Strategy beyond numbers

“Tactics is the art of using troops in battle; strategy is the art of using battles to win the war.” – Carl Von Clausewitz, Prussian general and military thinker

In business, strategy involves setting your goals and determining the actions required to achieve them. Traditionally, forecasting and setting KPIs are two critical components of this process:

• Forecasting is the use of historical data, analysis, and insights to make informed predictions about what lies ahead for your business activities – by generating numeric data about e.g., volumes, revenues, costs, profits, and market trends.
• Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are quantifiable measures used to evaluate the success or progress of your organization’s key business objectives. Beside the forecasted numbers, tracked KPIs may also include performance metrics like customer lifetime value, conversion rates, or operational efficiency.

Together, forecasting and KPIs supply a framework for measuring progress, guiding strategic decisions, and driving business success. Both activities heavily rely on quantitative data.

Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), portrait by Karl Wilhelm Wach

But there’s more to strategy than just numbers. To make your business strategy 100% client-focused, you need to put the customer at the center of everything you plan and do:

• Clearly name who your customers are and ensure you understand your customers’ needs, wants, and pain points, and use this knowledge to guide your decisions and actions. You may use tools such as customer surveys, journey maps, and personas to gain insights into your audience’s perspectives.
• Share customer information and insights across the organization and empower employees to access and use these. You may use tools such as CRM dashboards, reports, and internal newsletters to disseminate that information.
• Develop a unique value proposition with messaging that resonates with your target audience. Focus on the unique benefits and features that make your products, services, and people stand out from competition. Use storytelling to connect with customers on an emotional level and communicate the value of your offering.
• Look for people in your organization who have a genuine interest in helping customers and creating positive experiences. Let them often interact with clients and learn from them. You can use tools like customer visits and net promoter score surveys to evaluate customer satisfaction. 
• Align employee compensation, benefits, and incentives to customer-centric goals and results. You can use tools such as bonuses, commissions, and profit-sharing to reward employees who contribute to customer success. 

By implementing the above actions and by making sure that every department and every employee understands the company’s direction and their role in it, enterprises can develop a customer-centric strategy to achieve long-term business goals.

Footnote: I wrote this post with a little help from ChatGPT and Copilot.

Numbers and words

Picture this: You’re gearing up for an executive presentation. The stakes are high — the fate of your new product or the acceptance of your customer proposal hangs in the balance. Of course, you’re armed with heaps of relevant data. But when should you rely on the hard facts and figures, and when do you call upon the power of storytelling to convey the message?

Image source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Well, there’s no single answer but, when you combine the analytical power of numbers with the emotional resonance of words, you’ll create presentations that not only inform, but also inspire and leave a lasting impact.

When to prefer numbers?

• When you need to provide clear-cut insights or concrete evidence or measurable results.
• When your audience requires hard facts to make informed decisions about e.g. market sizing, RoI forecasts, product pricing, or test results.
• When you want them to compare different options, quantitative data offer a fair and unbiased way to present and weigh the pros and cons of each.
• When you want to demonstrate cause-effect relationships, numbers can illustrate the impact of certain decisions or the effectiveness of specific actions.

When to use words?

• When you want to connect with your audience, communicate messages effectively, make your presentation memorable, and inspire action, storytelling is a powerful and timeless practice.
• When you need to create understanding beyond rational thought, the story behind the numbers holds the key to humanizing data, fostering support, and unlocking deeper insights.
• When you opt for anecdotes, problem-solution stories, or firsthand experiences to help you grab attention, spark interest, and better convey your message or value proposition.

In conclusion, numbers and words are not adversaries but allies in the quest for effective communication. By understanding when to leverage quantitative data for clarity and precision and how to embrace engaging narratives for depth and connection, you can create impactful presentations that resonate even with the most demanding audience.

Related posts:

• Living by numbers (by me)
• No more naked numbers (by me)
• The duck and the rabbit (by me)
• The incredible lightness of numbers (by me)
• It’s the story, stupid (by me)
• Why storytelling is the new black (by me)

Footnote: I wrote this post with a little (but not too much) help from ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini.

The sign around your audience’s neck

“Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says: ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.” – Mary Kay Ash, American business woman

The above quote from Mary Kay Ash encourages us to treat everyone we meet with importance and to make them feel valued. It’s a powerful reminder to respect the people around you. By showing understanding, kindness and empathy towards every single person, you can cultivate a habit of prioritizing others’ needs and emotions, which will ultimately lead to professional and personal success in life.

It will also help you in tapping into your full potential as a public speaker. While it’s important to respect any single individual in your audience, it’s even more paramount to have a good knowledge of who is your audience and to understand and tailor your presentation to their specific knowledge, needs and expectations. Knowing your audience before you start talking will allow you to right-target your message and it will enable you to add the proper nuances to your pitch.

