![]() We don’t know a company in the world that enjoys the prospect of exhibiting at a trade show. It’s often the epitome of stress. But you can alleviate a good chunk of it. Hence this article. Grab the lowest-hanging fruit Sure, you’ll want to promote your presence at the upcoming show. That means creating ads and memes for social sites such as LinkedIn. But what if that were already done for you? Duh. It is, in most cases. The hosting company will typically create artwork that you can use for your own purposes. It’s in the “Exhibitor Kit” you got when you signed up, and/or it’s available for download on their website. These will be pre-created ads that say “Hey [Industry]! [Our company] will be at [Name of Trade Show] in [Location] on [Dates]! Look for us in Booth [Number]!” Granted, these won’t be stunning. Often, they’re stunningly generic. But they are there and you’re effectively getting them for free (with your paid entrance fee). So download ‘em, populate ‘em, and post ‘em. And if you belong to multiple LinkedIn groups—you do belong to multiple LinkedIn groups, don’t you?—be sure to post these things in every group you belong to, at regular intervals. That’s one little bit of pre-trade-show stress reduced. By the way, be sure to take advantage of all the stuff that the exhibiting venue gives you in advance. Submit all the information about your company to help populate, say, the mobile app that visitors will use to navigate the venue. You certainly don’t want to be left out of that. Update what you bring Is your booth or stand-up display skin still showing that outdated version of your company’s logo? Or artwork featuring people wearing Covid-era masks? Now’s the time to re-visit those materials, and update them as needed. This also applies to things like handouts, leaflets, flyers, brochures, and even business cards (you have them ready for that new sales rep you hired, right?). Note that all of the above-mentioned materials are fairly production-heavy, as in turnaround time. So prioritize those first. Get the input out the door and into the vendors’ hands, allowing ample time for both revisions and delays. Also consider the promotional items you’ll bring. We had a client who would prioritize what kinds of goodies to give away at their booth based on whether or not they would fit into a carry-on bag, LOL! It’s true. Whatever works for you. Speaking of updating your materials: You’ll want to tweak your slide deck, for whether you’ll be showing it at your booth, presenting in a conference room, or entertaining prospects in a hospitality suite. Fortunately, unlike those printed materials such as booth skins and brochures, you can update your slide deck with just a few clicks, no vendors or turnaround time required. This is similar to your website. You do have a big tile on your home page advertising your upcoming presence at the show, don’t you? Don’t reinvent the wheel Here’s a classic question: “How do we get more prospects to visit our booth and give us their contact info?” It’s a valid question. It’s also one that’s been brainstormed, and answered, a zillion times. So don’t reinvent that wheel. Use the latest iteration of Google, a.k.a. ChatGPT. Simply ask it that exact question. It will effectively search the entire internet, and give you a list of suggestions, from giveaways and contests to customized swag bags. Speaking of not reinventing the wheel: We had a client employ a little desktop carnival-wheel game, wherein visitors could spin for prizes. Again: Ask ChatGPT: What are some good prizes? Obvious answers are discounts on your services, loss-leader free services, Amazon gift cards, “Spin Again” slots, and so on. Speaking of Amazon: these little wheels are easily found there. They’re inexpensive. And they’re made of dry-erase/white-board material, so they’re easy to customize—and re-customize, say, when you run out of a certain prize. And be sure to pre-write the “Congratulations!” emails you’ll be sending to all the prize winners, since you’ll have their email addresses—and will have input them into your CRM. For the love of QR codes How can you not love QR codes? They apply to almost everything we’d mentioned in this article. Put them on your flyers. On your swag. Business cards. Everywhere. Link them to the most appropriate page on your website—which, in this case, might be a special landing page for trade-show attendees, replete with some kind of promotion/savings for visiting that page (and providing their contact info, booking a call, or other similar call-to-action). Everything we’d mentioned above is stuff that you can, and should, do well in advance. The sooner you do it, the more pre-show stress you alleviate. Need help? Contact us. We’d love to pitch in.
