There are two significant challenges that, when not well managed, erode how we keep an audience connected and engaged as we unpack our strategic business stories.

The most common of these is giving away too much too soon, unpacking every detail coming up before going through every detail in even greater detail. This is a surefire way to have the audience tune out and miss critical points when they think they know what is coming next.

40-60% of your pipeline isn't lost to a better solution.

It's lost to indecision.

Your prospects aren't choosing someone else.

They're choosing to do nothing and taking the safe option where they won’t get fired for getting it wrong.

We live in an era of great distraction. There is more information more readily available and constantly competing for our attention, a feeling of less time to take it all in, and as a result, we are more easily distracted than ever.

When it comes to pitching ideas and where you need to convince someone to back you, there are three things that make for consistently successful presentations.

Everywhere you look, there’s a digital device with a face glued to it. Whether that’s on trains or planes, on the sofa, in meetings or even across the table at dinner. We’re truly living life through a lens. Full disclosure, I count myself as one of those people too – and this is certainly not a rant about how devices and the content we consume are changing society. Rest assured, I’ll keep that for another day. This is more a reflection on whether our digital reliance means we are losing our connection to storytelling.

Does the drive for expansion now diminish your value?

One of the great challenges with design is its subjectivity and getting caught up in form over function, how it looks versus what it is there to do. And this can lead to many varied views from all quarters. This can certainly be the case with book covers, as I have recently experienced.

Newsflash: The products and services you make are of no interest to your customers. Sorry, but it's true. They just don’t care. And if you’re waiting for a witty twist to this tale, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.

The Columbia disaster was a tragedy that marked the beginning of the end of the Space Shuttle program and the world's only reusable spaceship. And one PowerPoint slide might, just might, have changed that.