In an older post on this blog, I introduced three tools that may give you a better knowledge of who is in your audience:

• A power quadrant assesses the (e.g. technical or financial) authority or expertise of your listeners vs. the effective decision or execution power they have.
• An influencer quadrant allows you to proactively identify potential advocates and opponents in the audience, and adapt your attitude, behavior and content accordingly.
• A personality quadrant may help you understand why certain people respond to specific situations the way they do.

Drawing these quadrants will make you better understand – and thus better address – the people you’re dealing with. And help you to also read the small (often invisible) print on the signs around their neck…

Referenced post:

• Know your audience before you start talking (by me)

tl;dl

A widely quoted Microsoft study from 2015 tried to tell the world that the time an average person is able to concentrate on a particular subject has fallen to 8 (eight!) seconds. Which is less than the average attention span of a goldfish.

Image by Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Although the goldfish comparison has been recited by many media and has been (mis)used by marketers to reduce their outreach to twitter-style messaging, it makes little sense – IMHO even no sense at all. Because the world of a goldfish ends at the rim of the glass bowl it’s floating in. Your audience aren’t carp. They are real people with unmet needs and innate curiosity. I know no single business person that would be satisfied with only 140-character content or an eight-second presentation. My personal experience as a public speaker actually tells me that you’ve got at least 15 to 20 minutes before you start losing (some) people’s interest. A number that resonates with the ’20’ figure in Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint.

On the other hand, as observed by Nobel prize and Turing award winner Herbert Simon: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” It’s not the number of slides or the detail of the content that determines their attentiveness to your audience. Human interest and attention span are determined by their daily problems, their current mood, and the persuasive power of the presenter. Nearly 9 respondents out of 10 to a Prezi survey acknowledged that a strong narrative and the story behind what’s being presented are critical in maintaining engagement.

Here are a few practical tips to keep, refresh or prolong the attention of your audience:

• Keep your talk short and crisp, and make sure that the first minutes include any material that you want people to remember;
• Intrigue, surprise or provoke: ask questions, do a quiz or launch a poll;
• Pause a few seconds before showing a slide or presenting a key message, to create a sense of anticipation. Pause right after a key point to allow it to sink in.
• Repeat the point for those who may have wandered, and summarize your key messages at regular times (and certainly at the end of your presentation);
• Do something emotionally relevant, e.g. tell a joke or bring an anecdote;
• Switch the medium: draw on a whiteboard, show a video, run a short demo;
• Change the speaker. If you really have so many important things to tell, just consider bringing a colleague to offload part of your speech to.

tl;dr is internet slang for too long; didn’t read. It’s often used on online discussion forums or in the comments section of an article to say that some text was ignored because of its length. A less diplomatic definition on urbandictionary.com suggests that the acronym is frequently used by lazy, ignorant people, when something exceeds their ability to read or when they lack the semantic capacity to comprehend or respond to a post.

The title of this blog post, tl;dl, is a variant to the above letterword, and stands for too long; didn’t listen. If you don’t want your listeners to be goldfish, you’d better make sure that your presentations are not tl;dl. Make sure that your presentation is to the point, that your words are worth listening to, and that you present with passion and persuasion.

Right pitch, wrong shirt

Know your audience before you start talking… This is not only the title of one of my earlier posts on this blog, but even more a piece of good advice for anyone who’s speaking in public. A group of people that also includes a growing army of young entrepreneurs, pitching in front of venture capitalists and potential investors to obtain the so desired initial funding to realize their dreams.

Not so long ago, I had the honor to be part of the jury for a (try-out) pitching session organized by a local business incubator. Among the 6 jury members were representatives of a regional business angel network, a few technology professionals (like me), and an investment expert from a major bank.

During the event, one of the startups was pitching a social app they developed for sports clubs. In an effort to accentuate his message visually, and probably to charm the audience and the jury too, the presenter-on-duty entered the stage dressed up in a colorful soccer shirt.

A great idea. Theoretically. The young guy made one wrong choice: the club shirt he was proudly wearing displayed in large letters the name and the logo of… a large bank. Unfortunately, not the one of the sixth jury member’s employer. But rather the one of its fiercest competitor in the market place.

Shit happens. The presenter delivered a great pitch for a nice product. But he won neither the hearts nor the (virtual) money of all jury members (guess which one wasn’t convinced?) A mistake that could have easily been avoided by conducting some quick, upfront research on who would be in the audience and in the jury (actually, the speaker should have known; the event was held at the bank’s HQ premises.)

Thought leader or entertainer?

“You know that I’m a thought leader, because I’m wearing a blazer, I have glasses, and I’ve just done this with my hands…”

Maybe you’ve already seen the recording of a This is That TED-like talk by self-proclaimed thought leader Pat Kelly. And if you haven’t, take a look at the video below.

