Elling Hamso Blog

Steve Jobs is considered one of the best presenters of all time. He walks on to the stage in blue jeans and a poloneck and just chats with the audience, effortlessly.

Jobs may have talent, but it doesn't come without effort. And he does everything right. If you read all the books on presentation design, Reynolds, Duarte, Atkins, Kawasaki, Williams, etc., you will find that Jobs is the case study that does it all.

He creates the story, the unforgettable headline; "Today Apple reinvents the phone", "The world's thinnest notebook", "One thousand songs in your pocket", the passion statement, the metaphors and analogies, he develops demonstrations and supporting slides.

More than anything, he answers the essential question: Why does it matter? Why does the audience want to know. Where does it hurt? And he answers without clutter, simplifies to emphasize.

Most of his slides, those that aren't pictures, are just a few words, in fact most of them would pass Reynolds' 'max six words on a slide' rule. The screen never competes with what he says, only supports and elevates.

Jobs might look like he is just ad libbing on stage, but the truth is he spends hours and days rehearsing. Every word and every gesture is scripted and refined and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. That is what it takes to be perfectly relaxed, just chatting with the audience.

His Macworld keynotes, which is where he really excels, are long, an hour, some times longer. That is why he 'chunks' his presentation. Every few minutes, ten at the most, something new happens, a demo, a guest, a video, something to re-engage the audience.

The author, Carmine Gallo, does a good job of analysing Jobs' presentation skills and presenting the underlying science which supports every thing he does.

It does not matter whether you are a professional speaker or just do the occasional presentation, if you read this book, your next presentation will be better, maybe totally different and amazingly much better. Nobody said that only Jobs can do it.

Without commissions in the financial services market, the credit crunch might never have happened. A commissions based business model means selling what suits the agent, not what is in the best interest of the customer.

Speaking at the Hotel Booking Agents Association annual forum in Hinckley, UK, recently, I was provoked to make known my stand on commissions.

Commissions are a disease. Business models based on commissions are a textbook case of a win-loose supplier-customer relationship.

Venue finders and others who use a commissions based business model say that I don't understand, which worries me, because I do. So at the risk of being patronizing, let me spell it out.

Let us say I am a corporate meeting planner asking an agent to find me a venue. I pretend this is a free lunch as the agent is paid a percentage fee from the venue and claims to leverage his purchasing power to get really low rates. How hard he will work to get me the lowest suitable deal is questionable as his percentage commission amounts to more money if the rate is higher. This is the win-loose mechanism between me and the agent.

But I will always get the best deal for my client even if it means a lower commission, says the agent, I have the long term relationship with my client at heart.

I, the corporate customer, don’t care what you, the agent, feel or think. I just know that the harder you work for me, the less you get paid. And I want you to work harder still, because I am on a continuous performance scorecard which means I have to get more value for less money, every time. I simply will not accept, and refuse to believe, that any company looking after the best interest of its shareholders will work relentlessly harder and harder in order to get paid less and less. It is a nonsense and such a business model is an embarrassment to our profession.

“We create emotions and memorable moments” an event manager told me recently, “you can’t measure ROI on emotions”.

I know there are many who simply don’t believe that you can measure the Return on Investment from events, it is simply too difficult, either you believe the event to be effective or you don’t, you have to take it ‘on faith’.

If you are one of these non-believers, thank you for reading this far, maybe you are just an agnostic? It will make me very happy if you keep on reading.

You create emotions, making employees and customers feel appreciated, buying-in to your brand values. They may not even know how it happened, they just like you better, trust you and believe in you, because you have reached them through all their five senses. Excellent, this is the power of live communication.

Do these emotions have a value? Of course, otherwise you would not spend good money to create them. Or do they? On their own, just the emotions? We have to be a little more precise. It is not the emotions themselves, but what your employees or customers do differently when these emotions come into play. Because your employees feel more appreciated, they will work harder, take less sick leave and not quit for another job. Because your customers think of you as a socially responsible industry leader, they buy more of your products.

