Tag: business communications

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I Never Planned to Be a PowerPoint Savant

I’m quite judgmental of marketing content.  Well, all content, to be honest, I’m judgmental of all content. I want content to communicate and serve a purpose, and I judge all content I encounter with a critical eye. 

I’ve been involved with persuasive content my entire professional life.  Heart and soul, I’m a practicing B2B marketing and content strategist that has watched the need for more human-centered, intelligent, content design explode. As B2B buyers become more digital, content becomes ever-more important to buyers and sellers.  I saw this trend early and became focused on content and message strategy because of it.

But many of the clients I work with in sales know me only as their presentation secret weapon.   

The truth is, I’m no PPT savant. I am a daily power-user, but competency is expected, and no one cares about my technical chops.  What they care about is winning the deal, and winning and losing is determined by how well you communicate business value.

It’s a bit ironic, because I’ve never promoted myself as a PowerPoint expert, in fact, I avoided it. It’s not that I don’t enjoy creating presentations, I do, but it was not a B2B niche I expected to serve when I began consulting. I also did not want to be pigeonholed and commoditized.

It found me anyways. It’s surprising in some ways, and not so surprising in others. After all, a PPT presentation is content, and content is one of the things I do best.  

Backstory

PowerPoint didn’t even exist when I entered the workforce.  As a designer in the commercial production industry, I enjoyed the work and learned a lot about simplifying messages into 0:30 second commercials. I also had a deep interest in being involved in the strategy and creative developed by the agencies.  I not only had my own opinions on the creative, but I wanted to understand the bigger ideas driving the strategies.

My first exposure to Microsoft was circa 1990 on early Macintosh desktops in a small design and marketing agency in which I was a partner. At the time, business software and hardware were emerging markets and start-ups were everywhere, fueling our own growth. I was now helping shape and execute brand and marketing strategies. It was also my entry into B2B technology.

Fast forward a few years, and much to my surprise, I’m managing marketing teams in a global technology enterprise.  By now, PowerPoint has become a ubiquitous tool. Unfortunately, too many presentations were hopelessly boring energy bludgeons.  Corporate life quickly taught me the meaning of “death by PowerPoint” and I swore then I would never inflict such suffering upon anyone subjected to a slide deck I was associated with.

During my years in corporate marketing, I wore many hats, from content to strategy.  I also became the go-to guy for executive keynotes. I was good at them, not only from a design perspective, but also because of my instinct for persistent audience focus complimented my ability to simplify complex messages and create continuity.  Keynotes were an omen, I just didn’t recognize it at the time.

Hurricane Maria’s lasting impact

I left the corporate marketing world for consulting in 2017 and creating keynote presentations and sales decks was not my target market. Then Hurricane Maria came barging through Houston one Friday night and turned it into a lake. The following Monday morning, an unexpected phone call modified my trajectory.

John Heimann, who at the time, was director of commercial marketing at Anthem of California, was calling.  John and I worked together at Alcatel many years prior. He started the call by saying “I don’t know if you can help me, but I’m in a jam.”

He explained that he received a call from the account manager at the Houston agency he was working with and was told “our studio is underwater. Literally, underwater.” They were not going to be able to meet several deliverables because of the hurricane and flooding.

On that Monday, the most critical deliverable to Anthem was an RFP finalist presentation required for a key account within the next 10 days. The ask was a PowerPoint presentation of approximately 60 slides, and the content had yet to be created. Though I felt a bit rusty as a designer, I knew we could make it work. 

Anthem won the account and I’ve been working with healthcare sales leaders to pitch key accounts consistently ever since.  It’s a role I never saw coming.

While I also help these same organizations define and produce various strategic programs and content, those contributions are invisible to most.  For many salespeople I work with, the finalist decks for key accounts are the only work they know me for, so they just see me as the PowerPoint guy.  Commoditized by assumption.

But, while many just see a slick presentation, I see an engaging, clear, and relevant message designed for the only people that matter – the decision makers in the room. This is what it takes to keep an audience engaged.  This is how I help sales win. This is why I have become their presentation secret weapon, even though I’ve never promoted myself as a PowerPoint expert.

It happened because I met a need, and that need is to help salespeople be successful, especially in front of an audience. And, while many salespeople just see a slick communication tool, I see a lot more.  Strong messaging and positioning are a byproduct of understanding what your audience cares about.  As with all content, when coupled with well-choreographed creative design and delivery, a good presentation helps presenters be more persuasive. 

Most importantly, my experience helps me, help them, win key accounts. And because I help them win, I’ve become a top gun for key account pitch decks and executive keynotes.  

I guess I have become a PowerPoint savant.  Bring it on. 

This article was originally published on Medium.

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Old Habits are Hard to Break

Change is hard.  “An A+ for stating the obvious” you are thinking to yourself?

B2B marketing is stuck in “old ways”.   Like any generalization, there are exceptions, but they remain the minority.   I’ll explain.

Business thrives on process.  From process comes efficiency, which is a critical element of success.  Consider FedEx and the UPS.  Process is their competitive advantage and they have embraced new techniques, structures and core processes to capitalize on fundamental shifts in technology, audience needs and service models. They are winning big because of it.

Process is key to efficiency but a process based on an old set of rules is disaster.  In many ways this is the status of B2B marketing.

Marketing is about message, content and audience reach.  B2B is adapting to the audience reach part of the model.  But it needs deeper analysis.  Marketing has not adapted to the message and content processes required to truly capitalize on new distribution models and audience consumption preferences.

The Internet and “digital” has forever changed how buyers evaluate and make purchase decisions.  In response, Marketing no longer prints collateral but publishes PDF’s on their websites. Many have adopted “marketing automation” tools to leverage their database.  Some discovered video, audio podcasts, eBooks.   The list goes on.

Communications teams are blogging and tweeting all day long to capitalize on the power of social media.  Many new tools, formats and media are being used, all powerful and with tremendous reach.

But here’s the thing.  Few marketing and communications teams are working together to consider the synergy of each effort, or the content required to support each channel.  The  activities are related and inter-dependent upon each other, though they are often not executed as such.

Engagement is the new buzzword in marketing. Engage with customers, prospects, and partners.  “We need to engage online.  Establish a conversation.”  But for many organizations the teams responsible for customer engagement are not truly engaged with each other.  They talk, have meetings and conference calls, but they are not engaged.  Why?

Old habits. The approach to content creation, communication, and the structure of organizations has not evolved. B2B has historically undervalued creative, message and content, and they have not yet recognized the need to adapt the process of creating content.  One team creates collateral, another press and media communications, and a third owns marketing automation. Other teams own the web, video, and training.  Each is focused set of deliverables but not the coordination or relationships of the messages they are delivering.

Unless co-developed, creating a PDF whitepaper to publish on the web and writing a blog post for LinkedIn, without a strategy to leverage their inter-dependencies is not a new approach, just a new distribution method.

Would love to hear your own opinions on this.