Step 9: Identify Any Potential Roadblocks to Achieving Your Objectives, and Make a Plan to Deal with Each
Not infrequently, some of the people who are necessary for the successful adoption and implementation of your recommendations will not be in the room during your presentation. If you want to be sure of success, you need to identify these people and create a plan to get them to agree to the steps that you need them to take if your recom- mendations are to bear fruit.
Think through each of the critical decisions that have to be made in order for your rec- ommendations to be implemented and who needs to make each of those decisions. Think also about whether there are any people who, if they decided that they did not like your ideas for any reason, could block their implementation. These are your stakeholders for this particular project. Make a list of all these people. You will need to approach those who are not going to be in your audience, preferably before your presentation. You may also want to approach some of the more important ones who are going to be in your audience to try to “ pre - sell ” them on your ideas.
FIGURE 9.1. Stakeholder Analysis Example
Whose help will we need for our recom- mendations to be
implemented?
Jane Joe
What must each of them think or do for the recommendations
to be successful?
Agree that the brand investment is worth a test
Agree that he can do without the incremental funding for his salesforce
Where do they
stand on this? Currently doesn't agree Currently doesn't agree
What do we need to do to close the gap?
Private meeting to go over the data in more detail
Work on his boss, because Joe himself will never
agree to this
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Once you have your list of stakeholders, the people whose buy - in you need, write down beside each name what the person needs to think or do for your recommendation to be a success, and where you think he or she stands right now. Then create a plan for how you will infl uence each, and schedule meetings accordingly. (See Figure 9.1 for an example; a blank form is included as Worksheet A.7 in Appendix A .) Then move on to Step 10.
Step 10: Decide How You Will Measure the Success of Your Presentation
The fi nal step in the Extreme Presentation ™ method is to measure the success of your presentation. Why should you bother to measure success? At one level, the success or failure of your presentation should be obvious rather quickly: either your audience did what you asked them to do, or they did not. Informally, another measure of success is to observe the quality of the discussion that accompanied or followed your presentation. If your audience starts to work out the implementation details of your proposal during your presentation, then you know you have succeeded.
In addition, you may want to be more deliberate in how you measure success. You have already taken the most important step in measuring your presentation ’ s success, and that was back in Step 2, where you wrote clear and specifi c objectives for how you want your audience to change what they are thinking and doing with respect to your subject. To measure success, you want to know whether you have achieved these objectives. This is particularly important for a training presentation; for a presentation proposing an idea, recommending a course of action, or pitching a product or service, you want to know for yourself how successful your presentation was, but for a training presentation you typi- cally also need to know to prove to others who have paid for your presentation. 1
At the beginning of the book we mentioned that the Extreme Presentation method takes a marketing communication approach to presentation. The measurement step is just an extension of this analogy, and it suggests one additional goal beyond changing what your audience is thinking and doing. To know whether marketing is effective, we don ’ t just measure changes in attitudes and behaviors — we also want to measure the change in brand or relationship equity. This allows us to determine whether our marketing efforts are strengthening our brand or, alternatively, whether they are just cashing in on it and therefore weakening it. Think of it in personal terms: If you try to convince people you know to do something, they may do it because you have convinced them that it would be good for them to do it, or else they may do it just as a favor to you. In the former case, your relationship may be strengthened because you have given them some useful informa- tion that allowed them to do something new; in the latter case your relationship is likely weakened. Too many such requests for favors and your friends will no longer be returning your phone calls.
It works the same way for presentations: we want each presentation to not only achieve its attitudinal and behavioral change objectives, but we also want each presentation to strengthen our personal credibility with our audience, so that the next presentation with the same audience achieves its goals more quickly and effi ciently.
1 See Brinkerhoff ’ s Success Case Method (2003; 2006) for a detailed approach to measuring training effectiveness.
1 See Brinkerhoff ’ s Success Case Method (2003; 2006) for a detailed approach to measuring training effectiveness.
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SATISFYING YOUR STAKEHOLDERS AND MEASURING SUCCESS 143
One way to gather all this information is to announce to your audience, at the end of the presentation, that you are working on an initiative to improve the impact of your work and that you would like to send them a very brief, less - than - one - minute online survey.
Gain agreement from everyone in the room to respond to it, to increase the chances of receiving a good response rate. Then email them a link to a survey by the next day at the latest. The survey should have a few simple questions, which will cover these A - B - C ’ s:
Attitudes: ask them to what extent they agree/disagree with a statement or two that describes the “ thinking ” that you are hoping to achieve with your presentation.
Behaviors: ask them to rate the probability that they will undertake a particular action or set of actions (these actions representing the “ doing ” that you are trying to get them to do).
Credibility (personal “ brand equity ” ): ask them to rate their willingness to attend another presentation of yours, and whether this willingness has increased, decreased, or remains the same as a result of this presentation.
In all cases, however, do not tell you audience before your presentation begins that you will be asking them to evaluate your presentation at the end, because it may foster an (unnecessarily) critical mindset in your audience to your whole presentation. Only announce your request for feedback at the end. 2
For more important projects, you may also want to send a similar survey again a few weeks, or months, after your presentation, to ask whether they have actually taken the actions they said they would.
Once you have decided how you will measure your success, you have completed the tenth step. Designing a presentation is an iterative process: if you have time, go through the method, the ten steps, one more time quickly, to see whether there is anything else you need to change. The next chapter, the Conclusion to this book, has a “ quick ” version of the ten steps that you can use for your fi nal review.
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2 Consumer research suggests that informing customers in advance that they will be asked to evaluate something tends to reduce satisfaction, because they tend to focus on the more negative points (Ofi r & Simonson, 2001).
2 Consumer research suggests that informing customers in advance that they will be asked to evaluate something tends to reduce satisfaction, because they tend to focus on the more negative points (Ofi r & Simonson, 2001).
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145
Conclusion 10
You have just completed the ten - step Extreme Presentation method. As a result of this exer- cise, you have created a presentation that will get people to act on your recommendations.
With practice you will get through the ten steps much more and more quickly; in all cases, the amount of effort you put in to designing your presentation should be directly pro portional to the importance of the presentation.