I was reviewing a presentation a client was preparing for a critical customer meeting. It looked exactly like the thousands of presentations I’ve seen. After the title and agenda chart, came a whole series of “corporate glamour charts.”
You know what these are–we’ve all inflicted them on our customers/prospects, and had them inflicted on us. These are the bragging charts. They are the charts where we want to tell the customer how great we are. They always follow the same format. Usually some data about how big we are, how many people we have, our global locations, and all the awards we’ve gotten. The next is the “logo” chart. It shows dozens of logos of “name” customers that we have.
Inevitably, we inflict those and a few more charts on the customer—all focused on us, all focused on how great we are. In the entire presentation, perhaps there are only one or two charts on the customer.
Usually, the presentations continue to be about us. We dive into the weeds about our products, how great they are and why the customer should feel privileged that we should want them to buy those products.
Perhaps, implicitly, we are also saying how fortunate the customer should feel to even be talking to us.
I detest corporate glamour charts. Just when the focus of our attention should be on the customer, we make it all about us.
What if we shifted our perspectives on these presentations? What if we made the customer the center of attention?
Imagine how corporate glamour charts might change. They would be glamour about the customer—based on the results they achieve as a result of working with us.
What if we could imagine, “What would this mean to the customer? How does this make them great? How do they stand out–to their management, to their customers?”
Then the rest of the presentation would focus on the customer, what they are trying to achieve with this project and how doing the project with us enables them to achieve their goals.
We’re supposed to make the customer the center of everything we do. How would things change if we made them the center of attention of our presentations. What if we made them glamourous?
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