Seth Godin is a marketer for whom I have the utmost respect. His head is screwed on straight. His books are easy and worthwhile reading. I do have an issue with his approach to Purple Cows and if, in the unlikely event, we should cross paths one day, I will talk to him about plain black and white cows that yield chocolate rather than regular milk or, at the very least, fat free, Omega 3 milk, directly from the udder.

Seth’s Blog, where he posts almost daily, proves that he has reached iconic status. He can be recognized by a single name like Madonna, although he is not at the point where he would be “the marketer formally known as the marketer formally known as Seth”.

In a recent post, The Marketer’s Attitude, Godin describes the perfect marketer. It would be a high energy, relentlessly positive person. It would be someone self-motivated and self-sufficient, able not only to visualize complex projects but also to carry them through to fruition. He or she could engage strangers and embrace ambiguity. He sees the down streams and the downsides of any plan and adjusts accordingly. And so on.

There was something missing from his description, however. The perfect marketer must also be the perfect politician. The astute marketer knows that, in a perfect world, all things are possible. But in a highly volatile world, where people see their investments and imagine their lives going down the rabbit hole, where Boards are insecure and CEOs intractable and budget cuts inescapable, not all things are possible. Indeed, most things – even the small things and especially the right things – require a great deal of personal conviction and much cleverness to gain the collaboration of those in high places if projects are to ever see the light of day.

The marketer must know how to properly package a proposal, how to wrap it in the context of necessity, how to make it risk-aversive, politically-sensitive, environmentally-friendly. He must show it as right for the times and right for the customer. He must know how to segment a project so that it is not a capital intensive venture requiring a long-term commitment from skittish shareholders, but a series of small bite-sized chunks with quick wins and easily quantifiable gains to the bottom line. He must know what to say when and to whom, how to recognize windows that are slightly ajar and how to contain disappointment and move on when they are not.

This is not a cynical view of the corporate world. It is a practical one, reflecting the times and the importance of timing. Selling starts not when a product or a program is ready to launch. It begins when it the next most perfect thing is just a gleam in the perfect marketer’s eye.

I’ve probably made several hundreds of presentations in my time, too many times by my reckoning, taking up altogether too much of my time. They seemed to detract – or at least distract me – from the business of doing my job. My boss, the then CEO, told me that selling – which when distilled down to its essence was what my presentations were – was precisely my job…and indeed that of all senior managers. We sell our plans to the Board, he went on, to the banks, to employees. We sell ourselves to customers, to suppliers, to analysts. He was right, of course. Once again. This was a disturbing trait that I never got used to. Anyway, I did learn a few things over the course of these presentations, which I share here:

Five Dos:

1.    Control the conditions. If at all possible, do the presentation on your premises. There are several reasons for this:
-    You won’t have to worry about being waylaid en route by snowstorms, cancelled flights, or traffic tie-ups. You won’t have to worry about arriving late, stressed or sweaty. Forget the commercials; getting there is not half the fun.
-    You can prep the room in advance, control the lighting, check the equipment and, even have time for a last minute run-through. If you are off-site, despite all the reassurances, you can never be sure that the room or the equipment will work for you.
-    You can tack on a tour, bring in support staff as appropriate (you don’t want to be out-numbered), and have complete control over the menu and washrooms…in short, you have at your disposal all the advantages and comforts of home.

2.    A two parter: First, Know your stuff! I find most nerves are related not to discomfort with the audience but with the material. If you know your stuff cold, you will be much more relaxed. If you don’t, frankly, call the whole thing off. Part 2: Get your facts right. Nothing makes you look stupider than being called out on information that is inaccurate. Even incorrectly added columns of numbers makes you appear incompetent and your thesis untrustworthy. Check and double-check your material. Ensure that anyone else present is using the same numbers as you so that your own people don’t embarrass you.