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![]() Zoom! And another year goes screaming past. Are we really ready for our year-end round-up of best-practice articles, written for our beloved creatives audience, here at Copel Communications? The calendar doesn’t lie. Here’s your chance to catch those ones you’d missed, and/or revisit those that helped:
Have suggestions for an upcoming post? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you! ![]() From time to time, we at Copel Communications are invited to make a presentation, via Zoom, to a business or networking group, to talk about what we do and how we do it. When the time comes for us to present, the Zoom host invariably asks us, “Would you like control of the screen so you can show your deck?” Imagine their surprise when we say, “No thanks. No deck.” So do these presentations, pardon our French, suck? We don’t think so. The feedback we get afterward generally says otherwise. So what’s our secret sauce? Why do we hate PowerPoint so much? What’s going on here, and, most importantly, how can you benefit from this approach? We don’t hate PowerPoint That line above (“Why do we hate PowerPoint so much?”) was pure bait. We don’t hate PowerPoint, simply because we shun it for our own presentations. Truth be told, we make a decent chunk of our income here at Copel Communications from writing PowerPoint decks for our clients! But our business is all about communicating. It’s in our name. And we can communicate this, quite well, thank you very much, without the crutch of a deck of slides. It’s been said that no one wants to hear a sales pitch, but everybody wants to hear a story. So the trick is to frame the pitch as a story. Have a hook. Use teasers. Sure, we’ll toss in a visual (not a deck), when it’s appropriate, such as the cover a brochure we’d written, or simply a photo of our long-suffering dog, just because. There are times when PowerPoint is unavoidable. If you’re a CFO presenting sales trends and forecasts to the board, you’ll need those line graphs and bar charts. If you’re presenting on demographic distribution, a scatter plot is de rigueur. But most of the time, if you do opt to use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, or Apple Keynote, or whatever), go for the minimum. Speaking of Apple. Watch any old keynote presentation by Steve Jobs. He used slides. (Trivia: the in-house app which Apple created to make his slide decks is what morphed into the app called, appropriately enough, Keynote.) And those slides are minimal. An entire slide would say something like “Lightest Mobile Phone on the Market.” And that’s it. Take a page from that playbook. Put the onus on your presenting skills (including writing, practice, and polish). Which segues, quite conveniently, to our next topic: Cognitive dissonance How many times has this happened to you: You’re sitting through some presenter’s PowerPoint, and they say, “There are three big things our company specializes in.” And at that point, they bring up a slide with four Big Things. And the first three don’t even match what the presenter is describing. So you’re forced to decide, on the spot: Which is more important? What I’m hearing? Or what I’m seeing? Because you can’t really do both at once, unless they’re verbatim. Meaning, you either 1) ignore the text that’s staring at you on the slide, and close your eyes, shifting your attention to your ears to listen to the presenter, or 2) you cover your ears (or mute your speaker) and read what’s on the slide, effectively ignoring the presenter. Gee. This, to us, is the all-too-common hallmark of PowerPoint sloppiness. If you’re going to show your audience Three Big Points, then have them match, on screen, what you’re saying, aloud. Even better: Have each bullet appear when you mention it. Don’t bring all three up on screen at once; when you do that, people don’t know whether or not to read ahead. You’ve already lost them. It sounds simplistic—heck, it is simplistic—but have your audience “follow the bouncing ball,” like a sing-along video. We think that many presenters are afraid to do just that, because it seems like it’s dumbing-down or pandering. But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s respectful of your audience. And it makes your points drive home. Where they belong. Our favorite quote from Jeff Bezos, who never allowed slide decks in his “six-page memo” executive meetings: “PowerPoint is easy for the presenter. But hard for the audience.” To recap: You can, and should, use PowerPoint, when it’s appropriate to do so. But use it sparingly. And if you can avoid it—if you can captivate your audience without it—by all means, do so. Need help with that next presentation, regardless of modality? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! ![]() It’s that time of year again: time for our annual year-in-review wrap-up of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience. This one (although it's posting first) is the latter. Here are the top articles we’ve published for consultants, chock full of counterintuitive tips and business-building tricks. In case you missed any of these, here’s your chance to get some fast, free pointers. Enjoy!
