Messaging Buy-in’s Pivotal Role in Presentation Excellence

Welcome to a blog series that highlights common pitfalls teams often encounter, which prevent them from getting the most out of their B2B presentation discipline.

Every company has a presentation culture

At GhostRanch, we've worked with probably a thousand+ different teams over the last decade, and we have come to understand that different orgs have different attitudes, opinions, and workflows (or lack thereof) when it comes to leveraging the presentation medium.

You may find this hard to believe (not!), but many companies don't place much value on presentations—treating slides as an afterthought, leaving slide design and content creation to rogue sellers and subject matter experts—who don't happen to be marketers or designers. 

PPT Wild West ensues, and scarily I'd bet like 15-25% of companies live in some form of this hell.

A step up from this turning of the blind eye approach to presentations, would be a middling majority who recognize that presentations have some place in their go-to-market—just not as important of a place as those sexier and spendier Demand Gen and Brand items high atop the funnel. These groups don't want complete brand chaos in their decks, since they understand that sales presentations and conference breakouts and webinars are still brand touchpoints.

So marketing will toss out a new PPT template every few years, ask the inhouse design team to make the new First Call deck pretty, and release the one size fits most slide library for employees to run with. My totally anecdotal estimate is something like 75-85%—or the vast majority—of companies make some loose attempt to check a few key boxes and acquiesce in this Good Enough state, with the belief that a more customized approach simply wouldn't scale.

Alas, the top 5% of organizations are inhaling a rare air that we call Presentation Excellence (PE): a corporate communication nirvana where presentations are valued and leveraged as a strategic differentiator. Their decks consistently integrate clear strategic messaging with memorable visual storytelling that illuminates key ideas. Moreover, the majority of these decks are hand tailored to resonate with a specific audience to take strategically capitalize on a very specific communication opportunity. And believe it or not, but PE companies do this at scale, with a systems approach to workflows, partners, and resourcing.

In crowded b2b markets, organizations attaining Presentation Excellence stand out from the masses, winning over analysts, helping prospects feel seen, engaging audiences to actually remember and act upon what they'd communicated.

Believe it or not, in a Presentation Excellent culture, even internal decks get the treatment.

This brings us to one of the first and potentially most obvious, but unforseen, pitfalls awaiting you around the first turn on the path toward Presentation Excellence. In order for your presentations to harness powerful Strategic Messaging to any degree of success, your organization must first actually adopt said messaging. Many marketers take this fact for granted.

Strategic messaging must be adopted

Product Marketers (PMMs) spend their business lives diving deep into positioning and competitive intelligence to figure out how to talk about the great value our products and services create.

PMMs work closely with Product and Sales and Marketing leaders, as well as Analysts and Executives to better understand how their products stand out from the market's many other offerings. PMMs need the ability to understand deeply technical capabilities and roadmaps, and then translate and prioritize key benefits into plain language that will resonate with an intended persona or buying group.

PMMs work tirelessly to define personas and build messaging frameworks for often incredibly complex portfolios and buying motions, hoping to give their sellers a go-to framwork that will aid them in consistently explanining how a suite's key features map directly to a user's problems. This process can take months to extract, distill, and priotize a massive amount of supporting data, anecdotes, and executive opinions to get to one cogent messaging framework that can help align the troops and get everybody to finally—FINALLY—say the same thing.

And then... 

Yeah, you're only halfway there.

As B2B Messaging Strategist, Emma Stratton, writes in her amazing book, Make it Punchy: How to Write Simple Tech Messaging That Wins Hearts, Minds & Markets, sadly...

Emma forces us to face the dark reality of what can actually happen when marketers aren’t able to convince stakeholders to embrace their newly crafted messaging. Stratton attributes lack of adoption to a few things. First, a lack of involvement and inclusion from key stakeholders from the early stages of new messaging development, or as she says:

“I may call myself a messaging strategist, but I’m really more of an alignment strategist when I consult with teams (if you know, you know). Alignment is as important as it is hard to achieve. What I’ve learned is that the less involved others are in the overall process, the less likely your messaging will get used by people. When someone tosses a new messaging document over the fence, it can feel like a ‘take it or leave it’ kinda thing. Some may use it, while others will stick with what they’ve got. And this leads to inconsistent messaging that confuses your audience and market. But when you’re part of the process, you naturally feel like you’re part of the solution… Remember, the more involved people are in the messaging process, the more likely they are to use it. In my experience, everyone wants to feel like they’re an important part of it—which they are!”

So yeah, you have to include stakeholders in messaging development. 

Next, you have to “create some buzz” internally around your new messaging:

The more complicated your product suite, and the more complicated your go to market motion, the more you should plan to invest in creating this excitement. 

Messaging adoption starts with buy-in at the very top

My teammate Steve Earl was formerly VP of Product Marketing at Oracle. Molly and I had him on the Presentation Thinking podcast recently, to reminisce on a roadshow he went on to foster messaging alignment across a wildly complex product suite.

In that capacity, Steve saw himself as the shepherd of the organization's new messaging, and his advise to anyone in a similar role is to guide your flock toward seeing the messaging as you do. In order to do so, Steve agrees with Emma wholeheartedly that you can't just drop a new document on them and expect a warm embrace. You're better off treating the initial rollout and attempt for messaging buy-in as one of the highest stakes presentations you'll ever give.

With as much reading and ingesting as your executive team is asked to do on a daily basis, packaging up your messaging deliver in a punchy, persuasive, memorable presentation that shows them why this new messaging will help your company achieve its strategic goals is the right step, because it speaks to what is keeping that audience up at night.

Steve's Key Takeaways

If you are keying in on this idea that presentations can be a key strategic differentiator for your organization, and you’re about to embark on guiding your organization up the path toward Presentation Excellence, you must acknowledge and handle the importance of Strategic Messaging, and adoption. 

Steve Earl's three key imperatives to ensure messaging buy-in:

1. Think like a salesperson:  Know your audience, know their pains, articulate the value to them, be clear on the why.

2. Communicate like it’s a high-stakes presentation – because it is. Don’t rely on your audience to simply “read it and provide comments.” Put it into slides – use animations and builds to tell a story.

3. Act like a shepherd. Bring stakeholders along on the journey. Always map to business strategy and priorities.

As Emma Stratton said in Make it Punchy, "I may call myself a messaging strategist, but I’m really more of an alignment strategist when I consult with teams (if you know, you know)." If you want your messaging to blossom, heed that advice, and think of yourself as the great alignment strategist your messaging deserves.

As always, thanks for reading, and keep on pitching!