3.    Provide a context. There might be a rhyme to your presentation but, more importantly, there has to be a reason. Everything should be part of a whole. A strategic plan, perhaps. Or a response to the economic or competitive environment. Even something like the launch of an important new product portfolio or marketing program, seemingly big enough items to stand on their own, can be placed in a larger context. Just ask yourself, what is the driver of change? I once did presentations to what some of us considered corporate raiders. Talk about mixed emotions. We didn’t want them to acquire us but, just in case they did, we had to look good to keep our jobs. I had to find a context to cover both eventualities. I came up with ‘value’.

4.    Make sure you have enough meat. Don’t waste people’s time. Present something interesting, something with take-aways. They should leave the room thinking about what you presented. I always worry when people don’t ask questions. It usually means that they didn’t get it. Or worse, that they did and were disinterested. Which brings up the corollary: Do let people ask questions…the more the merrier. Even if they are distracting. Even if they cut into your presentation time. Questions mean involvement. Involvement means commitment.

5.    Say it like you mean it. Show some passion. We had a bright young analyst who not only kept coming up with brilliant concepts, but was a master at Power Point and could capture and illustrate these concepts in a compelling way. The problem was, his presentation skills were lacking; he would stand in front of an eager audience and put them to sleep. I once made his presentation and began this way: “I am going to show you something incredible, something different and exciting. It will knock your argyle socks right back to the old country. This is highly classified information, however, so there will be no handouts. If you are caught with this material, we will have to kill you. Thank you.” The audience was mesmerized, not because I was so compelling or because they were so easily charmed. I had them simply because they came in receptive and I told them to be excited for me so they were. Try it.

Five Don’ts

1.    Don’t get cute. At least, don’t get too cute. You can have a prop. I always use props. They could be relevant quotes, nifty graphics, working samples, whatever. But you don’t want too many of anything. You don’t want to have too much animation, too many link buttons, too many distractions. Accents give flavor to your presentation. Too much flavor, however, becomes cloying.

2.    Don’t eat beforehand. At least, don’t overeat. You don’t want to be sick during your presentation. I once watched a senior sales manager make a presentation while his stomach was in the process of self-destructing. Needless to say, his mind was not on the material. As a result, neither was anyone else’s. And while we’re on the subject of food, don’t drink anything if you can during the presentation. At worst, drink water to cure a parched throat. Coffee is a diarrhetic. Soft drinks…well, let’s just say that the carbonation has a way of repeating itself.

3.    Slides should not be hard to follow or hard to read. Don’t use a dark background. Don’t put too many words on a slide. Don’t have too many ideas on one slide. Actually, one idea per slide is a pretty good guideline to follow. Don’t use massive spreadsheets forcing the audience to squint to read the numbers; almost assuredly, more than half your audience is of an age that finds small type visually challenging. As well, it will be hard to find and focus in on the two or three numbers that are actually meaningful. Show less and then highlight the numbers that are important. Make them bold, circle them, add arrows…whatever it takes. With one exception: the laser pointer. Use it at your peril. Nothing is more annoying than the laser dot zapping around the screen, shaking uncontrollably, circling herky-jerkey. The laser pointer is not high tech; it is the device of last resort for those who have not mastered technology.

4.    Presentations should not be too long. People get fidgety. You can get an awful lot in in an hour. You can probably distill an hour-long presentation down to three-quarters of an hour. Or a half-hour. Whatever you do, don’t surpass your allotted time. If there is an agenda, stick to it. Have someone friendly in the audience signal you when you are running out of time. It is unfair to cut into other people’s presentations because you are out of control; you are not that important. As for how many slides makes a decent presentation, plan on an average of three minutes per slide (with questions). That means 15-20 slides max. If you can’t cut your presentation down to 20 slides, you don’t really understand your material.

5.    Don’t worry so much. It’s only a presentation.

People talking without speaking
People listening without hearing.

Remember those lines from Paul Simon’s The Sound of Silence? Obviously, he had been to one too many company meetings.

A quick corner-of-the-napkin calculation says that I have survived in the range of 7,000 meetings over the course of my career. Somewhere around the 4,000 mark, I figured things out. You might think, therefore, that I’m slow but, hey, I was in a meeting.

