What Your Business Presentation has in common with a Sherlock Holmes story…..

Like many people I’m a great fan of detective stories because the best ones are great puzzles to be solved and  none are better than the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

One of the most popular short stories is “Silver Blaze” which focuses on the disappearance of a famous winning racehorse on the eve of an important race and on the apparent murder of its trainer.

The plot hinges on what has become famous as the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time”………

(For those of you who are not familiar with the story the curious incident is that the dog didn’t bark at a stranger which leads Holmes to believe that the murderer wasn’t in fact a stranger but was someone the dog knew).

What helped the detective to reach a satisfactory conclusion was the realisation that what mattered was not what was there but what was missing.

And this can be a problem in business presentations too….

Presentations often lose business, not because of what is there, but because of what is missing.

Not because of what is said, but because of what is not said.

Generally speaking when presenting many people have a tendency to include too much information but it’s not necessarily what the potential client wants to hear.

This stems from presenting from the perspective of the speaker, bidder, sales executive- telling your audience all about what you do, how long you’ve been doing it, what results you’ve got, who your previous clients are and so on and so on…..

But the thing is people don’t care what you can do, but what you can do for them

And this is often what is missing from business presentations and why so many don’t win.

So make sure that you include this missing piece.

Tell your audience what it is you do that will solve their problem

And in that way you’ll stand out in your marketplace because so many businesses just don’t do this.

Until next time,

With best wishes for your success,

Cath

Cath Daley Ltd.