Have suggestions for topics you’d like us to cover next year? Contact us. We’ve love to hear from you. ![]() What does your next crucial sales presentation have to do with Rich Little? And who on earth is Rich Little? Stay tuned. This will help you make more money. It’s based on some work we recently did for one of our clients, to help them sell better. And of course, it borrows from Rich Little. Who? Grating expectations If you’re old enough, you already know who Rich Little is. (We actually had to Google to make sure didn’t need to say—yet—“who Rich Little was.”) He’s a comedian. Specifically, an impersonator: someone who humorously imitates celebrities such as actors and politicians. He was famous for doing impressions of Richard Nixon and Johnny Carson. Who? And who? Oh geez. Google them if you don’t know. So. Late in his career—and this would be back in the 1980s, so we’re totally dating ourselves here—we saw Rich Little perform, live, at a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Mind you, at this time, he was still very well-known. He was the headliner. So you might think that the live show goes something like this: There’s a warm-up act: A lesser-known comedian who opens the show and “warms up” the audience, so they’re already laughing and in a good mood by the time Rich Little takes the stage. And then, just as the warm-up comedian bows off the stage, you hear the house announcer, over the P.A., say, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome our headliner! How about a big Atlantic City welcome for the one, the only, Rich Little!” And the audience cheers and cheers, and Rich Little takes the stage. Only it didn’t happen that way. In a word: Huh? The setup The first part of what we just described took place exactly as we described it. That is, all the stuff about the warm-up act. (Don’t worry—we are totally going to loop this back to your business, and crafting a superior sales presentation, in just a minute. We haven’t lost the thread at all.) But then, after the warm-up comedian left the stage, here’s what actually happened: The house lights dimmed. You could hear glitzy show-biz music playing through the house speakers. And then an enormous video screen descended from the ceiling, and there, up on the screen, was… Rich Little. Huh?? Think about that. Here’s an audience full of people who have paid good money to see Rich Little in person. And the very instant he’s supposed to take the stage—you know he’s standing in the wings, just out of sight—he doesn’t. And, instead, you see a video of him. Correction: You see lots of videos of him. And therein lies the crux of this entire conversation. You see, the videos were clips of him… on television. There he is, yukking it up with all the kings of late-night talk shows: Carson. Letterman. Leno. There he is up on a dais, at some roast. With all these other famous people laughing hysterically at his John Wayne (who?) or his Jimmy Stewart (who?) or whatever. With lots of brassy music under it all, tying it all together. Clip after clip. Of Rich Little, effectively being famous. After a few minutes of this, a recorded announcer says, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, here he is! Live! In person! Give it up for the one, the only, Rich Little!” And with that, he walks onto the stage. Setting the scene Guess what? When he took the stage, he took the stage to thunderous applause. The audience was already primed to see him. Why? They knew his work from TV. They thought he was funny. And they knew he was famous, so it was titillating to see him in person. And his little “sizzle reel” video had just reinforced that. Took it to a whole new level. Ta-dah. See where this is going? For your business? For your… PowerPoint? The Rich Little Video (that’s what we’d called it, initially, with the client we’d mentioned earlier) is effectively the same thing. It’s a quick highlight reel of “all the stuff we’ve done, the big-name clients we’ve served, a quick overview of our breakthrough methodology,” and so on. It’s something you can—and, arguably, should—show to prospects, very first thing, when you’ve got them in the room to make a sales presentation. It worked for Rich Little. It can work for you. Think about it:
Go big Unlike most corporate videos you might make, this one is infinitely slicker. And likely shorter. Keep it under a minute if you can. Thirty seconds would be awesome. Sweat every detail of the scripting, the graphics, the music, everything. “Hollywood” it up. It’s worth it. Rich Little’s retired. But your business is still going strong. Make it go even stronger, with your own “Rich Little Video.” Need help with a project like this? We’re your go-to source. Contact us today and let’s discuss your needs. ![]() It happens all the time: You book a meeting with a hot new prospect, and they want to learn all about your company. Time for the PowerPoint deck. Only yours sucks. Sound familiar? There is so much riding on the quality of that deck. We can’t stress it enough. And so, in this article, we’re going to give you some surefire pointers and tips to craft that killer presentation deck which ostensibly “tells the prospect about your company,” but which really “helps you close the sale.” This is not a website We recently worked