A bunch of great people (and great presenters) in big pharma told me one of their challenges is re-doing PowerPoint decks for presentations to different levels of management.
When they get a PowerPoint deck done to their boss’s satisfaction (they happen to work on reimbursement for a multi-billion dollar brand), that’s only the beginning.
After their boss presents the deck to his boss, then that boss (boss #2) wants to change the PowerPoints for his presentation to the senior executive committee.
Word comes down from above, “Create yet another version that will fit the needs of yet another audience.” They spend a good deal of their lives creating presentation decks, and then retro-fitting them to meet the needs of people up the chain of command.
This need to alter presentation content and flow to fit the needs of senior people requires them to rely on their bosses to serve as cultural ambassadors. The bosses hang out in the court of the senior decision makers, who care, on a global corporate level, about accurate predictions of revenue, whereas my clients are reimbursement specialists with a lot of technical knowledge about how to get the drug paid for by insurance companies.
What can these time-pressed business presenters do to respond to the interests of the senior decision makers they serve, while still providing an accurate and complete picture of the reimbursement environment for their immediate boss?
One way of defining the solution? Empathize! Empathy is the capacity to understand the thoughts, reasoning, and priorities of others.
Empathy demands that we suspend our attachment to our own view of things, and imagine what it must be like to be a senior decision maker who is responsible for predicting and delivering a particular revenue stream to the bottom line of a global organization.
When creators of presentations empathize with their various audiences, they are better able to create documents and scripts that can expand or contract. They can be lengthy and technically detailed, or they can be stream-lined and bottom-line oriented, much like a politicians standard stump speech, which can be delivered in 30 seconds on the evening news, 3 minutes at a quick campaign stop, or 30 minutes at a big event.
In the case of these pharmaceutical marketers, they now know that the senior people care about the bottom line, the final number, the revenue they can expect from the brand. The long and complicated story about how that final number gets calculated is background–off the screen.
Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact. Sign up for our presentation tips and learn more about us at http://www.simswyeth.com/.