Keeping messaging simple

Grant Leboff: Simon, when people are putting a presentation together, they may sometimes have some quite complex ideas to get across. How do they keep the message simple? Are the techniques that you can use to just keep it …

Simon Morton: Yeah. A couple different ways of doing that. The most obvious thing is just to boil it down to your key message. What is it that you’re looking to get across to your audience? What is it that if you called them up a week later and said, “What do you remember about the audience?” If they said, “Oh, I remember X.” What is X? How do you define that and then build your presentation around that key message? Now how do you do that? Well, it comes back to an issue that we touch on in the book quite a bit, which is ‘content clutter’. The content is the stuff that will gum your presentation up if you’re not careful. You need to get rid of that. Simplify that and maintain a focus on the messaging.

You can do that in a couple of different ways. One is just by constantly asking yourself, so what? If I’m going to add a bit of content into the presentation, is it supporting my message? Is it helping clarify and communicate that to my audience? If it is, great, it stays in. If not, if it’s there to demonstrate how much I know and how hard I’ve worked, but doesn’t support my message, probably get rid of it. You don’t need it. This presentation is about your audience and their understanding, not demonstrating how hard you’ve worked.

There is another structure as well which is we use time and time again, certainly when dealing with very complex type clients. It might be pharmaceuticals, engineering, and those type of things, which is just breaking it down. What, how, and why? What is it? How does it work? Why is it of benefit? Really simply, I mean, horrendously simple. Just by what, how, why, you’re able to disassemble some of the most complex ideas and then share them in a way that really engages an audience. We used what, how, why to help a client sell three nuclear power stations. Very complex sale, what, how, why was the way that we chunked it down to allow them to deliver that information in a way that really engaged their audience.

Grant Leboff: How does someone maintain objectivity about that? Because I sometimes, I know myself when you work with real experts in their field, they find it quite difficult to … You know? That is important, oh, but that isn’t. And you’re saying, “No, they don’t need to know that.” So how do you maintain? Is there any mechanism for trying to be objective about it? I understand the process, but I can see how someone sort of throws in the kitchen sink because they can’t disseminate between what’s important and what isn’t.

Simon Morton: It goes back to focusing on the audience, which again is something we’ve touched on in the book quite a lot. If you build your presentation based on your audience, what will float their boat? What will resonate with them? If it doesn’t resonate with them based on your analysis of that audience, and it won’t help them get your message, get rid of it. Even though it might be research that took you two years and countless – sort of – late nights to develop, if it’s not helping you get your message across then get rid of it.

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