on a deck like this for one of our clients; they had a first draft which they shared with us. It felt like a website. Which is understandable: they’d copied-and-pasted lots of pages from their existing website into PowerPoint to make the deck. That might seem like a good idea, but it’s a mistake. A well-designed website acts like… a website. That is, it offers the visitor various options they can choose from (pages, links, buttons), so they can learn about your company and its offerings at their own pace and in their own style. If you take all those various pages and drop them into PowerPoint, you’ll have a mess. While you can certainly “nudge” a website visitor along via things like sub-pages and even bifurcated home pages (we wrote an entire article on this topic), you can’t control the narrative anywhere nearly as tightly as you can in a slide deck. That’s not a limitation. That’s an advantage. Their story and yours A PowerPoint deck has Slide 1, and then Slide 2, and so on. You control what the viewer sees, and when. It’s totally granular. With that in mind, think of what you want to get across. The usual knee-jerk reactions are: “Tell them what we offer! And why it’s better!” Ennhhh. Flip the conversation. Make this about them. Make it about their pain-points, their day-in-the-life problems, the issues they need solved yesterday. This doesn’t take very long—or many slides. It can be a series of provocative “can-you-relate” questions. You can see where this is going. You’re building up the problem, specifically so that your company appears (in “Act Two”) as the solution. And since you have slide-by-slide control of the narrative, you can (totally unlike a website) build suspense. Imagine a single slide which reads: “How can you do that?” Let that sit on screen for a while. Let ‘em chew on it. You can click to the next slide when you’re good and ready. Then you can get into the stuff about your own company. It’s Act Two. This is certainly a case of less-is-more. Select—curate—the vital few wow-facts about your company that you can present in just a couple of slides. “Name-drop” big-name clients you’ve served. (Show logos!) Tout the biggest numbers. Perhaps you have one great sound-bite-style quote to show, either from a client or the press. Use it. The point is to establish as much credibility as possible, as quickly as possible. And then—again, keeping it short—wrap it with the “Q&A” slide. This is where you’ll stop clicking through PowerPoint, and get to the real business of answering the prospect’s questions, and closing the sale. Go modular Here’s a great thing about PowerPoint. It’s not a one-off oil painting. It’s a basic computer file that’s saved on your hard drive (or in the cloud, whatever). Thing is, as with any computer file, you can easily “Save as…” to create an alternate version. Some guidance: Create the biggest version of your deck first. Because it’s always easier to cut than to add. Indeed, you might not ever even use that full-blown version. Not a problem. It’s like a repository for all your best stuff—a “master file.” As new opportunities/sales calls arise, simply “Save as…” and cull the parts you don’t need. Examples: “Mission and vision” slides are snoozers for prospective clients, but they’re valuable for potential new hires. Specific “client success stories” might work better for some prospects than others, depending upon the alignment of the situation. And some might be eliminated altogether if, say, that prospect can only give you a half hour, and you want to save as much time for the Q&A as possible. Get help We know about this stuff because we work on these types of assignments all the time. Need help with that crucial company-intro sales deck? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help you out. ![]() If you’re looking to hire a firm to help you write a positioning statement for your business, you might consider doing it yourself first. Why? In this article, we’ll walk you through the basic steps of creating a powerful positioning statement. We’ll touch on the pros and cons of doing it yourself. But first, we’d like to address a couple of important questions: 1) What the heck is a positioning statement? And: 2) Why would you ever want one? Internal vs. external First things first: What is a positioning statement? Its name gives you a clue. It’s a short written piece—generally a single sentence—which describes your business, relative to its competitors, along with who your intended customers are, and why they should choose your business vs. the others. Sound straightforward? It is. Indeed, if it’s that straightforward—if it’s that much of a no-brainer, then our second question becomes all the more relevant: Why would you ever want one? There are two important words to consider here, both of which pertain to this discussion. And those words are internal and discipline. Let’s be crystal clear about this: A positioning statement is strictly an internal document. You do not put this on your website. You do not use it in any of your marketing material. You do not include it in a presentation deck alongside your company’s mission statement or team bios. This is internal. For you. And your team. And selected partners. And that’s it. Which begs the question: Why? Quite