What Do You Need?

I have sat through numerous sales pitches and vendor presentations in my career. I keep an open mind at the beginning of the presentations and try to maintain it throughout the presentation. However, there is little I can do if the presenter is bad. I have not built up the discipline to withstand a bad presentation and I do not plan to. I cannot stand a bad presentation. Whether it is faulty data, incomplete data, trying to make sales through partial truths, or poor public speaking skills, my decisions to purchase a product for my staff and our students are negatively impacted by a poor presenter.

The other day, I sat through a textbook sales pitch that I was not looking forward to. I had sat through a number of these presentations (most were not good), I was being pulled in various directions at work, and I was not particularly excited about sitting through another bad presentation. (Here I failed the interview as I came into an important presentation with a bad attitude… Be strong and keep an open mind). I was hooked right away by the presenter. After introducing the team of presenters, the lead presenter asked if we could let her know what questions we had and what we wanted from the textbook. She wrote down each of our six items on the board and checked them off when she answered them during the presentation. I was stunned. In 25 years, I never once heard a presentation start with “What do you want?”. These five words told me everything I needed to know about the presenter and hopefully the company that hired her. These five words corrected my attitude and helped me to focus on the task at hand. Now, I wanted to listen to the presentation, I wanted the presenter to teach my students how to present, and I wanted to hire the presenter. (As an aside, I did not force the textbook committee to buy this book. I actually did not tell them how much I liked the product until they told me that they liked the product. I did not want to influence their decision)

Clearly, the presenter passed the start of the interview by asking us what we wanted. She followed this up by covering in depth each of the items that we had listed on her chart. I want every presentation that I sit through in the future to start with these five words. It was the best vendor presentation I ever sat through. It helped that the product had everything that we needed and was customizable to our needs. If the presentation was bad, we might have missed this. The presenter passed the interview and in the process, taught me how to be a better presenter.