Unless you’re an alien without any sense of humor, you must have realized that this is not a real keynote. And observed that Kelly’s character is an empty shell with nothing to say, though with an impressive ability to deliver his message (and entertain his audience.)

Then, you also know that it takes more to being a thought leader than wearing the right clothes, putting on a pair of smart looking glasses, and making some gorgeous gestures with your hands. But, if you still believe you are one – or have an unstoppable ambition to become one – here are a few tips…

• Stay ahead of the curve. Keeping Malcolm Forbes’ wisdom that “the best vision is insight” in mind, always base your opinion – and accompanying narrative – on trustable and traceable facts and figures.
• When acting as a thought leader, NEVER deliver a sales pitch. Take the stance of a neutral observer,  and a dependable domain expert. Of course, when you’re explicitly speaking on behalf of your (or another) company there’s no problem to recommend or acknowledge the ‘sponsor.’
• Never stop earning your audience’s respect. Show them that you are an authority on the topic, and prove them that you have the right to speak. But even when world considers you a champion, always stay your humble self!
• Talk as often as you can with customers, end-users, and opinion makers. Listen to them and benefit from their insights and experience to further develop your expertise and evolve your narrative. Be careful with dropping names or citing facts or figures on behalf of any 3^rdparty to make yourself look more important.
• Create an elevator pitch, define your mantra and don’t be shy of repeating yourself – repetition is one of the tools to make your message stick. In the mean time, keep evolving your story and updating your content as technology and markets evolve.
• Craft and deliver compelling content for a broad audience. Keep it simple and sweet, but don’t be fluffy. Be aware of audiences’ needs and expectations and remember, people are always looking for the WIIFM.
• Build a personal brand, establish your social media presence (also as a follower!) and develop a multi channel content strategy. Try to create and share quotable quotes, tweetable data points, and impactful visuals.
• And finally, invest in developing your storytelling and public speaking skills. Being able to create and deliver a compelling presentation is certainly one of the basic competences an opinion maker (or any business leader) needs.

Unfortunately, there is no college class or MOOC that will teach you how to become a respected thought leader. It takes a lot of insight, expertise, and communication skills. And, even if you (think) you have all of these, the next time you’re on stage and walk over to your laptop, your audience may still look at you as an entertainer…

As a final note, by writing this blog post and giving you the above tips, I am not pretending to be a thought leader at anything at all. Think of me as a singer-songwriter, who’s passion is to perform a good song, while trying to entertain his audience.

More reading:

• What Is A Thought Leader? (by Russ Alan Prince and Bruce Rogers)
• What is thought leadership? And when you should use it? (by Michael Brenner)
• The Golden Rules of Thought Leadership (by John Rampton)
• The Golden Rules For Creating Thoughtful Thought Leadership (by Daniel W. Rasmus)
• 7 Things Thought Leaders Know That You Don’t (by Dan Martell)
• About storytellers, storydoers and storymakers (by me)
• About folklorists, evangelists and futurists (by me)

Know your audience (before you start talking)

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This is a compilation post that brings together my views on closely related topics, collating articles that I published earlier on this blog. It doesn’t contain new content, although part of it may have been slightly reworked. Knowing that the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts, I hope this update provides you with a bigger picture, a more complete list of good practices, or a better grounded opinion.

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“Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it ‘to whom it may concern.’” – Ken Haemer, former AT&T presentation research manager

Did you ever wonder why the people in the auditorium or meeting room came in to listen to your presentation?

In fact, you should ask yourself that simple question each time again. Because each audience –or even each single member of that audience– may have different and personal reasons for attending:

• “Learn something.”  As you, the guy in the front, are assumed to be an expert in your domain.
• “Get the necessary foundation for making a business decision.”
• “Obtain confirmation or recognition from managers or peers in the same room.”
• “Meet with other people in the industry.”  At public conferences and seminars.
• “Be entertained – and enjoy a networking cocktail at the end of the day.”  Also often the case at public events.
• None of the above. Some people may just “feel obliged to attend.”

As such, it’s extremely important that you have a good knowledge of who is your audience to tailor your presentation to their specific knowledge, needs and expectations.

In the following sections, I will introduce 3 tools, the Power Quadrant, the Influencer Quadrant and the Personality Quadrant, to help you better understand – and thus better address the people you’re dealing with.

The Power Quadrant

In many cases the persons that demand most of your attention or ask many questions are not the ones that are taking the (business) decisions at the end of the day. Power mapping techniques, like drawing a power quadrant, often lead you to a better identification and understanding of the key players in the room.

A power quadrant assesses the (e.g. technical or financial) authority or expertise of your listeners vs. the effective decision or execution power they have. A well prepared presenter knows to which category the people in front of him/her belong, and how to deal with the different roles they play.