simply: It’s not a good piece of marketing. Any more than your company’s policies-and-procedures manual is. Sure, that’s an important document. But you don’t put it on your website. Same thing for the positioning statement. The biggest advantage of a good positioning statement is to provide alignment. If you’ve got sales reps out in the field, they need to know what your company is about. If you’re hiring a marketing firm, they need to understand where you’re coming from. Similarly, every single member of your team should know and understand how the company is intended to compete. Thus the “discipline.” To make this easier to understand, consider the opposite. Imagine if everyone on your team had a different idea of who your prospects are. Imagine they all had their own, varying ideas, on why those prospects should choose you. Imagine they had differing opinions on who the competition is. All of this “noise” can be eliminated with a good positioning statement. So how do you create one? As we’d said above, this is very straightforward. Indeed, there’s a formula for it. We didn’t invent this. It goes like this: For [target audience], [brand name] is the [competitive frame of reference] that delivers [emotional benefit/point of difference], because only [brand name] is/offers [reason to believe/critical support]. It’s a fill-in-the-blanks exercise. Simple as that. Or perhaps not so simple. We’ve helped to moderate some very emotional, hair-pulling arguments over each of these “blanks” to fill, with various clients of ours. Consider some of the issues that can arise:
A little tip: Be prepared to do this a lot. A lot. We typically go through a zillion iterations of positioning statements when we’re hired to help craft them. And a caveat: Don’t expect to find good examples of others’ positioning statements online. We know. We’ve tried. All you’ll find are other bloggers out there, pretending to quote, say, Amazon’s or Disney’s positioning statement, when you can tell, just by reading it, that that’s not it. As we’ve said, these are internal documents. There’s an embarrassing number of mission statements and even taglines out there, supposedly standing in as “positioning statements” in all these other articles. Don’t believe them. Besides, someone else’s positioning statement won’t help you. This is about your business, not theirs. A parting shot As we hinted above, a positioning statement is not the same thing as a mission statement. Or a vision statement. Or a tagline. Or a value proposition. They’re all different. Some are internal; others are external; there are subtleties which differentiate them all. That said, the utility of all these things is limited—by their intended usage, by the quality of the input used to create them, and how they’re actually leveraged in the real world. In other words, don’t put effort into this exercise unless you really intend to use it. And if you do, you might want to get help. This is a real team-building exercise, and as we’ve intimated above, we’ve facilitated this numerous times. Contact us today to get started. ![]() Consider this: You’ve worked your tail off to create a new offering for clients and prospects, and can’t wait to show them an onscreen demo of how it all works, whether it’s a software application or a new business process or service offering. You click “Play,” and... Crickets. The thing sucks. Why is that? As we mentioned, you worked your tail off on this thing. We’ll trust you: this offering is really good, perhaps even breakthrough. Then why doesn’t any of that translate into your screen demo? Why is it, well, boring? First: Don’t beat yourself up over this. It’s a common problem. Second: There’s nothing wrong with your new offering. What’s wrong is how you translated it to a screen demo. This can be fixed. But it requires more effort than you probably imagined. However, it’s well worth it. “A” does not equal “B” Let’s imagine you’ve got a way of getting something done for potential clients, and it all runs onscreen, like software, automatically. That’s quite a feat. If you can literally click “Start” and something just starts chugging along on its own—robotic process automation and advanced analytics come quickly to mind—then that’s amazing and paradigm-shattering. All of your development effort was well worth it. But here’s the problem: Your audience, and it doesn’t matter who they are, are inured to seeing slick video production, especially for whiz-bang demos. Just watching a process click through its motions is, viewed through this lens, a snoozer. Think about that. Your solution is brilliant. But the brilliance doesn’t come through simply by showing it in action. How bizarre is that? Yes, it’s weird. It’s also unsurprising, given our fast-pasted media world and atrophied attention-spans. Importantly, it’s a truth you need to accept and embrace if you want your offering to succeed. Borrow from the best Let’s make a distinction here: “Live demo” vs. “recorded video.” You’ve seen lots of live demos; if you’ve ever been to a trade show, they’re on every big screen in every booth, with some presenter talking about what’s happening. (The trade shows have mostly gone virtual these days, but that hasn’t altered the reality.) Lots of times—think of when Apple unveils