It’s the Process of Getting There!
August 22nd, 2007We had an important meeting yesterday with one of our bigger clients. Since we are in the business of producing presentions, we often go presentationless for our own meetings. We’re often too busy meeting client’s presentation production deadlines to work have time to work on our own.
But we decided this meeting had a level of importance that demanded the attention and effort it would take to prepare a good presentation deck. About a week before the meeting, I started the process by putting together an outline of notes and pulling together some ideas to modify and build few new slides to our core pitch deck.
My partners and I emailed back and forth some notes about the meeting strategy and the key points we wanted to communicate. We decided that even if we did not end up using the slide deck, by developing the PowerPoint deck, it would be a good road map of our meeting communication strategy.
We met a number of times to dicuss the strategy and review the deck. In reviewing the deck and developing the individual slides we planned and strategized what we would say, what was important, how to say it, and what not to say. We asked each other questions, we asked questions we thought our client might ask and guessed reactions to the messages we were going to say and emphesize with supporting visuals. We added some slides, deleted others and ehanced the most important.
We did get to use our slides after a few anxious moments of room projector technical glitches. The slides with high visual value to ehance what I was saying as the primary speaker, kept us on track and I feel we did get to say all we planned to say and more. It was a good meeting. I’m not sure of the final outcome yet – as the agreement discussed has yet to be signed. But the slides helped get our message communicated. But they also helped us develop the message. We had time for questions during our presentation and time left over to discuss things further after the last slide. We were prepared to answer every question thrown at us, even the hard ones.
In the end we experienced first hand the added value we often speak of when we help clients develop a PowerPoint deck , that it is not only more effective slides you end up with, but the process of developing the better slides with high visual value – helps prepare for a successful meeting!