UBPs and ad copy

Remember Andy Bounds? He is very good at reminding us that everything we do as sales and marketers has to be tested in a world populated by buyers who look at the world differently from us. He believes that the copy has to meet the buyers' unique buying points (UBPs) rather than our selling points.

So where does the buyer want to see the price in an ad? Different ad producers tackle the problem in different ways, some people:

• put the price in the headline
• set out the price in the opening paragraph
• leave the price until the point they are asking for the sale
  

It's obviously important to get this right, so let's start to look at an ad from the Andy Bounds perspective. The price is not a benefit to a buyer so emphasing price in the headline could alienate some buyers before they find out how wonderful the product is. Of course, if the product is a staple where the price is well-known then a low price could make a compelling headline providing it detailed the saving rather than the price itself.

Putting the price in the headline makes a number of assumptions:

• the buyer is aware of the normal price for the product
• the buyer will find the discounted price attractive rather than suspicious
  

Using the UBP approach, it makes more sense to focus on the benefits that the buyer will enjoy from the purchase - what they are left with after the product or service is delivered.

If the benefits are really compelling then the price can be introduced after the buyer understands what the purchase will do for them. It's at that point that the buyer makes a decision based on their individual value proposition - are those benefits so attractive that they overcome the price that you have just disclosed? If they do, then there is a good chance that your buyer will close the sale.

Don't forget the feedback

Feedback is important in plenty of areas, particularly in training. The mantra in training delivery is: give feedback when it isn't asked for and ask for feedback when it hasn't been offered. Both my wife and my younger son have been on training courses this week and their experiences have been very different.

My younger son has been on an induction course at Pretty Big Employer Ltd which gave him an opportunity to meet a range of fairly new starters from around the organisation and learn something about the history of the business. He seems to have enjoyed the experience immensely which is fine. The training seems to have managed the mix between socialisation and content pretty effectively.

On the other hand, my wife was at a regional course on Tuesday which was supposed to be the last word on how to improve an aspect of her College's delivery and she came home spitting feathers, complaining that the trainer was completely useless and unaware about the impact of legislative changes occurring in her area of provision. She deliberately didn't complete her feedback form while she was on the course and brought it home last night so that she could compose something suitably scathing. Now, I don't know the process for analysing those forms or indeed who reads them, but I'm in no doubt that the course designer and the trainer could both learn something fairly useful from that feedback form.

Is your presentation self-consistent

I attended a presentation last week. These kinds of presentation generate most of the presenter's income since he uses them as a sales vehicle for his paid services. The first point on the presentation was ho-hum, but the third was a doozy which made his audience sit up. The problem was that some of his later points contradicted the third which seemed like a major faux-pas to me.

I'm anal about presentations - the material itself has to tell a story when I'm not there but it has to tell it in a way which is self-consistent. The presentation that I attended just about worked despite the incongruities because the presenter had just about enough skill to bring it back even if he was unaware why he had a problem in the first place.

This comes back to being ruthless in checking and testing presentations before you make them live - once they're gone, they're gone and if you don't test it, you risk that part of your audience will never think about you as positively in the future as they did before point 4.

Presentations aren't easy, if they were then people would be better at them - most presentations are tosh. Since they are so important to many people's professional lives, they deserve more thought in the planning, development and execution. These are all skills that can be learnt and practiced - promise yourselves that you will do better in 2007. Then, having made the promise to yourself, do something about it.

The Physical bit

Someone has just emailed me to point out that I didn't mention body language in the last post on presentation. That's true, but I don't think that you will learn much from a written description by me. If you want to learn how you look when you present, get someone to video all or part of one of your presentations and it doesn't matter at all whether it's a practice or the real thing, the learning points will be very similar.

My natural presentational style is physical - I like to move around, so I like a physical space where I can use my arms for emphasis. That's fine when I'm in a situation where the constraints of room and sound system allow that, but for a large audience and a lecturn then I clearly have to tone down the urge to move my body and more importantly, my head, so that I stay within a fairly well-defined range of the microphone to avoid significant sound glitches. There is nothing more irritating to the audience than the speaker moving their head away from the microphone so that the delivery becomes indistinct or inaudible.

For me voice is more important than body language - flat, monotonic and consistently paced delivery sounds over prepared. That's why I favour less reliance on the formal speech or script - the fewer back-ups the more normal the delivery and the greater chance of changes in pace, intonation and stress. That's what I look for in someone else's presentation and that's what I hope to achieve when I deliver material myself.

Tags:

• Presentation

Getting the presentation right

At some point Business Development requires a formal presentation. It could be to an individual, a small group or a large audience. The issue here is context - formal presentations aren't the kind of situation where you can just bound up to the white board and start doodling. A formal presentation requires planning. It requires involvement - very few people in the world can deliver a good presentation cold if it has been prepared by someone else.

Let's give a nod towards Andy Bounds again because he is so good at the content and ordering of material which is particularly geared to making sure the objectives for the presenter and audience provide the context for what is actually in the presentation.

Beyond the content, the ordering and the material itself (is the exploding dinosaur really such a good idea?) there is the style you use for the presentation. Whatever you feel inside (and some people become very nervous before presenting), it's important that you look relaxed and in control so I'm a great believer in getting rid of the prepared speech and the formal script to accompany the slides. I don't want to provide a presentation where all the content is on the slides - the slides make sense and can be read by anyone, but the real purpose of a slide is to trigger my memory - provide me with the prompts about what it is I want to say, and very often what I want to say is why I think this bullet should be on the slide, providing an unstated "because" and answering the unspoken question "why?" from the bulk of the audience. That tells the audience that you know a lot more than appears on the slides and makes it a more interesting and involving presentation.

So, if you are going to get rid of the speech or the script and just use the bullets to prompt your own recall, how are you going to manage? Here it is a matter of what you think you need - some people will want to run through the material a few times in order to check that they have the timings and content roughly right. Whether or not you feel the need to do that, it is important to do some higher level preparation. It is worth printing off a black and white copy of the slide set and laying it out on a desktop and looking critically at it to decide how much meta navigation you need to apply to help the audience digest the message. What I mean by meta navigation are those points where you navigate forward (I'll be talking about that a little later) or linking back (you'll remember that I said) which can be enormously important in involving and engaging your listeners.

So how do you use the slide set to remind you to provide the meta navigation without putting in a lot of clumsy stuff on the slide? One way is simply to provide a visual marker on the slide which is obvious only to you. It doesn't matter what it is - a coloured full-stop or underlining of a keyword, the content will trigger your memory about the content of what you want to say and the visual marker will remind you to put in the meta navigation. Simple, eh?

Tags:

• Presentation