a new feature for one of their computers—there will be two people onstage: A presenter, and a hardcore geek who’s actually sitting at the computer, frantically making all the stuff happen. The presenter is slick, too: he or she knows how to fill time while images load and screens update (or don’t!), so things look faster than they are. You could try and emulate this approach. But why? It’s not worth it. It’s best left to those specialized performers. And, best of all, you can outdo it. Easily. The trick here is recording. Don’t fall into the “it must be presented live” trap. Even if you are going to be presenting live (e.g., if you’ve booked a Zoom call with a prospect), you can simply click “Play” on the video of the demo you created in advance. You’re clicking the “Play” button in real-time, so that’s live. But the rest isn’t. It’s pre-recorded. It’s canned. It’s ready to go. Why? Because going that route ensures that it’s slick, it’s quick, it’s exciting, and it’s flawless. Altering time One of the biggest problems with actual live demos is the amount of time it takes for mundane things to happen: for stuff to load, for screens to populate, and so on. That’s why we’d mentioned the slick presenter you’ll see at trade shows, who knows what to talk about during these gaps, to try and hold your attention and distract you from the fact that there are gaps in the first place. But when you go to recorded video, the solution is a no-brainer: Simply edit out the gaps. You’ve seen this before. Think of any TV spot for a new smartphone or smart watch or whatever. You’ll hear exciting music, and see some gorgeous person tap their little screen, and all kinds of magical stuff happens instantly in their lives, and if you look closely at the bottom of your TV screen, you’ll invariably see the little disclaimer: “Sequences shortened.” Ta-dah. There it is. You know it’s been edited to appear more responsive. Do you care when you watch that TV spot? Not really. If they’d shown it in real-time, 1) the spot would be boring, and 2) they couldn’t even showcase their new features in the 30 seconds allotted. Hence the disclaimer. So that’s the first trick up your sleeve. Simply edit out what you don’t need. Your audience—in this case, your prospect or client—won’t blame you. To the contrary, they’ll thank you. But there’s one more thing that you could, and should, do. Setting the context As we’d mentioned at the outset, whatever it is you want to demonstrate is solving an existing problem for your prospect. Why, then, would you ever, ever dive into the solution without setting up the problem first? That’s an essential bit of storytelling. And it’s crucial to the sale. So don’t open your demo with your demo! Open, instead, with a setup of the problem that your demo will solve. And make that problem sound as impossible as you can. The higher the bar, the more satisfying it is to clear it. You can phrase this as questions, or can-you-relate statements: “Ever try to [do something] when your only tool is [existing tool]?” Or: “Compiling a hundred reports from over a thousand sources can seem like an insurmountable challenge, especially with deadlines looming and regulators breathing down your neck.” That kind of stuff. And when we say “statements,” we’re talking “voice-over.” Spend the hundred bucks on Fivver and get a nice one. So in case you hadn’t inferred it yet, this requires the writing of a video script. Two columns. With images on one side, and audio on the other. Audio. So, of course, there’s music. The music alone will save your butt; it can make a rather leisurely demo seem like it’s flying by. It will add impact and drama to your voiceover. And take advantage of all your other video tools and options. When you describe the problem/set-up, show it. Use titles. Employ inexpensive stock footage. And when you segue from the setup to the payoff--i.e., when you finally get to the (edited-for-time) screen-demo itself—help the viewer along. Use call-outs, arrows, sound effects. Blur out extraneous info. Zoom in on the important stuff. Help the viewer to see the elements that you take for granted. Put it this way: Before you were old enough to drive, a car’s dashboard looked like a sea of dials and gauges. But today, when you’re actually driving, you now know exactly where to look, and when, to get the info you need. Think of your audience as “too young to drive,” in a good way, and help them along. Get help We mentioned, earlier, that this isn’t exactly easy. But it is so worth the effort. We know: we help lots of clients with these kinds of challenges all the time. If you need help, we can provide it. Simply contact us today to get started. ![]() We recently interviewed a client’s subject-matter expert (SME) to help us create some materials for a virtual trade show they’d soon be attending. As the phone interview was winding down, and we were re-capping some of its big take-aways, that SME mentioned, “This is good info; it could help at that virtual trade show.” As it turned out, he was going to be pulling double-duty: not just as an in-house technical expert, but as an ad-hoc salesman, too. We quickly realized that this SME—and others on his team—would benefit from an age-old tool: a set of talking points. The owner of the company