For any event to create value, the participants have to do something afterwards, something that creates value to the stakeholders. This is the only mechanism known to mankind for creating value from events. You have to make the participants do something they would otherwise not have done.

You don’t turn emotions into money, you turn emotions into actions, which in turn lead to either more sales or lower costs, thus improving your profits and shareholder value.

Then we have the ‘isolation’ issue. If sales go up after the customer event, how do we know it was because of the event and no other influence? There are several different methods for finding out, some are very good, such as doing a control group experiment, other methods are quicker and cheaper, but the results are not as precise. If you really need to know, you can always find out.

One large company in the healthcare industry recently told me about a new company procedure. In the future, no event budget, large or small, would be approved before a document was on the table specifying how the event would influence the bottom line, what participants need to do after the event in order to achieve this value, and how the event is designed to achieve such behavioural change. They had figured out ways of connecting emotions and memorable moments to the bottom line. You can do that too.

Elling

I attended today the Dutch MPI chapter meeting during Marcom exhibition at Amsterdam RAI. Terri Breining and Antonio Ducceschi did an excellent double act extracting some very interesting discussion points from the latest FutureWatch study.

An interesting group discussion topic was 'What do you do different to keep customers in a recession'. The answers were things like 'Be more creative', 'Create alliances', 'Maintain relationships', 'Be more flexible on cancellation terms', etc. All of these, in my opinion, were the wrong answers. Then one table said 'Turn USPs into VCPs, Unique Selling Points into Value Creation Points' which is spot on.

Unfortunately they didn't elaborate on what they meant, but i think your VCPs could be as follows:

1. Explain exactly how the event will increase profit. It either has to create more net revenue from sales or reduce costs, those are the only two ways of making profit.

2. Explain exactly what the event will make the participants do (not just feel or think), the only way of increasing sales or reducing costs is through participant actions.

3. Explain how the event will make them do just that. Show that you know why they are not doing it already. Maybe they lack product information or don't have a good attitude to your company or brand. This is why you need the event and this is why the programme is designed the way it is.

4. Ask your budget owner if the story above makes sence and if he believes it will work. He will probably say yes, then you ask him for the money.

Elling

 

When National Business Travelers Association (NBTA) recently launched the Strategic Meeting Management Certification programme (SMMC), meeting planners had it coming.

Meeting planners have been asking for ‘a seat at the table’, suggesting that general management should recognize the importance of meetings and place meeting managers alongside such professions as Human Relations, IT and Procurement managers.

General management took a quick look and asked meeting planners how they take care of the company’s money, applying good procurement practices, for example. The meeting planner explained that buying meeting services is too difficult for the professional buyer, who doesn’t understand meetings, and the meeting services providers agreed; leave meetings to the professionals!

Management didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Not knowing how to do your job is bad. Believing that you know something you don’t know, better than the professionals who know it, is deadly. The executioner is the professional travel manager who just launched the Strategic Meeting Management Certification.

Let us hope, for the sake of the meeting planner, that the General Manager has not asked any more questions, such as how do you manage meeting projects (online, of course), where are your quality assurance procedures, how do you manage risk? If a professional from any of these disciplines were to audit the average meeting planner, the meeting planner would be dead again, several times over. There are exceptions of course, like every reader of this blogpost.

Back to Strategic Meeting Management. What is it? In principle it is the application of good procurement principles to the total meetings spend across a corporation. In practice it means procedures whereby all meetings are registered and centrally approved, purchases are made from approved suppliers according to contracting policies and all payments are made through a system which captures and categorises spend. As a result, savings in the order of 15 – 30% are being reported by large corporations after implementing SMMP.

All of this was explained at the recent Paragon/NBTA Crossroads conference in Paris. I didn’t see many meeting planners there, but you may want to download Kari Kesler’s ‘Diving in to Strategic Meetings Management Programmes (SMMP)' (http://tinyurl.com/crossroadsparis) or check out some of the SMMP white papers on www.nbta.org.