blog
Speaking On A Panel: Be Kind To Your Audience
by Mike Ma
One of the most trafficked posts on my personal blog is something I wrote a year and half ago on how to moderate a panel. Since I am helping organize a few panels and conferences this season, I'd like to update this with some tactical recommendations on how to present on a panel when you are asked to show how you do something at your firm.
Typical industry panel presentations of this ilk go something like this:
1. Introduction of the firm one represents (located in New York, 1000 employees, $54B under management)
2. Description of a process at their firm (how we do CRM, how we structure our sales team, etc,)
3. [Results] - I bracket this, since it is rarely presented.
Sigh. Reaching for your blackberry yet? Perhaps strategizing on your cocktail hour attack? Trolling through the attendee list? I'd bet most likely so. Conference goers are a cynical lot, aren't they? (we?)
Most panelists wait for the last possible moment to share the thing that people most want to hear. I say change that. Front load it and give them a little instant gratification. Here is a generic plan.
1. R.POV/8. What is your Remarkable Point of View in 8 words or less? Throw that up there as your first slide. Why are you or your firm there? What do you believe? You have to let us know why you are up there and the rest of the hundreds or thousands of us are down here listening!
2. What are the results? That goes next. Quick! Before you lose them. How did you get there? How much money did you save or make? What happened to the % increase in customer satisfaction? Time reduced in lead time? How much closer did you get to a six sigma error rate? Give me numbers, please! Show me the scoreboard!
3. What were the three factors to success? Most panelists cherish completeness to tell the whole process they or their firm goes through. Give me the "Keys to the Game." Oh, and I mean 3.
4. Give me screenshots, a demo, or the internal documents. Let me see the real McCoy. If your CRM system is so great, give me a test drive. I want to see how you did it and what it looks like. Don't worry about competition, it is all about execution anyway. That I can see what another firm does and their strategy doesn't make it any easier for me to viably, and commercially duplicate as my own.
I am admittedly attention deficient these days, but I think that these principles can provide benefits for all of us in attendance. I will try to do the same myself. See you out there on the conference circuit.