agreed, and quickly green-lit this little project. What are talking points? The best description of “talking points” that we can think of is “cheat-sheet.” That’s basically all it is. Ideally, it’s a single page of quick headline topics and supporting bullet points, meant to help someone prep for a live (or virtually live) engagement where they’ll need to appear spontaneous, yet be fully prepared. It’s important to understand what talking points aren’t. They’re not definitions or descriptions of anything. That would be far too detailed. Think of the SME we’d described above. He already knows everything there is to know about the offering he would be pitching at the trade show. Indeed, he may have known too much to handle the trade-show venue comfortably. The cheat-sheet—er, “talking points”—was just a quick guide to help him remember important topics to touch on when asked about the offering. Simple as that. In that regard, it’s kind of like a mnemonic device (such as “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles,” for example, to help you remember the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, in order). Indeed, if you can create some kind of easy-to-remember acronym, so much the better. Let’s say your offering boils down to six important things to remember. Then try and make a six-letter word out of the initials. There’s a reason for this: You really don’t want to be using the talking points when you’re actually talking. In that regard, they’re a misnomer; they should probably be called “pre-talking points.” They’re not a teleprompter. They’re something you, ideally, memorize in advance. Sure, you can keep them handy when you’re at the podium or working the booth, but if people see you looking down at them, it robs you of credibility. When should you use talking points? You might be surprised at how useful these things are; you might also be surprised to learn how often we’re tasked with creating them, here at Copel Communications. The trade-show example cited above is perfect. A great sales rep is practiced and polished, but when someone else is manning that booth (whether live or virtual), they’ll need—and appreciate—help. Now, fast-forward to the soon-returning post-COVID-19 reality: Let’s say you’re going to present at the office of a new prospect or client. Sure, you’ll have your PowerPoint deck all ready to go, but what about that non-presentation time when everyone’s taking a bagel break? What about the junior members of your team you’ve brought along? They should have talking points, too, given to them in advance. They can practice in the plane, or the car, en route to the meeting. Feel free to help them. The practice will help you, too. The classic use-case for talking points is public relations. If you’re going to have an audience of any kind, whether it’s a reporter calling you on the phone, or if you’re surrounded by cameras, you want to be prepared and “on-message,” as they say. This could apply to the rollout of a new product or service your company will be offering. If it’s new, then the ink is still drying on the marketing materials, and your head will still be swimming with all of the different versions of selling points that you and your team had argued over, leading up to this moment. So talking points will be your savior. Saving the biggest for last: Talking points are required for damage-control. You don’t want to pick up the phone, or face a camera, without those talking points locked down. In such a situation, you won’t have much time to create them—it may be just minutes—but don’t shirk the responsibility. Among the kinds of points you’ll cover, i.e., the narrative you’ll spin, will be:
Pretty straightforward, when you see it written out here. But just try and do that, off-the-cuff, when your company is caught in an awkward situation, and the lights are glaring in your face. It’s impossible. A final talking point One of the many nice things about talking points is that they’re a really low hurdle. They can be crafted quickly; even when you tap an external resource—such as us—to create them, they’re inexpensive, too. But they’re worth their weight in gold. So take advantage. Get your facts straight, and keep your brand clean. Need help with those talking points, or any other marketing-communications challenge? Contact us today. We’d be happy to help. ![]() Boy the year goes by fast. It doesn’t seem like it’s really been that long since we wrote a year-end roundup, but the calendar doesn’t lie. Sure, we at Copel Communications would love it if you read every single one of our blog posts the minute it came out. But we also know you’re busy, so here, in convenient compendium form, is an overview of our posts for consultants from the year. (We alternate between posts for consultants and what we call our “creative clients,” i.e., ad agencies and others that directly contract us for creative services. So we annually do separate year-end posts, both in December, for each audience.) Each summary/tease below has a link to the full article, so feel free to binge away!
Do you have a topic you’d like us to cover? Or a marketing challenge you’d like us to help you with? Contact us today. We’d be delighted to hear from you. |
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