Episode #135 Why Do You Need to Bother With Presenting?

As usual I got the venue early. I was doing what I teach others in sales to do, get to the venue early, check the nametags of who are attending. This way you can put faces to names of people you know and you can see if there is a potential client in the room who you would like to meet. The speaker was also there nice and early setting up. This is a very good practice and allows you to fix any technical issues which arise. Sure enough the stand microphone was not working properly and she could not be heard at the back of the room. So a pin microphone was called for. While waiting, I was chatting about whether she did much public speaking. I was a little bit astonished by her answer.

She said she did not and that this would be the last one she would do. She mentioned she got a lot of invitations but declined them. Now as a strong advocate and preacher of doing public speaking to grow your company and professional brands, I was aghast to hear this sacrilegious viewpoint. She dug the knife in deeper and twisted it when she asked me how many of her competitor CEOs in her industry I had heard talk. Actually, she was right. I could only think of one and that was a long, long time ago.

Now I would have thought that this was a tremendous advantage and would be praying that my competitors stayed as silent as the tomb, so I could go around shooting my mouth off at every opportunity. Interestingly, in her industry the herd instinct seems to prevail over differentiation. If they don’t do it then I shouldn’t do it either.

That seems totally crazy to me. She could use these speaking spots to build up a positive image of her company. She could make sure her firm was top of mind in that competitive high end of the market. Even if we didn’t all become consumers of the brand, we would become fans of the brand and would recommend it to everyone over her rival’s alternatives. She has risen to a position of consequence in her job. She is the first female CEO in Tokyo in that industry. What a fantastic chance to grow her personal brand as well. I can’t imagine her current employer or any future employer would look askance at her efforts to promote herself as the face of the brand.

I asked her why she was reluctant to speak and again her answer floored me. She said she didn’t think there was any point running around telling people how great XYZ company was. She believed they needed to experience the quality of the service to appreciate it and her telling people about it wasn’t effective. I must be too deep in the public speaking world to have these types of thoughts.

I said to her, “Nobody is here to hear about XYZ company. They don’t care one iota about XYZ company. They are here to learn what you are doing, your successes and failures, so that they can apply those in their own businesses”. This would have seemed obvious to me, because I do a lot of speaking, but I could see this struck her as an entirely new idea. I explained that in providing value to her audience, her worth and her company’s worth become further enhanced.

So it would seem she didn’t understand her audience and what they wanted. I had read all the name badges, so I knew exactly who was in the room and what companies they came from. This was a gathering of people hungry to learn something new. She could just as easily have asked the organisers who was attending, so that she could tailor her remarks accordingly. She was accompanied by her head of PR, who should have done that for her, but sadly the PR person though charming, appeared clueless about using pubic talks to grow the brand.

One thing I will praise our speaker for was flexibility. After listening to me giving her my mini Master Class in speaking, she did switch gears during her delivery and try and give more audience perspective to what they are doing. It could have been so much better though, if she had planned the talk with that at the forefront of her mind, when she and her team started work on the talk.

The realisation of things I take for granted, not being the common perception, was a good wake up call for me. They say a fish is the last thing to discover water. I will make a bigger effort to promote the idea of public speaking as an absolutely indispensible arrow in the quiver of business and we must learn to become master archers in our field of endeavour.