number to £5,600,000.
    • The next click would replace all those words with “Saving £4,000,000”.

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.

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