So, here is one veteran’s Top 10 take-aways on meetings and facsimiles thereof.

1. Meetings are neither good things nor bad things. But, depending on your objectives, they can be necessary or unnecessary things. So when you are planning a meeting, begin by asking yourself these questions: Why have a meeting at all? Can we achieve what we need more efficiently and more effectively in another way?

2. What kind of meeting is this going to be? Brainstorming sessions are not the same as information sessions are not the same as planning sessions. The objectives are different; therefore, the organization of the meetings should be different, as should their participants.

3. So, who should be invited? Only those that have to be. This is, apparently, not as obvious as one would imagine. The tendency is to invite everyone and anyone who is remotely attached to the issue at hand or remotely related to someone else who, by invitation or by chance, will also be at the meeting. There is more fear of insulting someone by leaving him or her out than there is of having the wrong people or too many people involved in the first place. This is not a quilting bee. The only people you should worry about insulting are the people who actually should be there; you don’t want to waste their time. Oh yeah, the maximum number of people at a meeting: seven.

4. There should be an agenda prepared for any meeting, no matter how small. If you deem an agenda superfluous, then so, likely, is the meeting. An agenda, sent out in a timely fashion, ensures people come to the meeting prepared and makes clear the purpose of the meeting and its desired outcome.

5. Meetings can easily meander, with conversations wandering off in different directions. There should be one key objective going in and one major accomplishment coming out…which is achieving the key objective. Get what you need out of a meeting or get out of the meeting. There has to be a single-mindedness about this. Anyone who is of two minds on the subject should not be invited and certainly not invited back. I am reminded of this line from comedian Fred Allen: A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done. You’ve got one objective. Get it done.

6. To make sure there is no meandering, there should be a facilitator at every meeting. Most people assume that the chairman should play the role of facilitator; after all, it is the chair’s meeting. Wrong! You can’t play leader, scribe and facilitator at the same time. You may be the mouthpiece of the project, but you shouldn’t have to be its eyes and ears. The facilitator will make sure the meeting starts and ends on time, will keep the meeting on track (i.e., stay on topic), will stop side conversations, will ensure everyone gets a chance to speak, and will take notes so that no good idea gets lost. The facilitator is invaluable.

7. Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits. Apply his dictum from Thomas Edison to meetings…or, more precisely, to between meetings. People must meet their commitments, must do their assignments. I have seen teams energized and I have seen projects grind to a halt simply because someone did or did not complete a pivotal assignment. In other words, the between time is as important as the meeting time itself. You don’t want to have to have a meeting (as I have had) to agree that you agreed on something at your last meeting.

8. Be aware of each meeting’s dynamics, which really means, be aware of the people dynamics going on in each meeting. These change in dramatic but predictable ways when senior managers are present. It is important for managers to subordinate their ideas until others have had a chance to speak and that, if others speak, said managers do not shoot down or shrug off suggestions or even offer yes-but-wouldn’t-it-be-better-if improvements.

9. Meetings are to be survived and to do so sometimes means you’ve got to find a way to amuse yourself with the small things. I love whiteboards. I dislike laser pointers. I hate arrangements where table legs get in the way of mine. Speaking of legs, though, I have to admit to being a student of seating protocol. And seating habits. Where people sit is predictable and, as it turns out, inviolable. Okay, so the boss sits at the head of the table, opposite the drop-down screen. Others jockey for position and eventually sit where they sit. As time passes, you will notice that where they sit is where they always sit. Just as you will sit where you always sit. Seating is a security blanket, so if someone sits in someone else’s seat, there inevitably ensues a bizarre dance of the lost, a silly milling about. Like I said, be amused.

10. Lunches have become a staple of the North American meeting diet. Lunches meaning pizza and barbecue chicken. Not meaning tuna and bell pepper pockets. They say armies march on their bellies. So do meeting participants. Feed them wisely, which means that if the meeting continues after lunch, do not feed them too well. Nothing slows down a meeting like having all its participants take a communal nap.

So there you have it: 10 things to note for your next meeting of the minds.