The more you know, the easier it becomes to lose your audience.

We have this amazing ability to hear what we think we are saying and find it very hard to distinguish between our inner dialogue and what the audience is actually hearing.

The value lies in the problems solved.

We obsess about our products and services.
What the competition is doing, and how the market is performing.
What next, and what do we need to do to keep up…

What about the customer? What do they want and need?

It's the thing that all presenters dread – the silence that follows a presentation.

The days that follow your presentation are critical to success. This is when the people you presented to should be passing on your content to others, becoming content ambassadors and evangelists for your message. But in that silence, it can be hard to tell what is really happening.

Have you ever sat through a presentation or even read a book and thought, This isn’t for me, what is this all about? or Why am I bothering with this? That isn’t how you want your audience to feel when you present, but I can’t tell how often this happens.

This usually occurs when the audience for this specific presentation isn’t clearly identified upfront. As a result, different pieces of content get added for everyone ‘who might be interested’ or who might attend the meeting. All bases get covered. What could have been a clear message for the right audience, addressing a clear problem, becomes a waffly rambling collection of something for everyone.

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.