Have you ever had a guest speaker, or a "motivational" speaker at a conference, offsite, or retreat? If so, what do you remember about their presentation? Did you make positive changes in the way you did business, or can you just remember the name of the speaker?
I recently attended a team retreat where the highlight was having a well-regarded, luxury hotel chain come in and give a two hour presentation on how they focus on the customer. The presentation started strong with a few stories about the chain, and how they saw their guests.
After about forty-five minutes the "how" portion of the presentation kicked in with fancy graphs, exotic formulas for guest service success, and a great credo card carried by each hotel staff member.
As this portion of the presentation continued I turned and started to read the body language of the assembled team and literally watched them disengage.
The reason their attention span diminished was that the guest speaker and the team leader didn't spend enough time, pre-presentation, syncing the hotel world with the team's world. This is a common mistake and the main reason why guest speakers are easily forgotten.
Here are a few suggestions on how to sync your team with potential guest speakers.
1) Get the speakers basic deck - Every speaker has a stock deck that they use, no matter who the audience is. Look for basic themes that will or won't work with your team. Do they need more help with connecting with clients, or their listening skills? Ask the speaker to deepen the content in areas you need and lighten or remove areas you don't. This will cause some heartburn for the speaker as they as used to giving the show their way. Hold firm as you are usually paying them a ton of money for their work.
2) Focus on the translation between worlds - In the hotel example above the main focus was on interactions with the client that lead to increased satisfaction and the potential for increased business. How does that translate to your teams world? How do you interact now, and how can the hotels principles be used to interact with the team's clients. An idea would be to have the team leader stand at this point and talk about how this principle could be used with the team's clients.
3) Less is More - The hotel's presentation had three large, guest-focused formula's. Seventy-five percent of the presentation was spent on the first formula and the other two were covered very quickly at the end. If the team leader and the guest speaker had agreed on covering one, in-depth, the presentation would have been more memorable. The fear to overcome is "I have so much great stuff, I will just zip through these last two items, because they are so good." They aren't. You may feel great about them, but that is because of the time you have spent with them.
4) Provide more interaction - Every guest speaker could learn from this. Rather than just calling on folks to throw out the answer to an easy question, work with the team leader to find out more about the team so that you can ask great questions. Those questions will help frame a positive discussion, that will make your presentation memorable. This is scary because any guest speaker is afraid of diving into the weeds and losing momentum during their presentation. I would argue that proper preparation will help avoid this.
5) Know Your Audience - What roles will be in the room, what are the compensation ranges, what are the main duties of each role, how do they do their jobs now, what are the pain points etc.
Get ready to spend at least 3-4 hours working with your guest speaker to make their presentation pop!
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