I don't care how you make the sausages

I was reviewing a presentation for a client recently. He's a boutique consultant, with some very good ideas and the service that he and his partners have come up with centres on identifying savings and efficiencies for small-to-medium sized businesses, improving cash-flow in the short term and enabling those businesses to expand in the medium to long term. They have developed a strong methodology and have gained an invitation to present their ideas at ministerial level here in Ireland. So far so good.

Then I looked at the presentation.

• 30% of the landscape was logos and bands of color.

• Every slide was awash with full-sentence bullet points.

• All the info was presented up front on each slide - the busiest of which had 43 elements on it.

• And finally, the core of their presentation was a lengthy discussion of their methodology, the elements it was designed to address, and the three pillars on which it was built (represented by a triangle, four circles, and a continuous improvement arrow diagram)

"I don't care how you make the sausages," I said.

"Pardon?"

"You're jumping straight into a long-winded description of your processes and the thinking behind them. I don't care how you make the sausages."

My recommendation to him was to produce one slide. A case study of Company X. 

"We applied our methodology in Company X. They made savings of Y% over 6 months and grew by Z% over the next 12 months, hiring 5 new staff to accommodate all the extra business." [Irish ministers right now are very interested in projects that result in jobs growth]

"If the minister seems interested in this, then you produce one more slide. Case studies of Companies A, B and C."

Company A          Savings X%          Growth Y%          New Jobs: N
Company B          Savings X%          Growth Y%          New Jobs: N
Company C          Savings X%          Growth Y%          New Jobs: N

"Then you can tell him you accomplish all this with a simple sausage and ask if he wants to know how you make your sausages!"

Image: Canstockphoto.com

Look at a recent presentation of yours. Chances are, there will be a flowchart or a process diagram in there. Like as not, it will have four apices with a continuous arrow feeding into each of the points. Or it may have three or five or even six apices.

Utterly generic.

I don't care if it's in 3D, I don't care if it was hand-rendered under a full moon by elvish princesses and cost you $5,000; if it's a process improvement diagram, it is UTTERLY GENERIC.

Not to you - you've sweated over every detail of it, you've questioned the utility and impact of every word in every part of every questionnaire you have designed. But to me - and hundreds of PowerPoint viewers like me - ya-awn! 

That means, two slides into your presentation, my eyes are glazing over. That means I am unconsciously thinking of you as nothing special or writing you off as yet another snake oil salesperson. That means you have not piqued my interest or held my attention from the get-go.

So don't tell me how you make your sausages. Instead, determine if I like sausages. Determine if I need or want sausages. Tell me how your sausages have improved other people's lives. Give me benefits, give me happy endings and smiling faces. Then, once I've expressed real interest in your sausages, I may start asking questions as to their constituents and manufacture.

There's an old quote, frequently misattributed to Otto von Bismarck, about the two thing you should never see being made - laws and sausages. I don't know who the true coiner of the phrase was, but it was a good one.

I don't care how you make your sausages.