As I write this blog I am sitting on a train from Bukhara to Samarkand, following the Silk Road of Uzbekistan. Bukhara is an architectural treasure that I absolutely recommend if you haven’t been there. It’s also worth having a tour guide otherwise the many details that form the rich history of the area will be missed, and the experience incomplete.
It is the experience with our tour guide in Bukhara which inspired today’s blog. Our guide was a petite, middle aged lady with a deep knowledge of her home city matched with a passion to share everything she knew with us. For that we were both fortunate and grateful. However, seeing every minaret and understanding the reason for the shape of a brick is not always what equates to a job done optimally.
Please bear with me here, I don’t want to sound ungrateful as I absolutely loved my Bukhara experience, however there were parallels between our guide’s need to complete the tour no matter what, and business meetings where the agenda is the only important thing.
For example, while I understand that there is a tour itinerary and she wanted us to see the best of her city, it was 38 degrees and now in our 4th day of dawn to dusk tourism, most of my group were quite tired. Requests to stop at a cafe for a drink received the response “no cafe, but you can have a drink!” Some of us wanted to buy some trinkets to take home for family and would have happily traded 20% of the sight-seeing time for market browsing.
My point here is that what constitutes a successful tour, meeting or sales pitch is not a function of your pre-planned itinerary, agenda or pitch-deck. Success is a function of giving your audience what they want and you will only know what this is if you ask them, or read the room by listening and observing for hints.
“Would you like to see as many of the architectural sites as possible with our time today, or do you want to take it more causally and spend some time at the bazaar or take a break in a local coffee house?” would have been a good way to understand our preferences.
When I give a presentation using Keynote or PowerPoint, I use the view that has thumbnails of each slide on the left. This allows me to toggle quickly between slides depending on the direction of the meeting. I rarely use more than 50% of the slides but I don’t need to: the ones I use are the ones that the client wants to see and sufficient for a decision to be made.
Often our passion for our subject results in us flooding the client with information. We mean well and think we are doing the right thing however, we are actually overloading them with data that not only isn’t required, but may be misaligned with their needs or expectations. When this happens you risk a single piece of data leaving a negative association which can be the deciding factor on whom to select when comparing two closely matched proposals. Less is often more.
In our rather large tour group of 22 people, there was no single “right answer”. Some wanted to see every monument possible while others were happy to see the main ones and allocate time to shopping in the bazaar and hanging out in local coffee shops. There is no right or wrong however, whether on vacation or in the board room, understanding your audience is key to delivering the best possible experience and achieving the results you want.
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