Hi, It’s Hollywood…

There’s a ton going on here at Progress, and a lot of it affects me. I’ve been par­tic­u­larly quiet, in part because the things hap­pen­ing aren’t nec­es­sar­ily what I’m able to speak about openly. It’s a judg­ment call of course, as I have no edi­tor but my own eth­i­cal conscience.

In par­tic­u­lar, I’d like to weigh in on the Savvion acqui­si­tion we just com­pleted and my new role. But, I don’t feel com­fort­able doing either just yet.

I recently had the oppor­tu­nity to present to the entire com­pany dur­ing our annual sales con­fer­ence keynote; a pre­sen­ta­tion that was streamed out to all our offices. I’ve got the record­ing, and I believe it to be appro­pri­ate to share that expe­ri­ence as part of my online resume/blog.

So, what you’ll hear/watch/read here is a bit about our go to mar­ket strat­egy and mes­sage through the cha­rade of an exec­u­tive sales call that uses a solu­tion demon­stra­tion to con­vince a fic­tional CEO, Pete, of the value that Progress can help him and his com­pany achieve.

The Setup

In our sce­nario, I was pre­sent­ing to the CEO of a logis­tics com­pany with the objec­tive of get­ting his sup­port to take our proposal/project to the board with his rec­om­men­da­tion to move it for­ward. I had never met the CEO, but we had worked with his “under­lings” prior to gather the right infor­ma­tion and under­stand this company’s pains and needs.

The Deliv­ery Strat­egy & What I Learned

While I was prepar­ing, I spoke to a bunch of our top speak­ers and prod­uct strate­gists within the com­pany, and bounced ideas off their expe­ri­ence. I rec­om­mend doing this… for me, as I talk about what I’ll be pre­sent­ing, I get com­fort­able with the words, the con­cepts and the flow which then makes me smoother on stage. One guy in par­tic­u­lar, Rick Kuzyk, gave me some good advice:

When you’re talk­ing to a CEO, they del­e­gate you to the per­son they feel most closely relates to what you tell them. If you start talk­ing about tech­nol­ogy, they’ll del­e­gate you to their CIO. If you start talk­ing about oper­a­tions, they’ll del­e­gate you to their COO. If you want to keep his atten­tion, you’ve got to speak to what he relates to.

Or some­thing like that. Rick’s one of our Power Mes­sag­ing experts, and a fan­tas­tic instruc­tor. He gave one of the best training’s I’ve ever been to, so if you’re a Progress employee get your ass to one of his Power Mes­sag­ing classes!

3 other things I’d like to men­tion about presentation/delivery strategy:

Amount said. Frankly, this was the biggest “a-hah! moment” for me. I had 10 min­utes in the agenda, but was asked to do a 5 minute pitch. I ended up at 7 1/2 min­utes. I knew the 3 key capa­bil­i­ties I wanted to speak about, and how those would present Pete with value. I also knew how I had to show (remem­ber, it was a demo-driven pitch) the solu­tion in a way that high­lighted those val­ues. The three key val­ues I chose were (1) vis­i­bil­ity, (2) sense & respond, and (3) process opti­miza­tion. The key ways to describe dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion were (1) use their exist­ing stuff so no major upgrades/investment required, (2) rapid time to value, and (3) highly performant/scalable even with a huge amount of infor­ma­tion that we were sens­ing and respond­ing to. I wanted to tell Pete what I was going to tell him, tell/show him, and then tell him what I told him. I wanted to use case stud­ies to rein­force the key points, and close by ask­ing for his sup­port to take this to the board.

By the time I out­lined that, I real­ized I didn’t have a whole lot of time to say all that! It doesn’t seem like a lot, but since I was essen­tially repeat­ing myself mul­ti­ple times (and that’s a tech­nique you should use pur­posely — it rein­forces your key mes­sages and helps peo­ple know what’s impor­tant about what you’re going to tell them), I didn’t have much time at all.

Actu­ally how lit­tle I had to say to fill that time was a really big sur­prise. I ended up using only one case study, but I believe it was enough. You’ll see for your­selves in a few.

