76. One Presentation, Multiple Audiences: 12 Presenters, 12 Stories, 1 Set of Slides

The foundation of the Power Presentations methodology is that the presenter is the focus of the presentation, not the slides. But this concept often runs into objections that usually begin with, “But you just don’t understand,” and then continue on with, “We need to have the slides to send ahead!” Or “We need to provide leave-behinds!” Or “My audience wants the details!” Or “The slides help me remember what to say!” Or “My board member made me do it!” Or, the most common, “The slides have to stand alone!”

As a coach, I have tried to counter these objections by driving a wedge between the display functions (during the presentation) of slides and their document functions (before and after the presentation), to no avail. Despite all my efforts—and those of countless other fellow coaches, critics, and authors—presenters continue to treat presentations as documents.

So let’s try one other argument. To set the stage, let me begin by describing the span of my services. For more than two decades, I have coached:

• Individual presenters to deliver one presentation to one audience, as in a keynote speech

• Individual presenters to deliver one presentation to multiple audiences, as in an IPO road show

• Individual presenters to deliver multiple presentations to multiple audiences, as in a tour to launch of a family of products

• Multiple presenters to deliver one presentation to one audience, as in presenting different levels of expertise at a conference or convention

• Multiple presenters to deliver multiple presentations to different audiences, as in offering a variety of schedule options at a conference or convention

But I had never coached multiple presenters to deliver one presentation to multiple audiences, until I worked with a unique group of executives at Cisco Systems.

Cisco has been my client ever since I coached its IPO road show in 1990, and they have given me the opportunity to work with many different business units. One of them, the Eastern Europe region, is run by Kaan Terzioglu, a Cisco vice president. Kaan invited me to Cisco’s London facility to coach a dozen of his managers from several countries, including Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. Because of time, travel, and cost considerations, we reconfigured our core program, which usually involves only 4 participants, to accommodate all 12 people within one week. This format provided the identical set of techniques we give to the smaller groups, but it condensed some of the individual coaching. As a result, instead of developing 12 different presentations, we worked with only one. That one came from a set of slides that had originated in Cisco’s corporate headquarters in San Jose.

In the culminating session of the program, I asked each participant to deliver a version of the slide show to an intended audience in his or her country. Their selections were quite diverse. One manager targeted a corporate enterprise, another a government agency, another a telecommunications carrier, and another a university. Yet as each participant stood to present, each was able to customize his or her story to a specific audience while using the same set of slides.

Multiple presenters were able to deliver one presentation to the multiple audiences because each presenter’s narrative added value beyond the content of the slides.

The presenter is the focus of the presentation.