Business Consort

Two years ago, a City journalist wrote a piece in which he said business may be many things, but boring it ain’t.  Previously he took the job of Sports Editor on a Sunday paper because it was a change.  But he soon regretted it.  He found sports people deadly dull.  On one occasion he took an England Cricketer to lunch but halfway through the soup course he was already overwhelmingly bored, and by the end of the meal he had lost the will to live.

He gave up the job and went back to the City, where he thrived on the thrills and spills of malpractice, malfeasance and magnificent soap operas.  Sadly, the adrenalin rush is missing in swathes of business activities. 

Being boring is the way of life for most businesses.  Most business presentations have had an adrenalin bypass, and you could probably pay the national debt with the wasted costs of failed marketing activity.  Mostly, they are linear descriptions of the company and its offering.  Little or no ‘persuasion’.

 Poor presentations fail

A couple of years ago, a survey was done of senior executives in Florida.  71 per cent of them admitted to drifting off during business presentations.  In this country, that figure may be even higher.

I work as a training consultant in communication skills, and often have to help business leaders with their business presentations.  The overwhelming majority have no chance of achieving their aims.  I’ll come back to that in a little while, but first I’d like to talk about the business of being boring.

Recently I published a Blog on the Ecademy business network forum.  It was called Beware of Being Boring.  It has scored 2,728 views, and 105 comments.  Some of the comments were longer than the original Blog.

I published another Blog, called Ever Been Asked to Get to the Point?  That has attracted 1,276 views with 56 comments. So what I have I learned from these two Blogs?

·         When people are boring, they usually don’t realise it

·         Boring people are focused on themselves

 What is boring? 

It is offering the same old same old.  You may like a prawn sandwich, but if you had it for lunch and for dinner, day after day, how long would it be before you found it boring?

Monologues are boring too.  A man I know attended a networking event in London.  He met someone new and asked him the age-old question, What do you do?  The other person spoke for seven minutes without pause, then said, Sorry, what was your question?  Do you know people like that?

Why do people get bored?  Because they have a very low attention span.  Any idea what the average attention span is among adults in this country?  Seven seconds. Every seven seconds they think of something else.

One very important reason why most business presentations fail is that they ignore the way people listen and receive information, and that is a central plank of my training programmes on communication skills.

Another is about the experience you deliver, when you make a presentation.

What experience do you deliver?

We live in an Experience Economy.  Everything is judged by the experience it delivers. What do you deliver?

Do you know anyone who is boring?  Would you buy from them?

Just consider what it is about them that you find boring and see if any of that applies to your own sales pitches or business presentations.  Often, we just need an expert external eye to tell us what we should be doing differently.

There are three essential elements to consider:

1. What is your added value?
2. What can you do for others that no one else can do?
3. How well do you put that across?

You must have a clear understanding of what you bring to the party.  Knowing your personal added value will add energy, conviction and authority to your presentations.  Knowing what you alone can offer (even if it is just the way you relate to people), will give you the edge in competition, and release you from having to compete on price.

Finally, you must be good at putting your case in a persuasive manner.  That usually means getting the help of a professional coach.  Email me and I’ll send you a free Presentation Checklist (phillip@mindassociates.org). It’s worth doing, because Boring Does Not Sell! 

© Phillip Khan-Panni 2010

I can get them to you today!