Speed at which it was said. I know from com­pe­ti­tion that peo­ple always move faster when they’re under pres­sure. Even when you think you’re mov­ing slow, you should move slower. So, it didn’t come as much of a sur­prise that I needed to talk slower, and that I would feel like I was talk­ing too slow. I was fas­ci­nated though, when I saw the video below… my speed was really good. It looked like a nat­ural pace. I hope know­ing this makes it eas­ier for me to be slower in the future.

Tempo at which it was said. I’m a bit of a show­man. Not unex­pected, I’ve been performing/competing for almost 30 years. I was sur­prised at how many peo­ple in the audi­ence, when they con­grat­u­lated me after­ward (thank you all for your sup­port!) chose their one com­ment to be about the tempo at which I pre­sented. You’ll see me get on the stage and first just look across the whole audi­ence. That was for me. I have a lot of friends in the audi­ence and I knew that if I were at all ner­vous, see­ing them would remind me where I was and that I would have their sup­port. It also gave me a few sec­onds to gather my thoughts and be fully present, both of which would trans­late to my body lan­guage and presence.

Once I started the pause, I real­ized some­thing else. I could feel the audi­ence ask them­selves the ques­tion “what’s he going to say?” Had I started right in, peo­ple would have been lis­ten­ing. But, by wait­ing, they pulled them­selves in. I let the antic­i­pa­tion build just enough for some ten­sion to grow… and that not only engaged them more, but lifted my energy for the deliv­ery. I con­tin­ued to use tempo through the pre­sen­ta­tion to keep the audi­ence (and Pete) engaged, and to help them focus on the key points.

By the way, if any of my stu­dents are read­ing. We do the same thing in iaido. You don’t want a flat tempo when you do a kata. You need to make your enemy come alive. You do that, in part, with the tempo in which you present the kata. Hooper Sen­sei, as a musi­cian, is really good at explain­ing this concept.

The Pitch

There was fun­da­men­tally one slide, and three com­po­nents to the demo which show just as well as screen shots, as they do as point-and-click recorded demos. The slide setup the con­text, with the left side used first before the demo, and the right side used for the sec­ond half of the demo — when I talk about pur­su­ing new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties in addi­tion to solv­ing prob­lems. The first screen shot was used for the demo around solv­ing prob­lems, the last two were the parts about pur­su­ing new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties. Lis­ten for me to say some­thing like “you’ll see that the ser­vice level deliv­ered is the same for expe­dited bio­log­i­cals as it is for reg­u­lar ship­ments…” that’s the sec­ond screen shot. The third screen shot shows the results after imple­ment­ing new busi­ness processes to specif­i­cally tar­get this new busi­ness oppor­tu­nity. I’ll make more sense in about 5 1/2 or 6 min­utes, I promise!

Holy cow, YouTube is cool! I anno­tated the video to let you know which slide/screen-shot I’m talk­ing to.

The Result

It was received amaz­ingly well. I had a great time, but I also felt like I accom­plished what I set out to accom­plish. I stum­bled once or twice while speak­ing, but I bet you couldn’t tell that the mon­i­tors in front of me weren’t work­ing prop­erly! You might have noticed one quick glance over my shoul­der to make sure it was just my mon­i­tors and that the audi­ence could see what I was talk­ing to. Or, you might have noticed a grin at one point when they came back.

For­get about me though (for just one sec­ond). We accom­plished our goal of demon­strat­ing three Progress prod­ucts truly inte­grated into a sin­gle solu­tion with a clear mes­sage as to the value. And, the value was aligned clearly to our cor­po­rate value of Oper­a­tional Respon­sive­ness. In doing all this, we gave our field the con­fi­dence that we can deliver — even though we’ve only recently acquired Savvion.

Oh, and I got a new nick­name from my new boss. I’m sure the hair had noth­ing to do with the fact that I’m now known as ‘Hol­ly­wood.’ It’s all about “the show” and the show must go on. I can live with that.