• Influencers are experts in an advisory role, but don’t have clear decision power. Provide them with the arguments to convince their managers. Go through the details and help them score.
• In many cases, controllers have a final word. As they often don’t have the expertise to grasp all the details of your presentation, just make sure that you win their confidence, trust and support.
• Deciders are the ones who have both the knowledge and the power to close the meeting with a clear “go” or “no go”.  Give them all necessary elements for making a decision –here and now!
• And finally, there are also non-contributing spectators. There is no need to pay special attention to them. Just help them make it through the day.

The Influencer Quadrant

Unfortunately, getting decisions made is not only about bringing the people with authority and power on the same page. Some of the members of your audience may have (often unspoken) reasons to support or to thwart you, or may even have the intention to hijack your presentation.

This is where crafting an influencer quadrant often turns out useful.

It allows you to proactively identify potential advocates and opponents in the audience, and adapt your attitude, behavior and content accordingly.

• Friends: in an ideal world (which unfortunately does not exist) the room in front of you is filled only with men and women that like or respect you, your products or your company. Give them the opportunity to express their opinion and contribute to a constructive conversation.
• There may be adversaries present too. People who had a bad experience with your company or your products or have been charmed by a competitor. Always be respectful and try to convince them with arguments –hoping they will change their mind.
• Having allies in the audience is even better than having friends. As they combine a positive stance with influencing or decision power, get them involved into the discussion and let them help to prevail upon the others.
• Unfortunately, sometimes there is also this one annoyer in the room whose intention is to spoil the meeting or hijack your presentation. Even if he is nothing but a pain in the… (fill in your favorite three or four-letter word): stay polite. Block him off when you can, but make sure that you don’t lose the support of the other people.

As a conclusion, it’s always good to think about which and why people in the room may be prejudiced, either in a positive or negative way. So make sure you know how to deal with friends and foes, and deal with them appropriately.

The Personality Quadrant

There are many typologies and taxonomies that may help us understand why certain people respond to specific situations the way they do. The dichotomy between introversion and extraversion is one of them. If you to want build a good rapport with your audience and get your message across, you need to understand your speaking/listening partners’ personality, anticipate that they may react differently to what you say, show and do, and adapt your interaction style to their needs.

In the previous sections, I introduced a power quadrant and an influencer quadrant as tools to characterize your audience, and to adapt your content and presentation style to their anticipated behavior. Recently a came across a document that introduces a 3rd –complementary– matrix that takes your listeners’ introversion and extraversion into account.

Introverts care more about information than about interaction. They value exact data, facts and figures to learn, apply and reuse. As they need some time to think before formulating a response, don’t be surprised if they appreciate the handouts of your presentation more than your narrative. You may even consider to provide them upfront with a copy of your slides, so they have ample opportunity to prepare, annotate and digest.

• Listeners: When what’s being presented is either uninteresting or irrelevant for them, introverts may just limit their participation to passive listening. So, make sure you supply them with ample (oral or written) information to take home and share with their management and colleagues.
• Participators: Even when the content is relevant, don’t expect introverted people to be enthusiastic about what you say or to explicitly show their appreciation. Be ready to answer many questions about details – if not during the public presentation itself, probably in a tête-a-tête afterward.

Extraverts tend to think while they speak; they appreciate a good story (which they can retell) and are in for a good conversation. Surprise them, challenge them and acknowledge their thinking with your words and images.  Expect them to interrupt your speech from time to time, and prepare for an inspiring discussion after your presentation.

• Discussers: As extroverts tap their energy from interaction with other people, they may (intentionally or unintentionally) hijack your presentation by starting a discussion – with the rest of your audience – about their own vision, project or experience.  It’s good to have them in the room, but make sure you stay in control of your speaking slot.
• Conversators: A problem with many extroverted people is that they like to talk about (almost) everything, just for sociability. Don’t allow them to deviate you from your topic – and end up in a “rest room conversation”.

Of course, Introversion vs. Extraversion is not the only dimension of human personality. There are other models, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI, that introduce (and combine) other typologies, e.g.:

• How does someone take in information (Sensing vs. iNtuition)
• How does someone make decisions (Thinking vs. Feeling)
• How does someone orient himself/herself to the external world (Judging vs. Perceiving)

By the way, my MBTI personality is E-N-T-P.  I invite the readers of this blog to figure out what this means, and how you’d get me warm for your presentation.

(this compilation post has been published earlier on Business2Community and on LinkedIn)

I have also created an infographic that summarizes this post. You may download the file by clicking on the image below (or hitting the download tab on top of this page).

Creating personas for audience-centric story design

“In this age of the customer, the only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers.” – David M. Cooperstein, Forrester Research

Not so long ago, I participated to an ideation session in which we used personas to represent different user types of a new application. In user-centered design and marketing, personas are fictional characters, created to represent classes of users that might use (or appreciate) a site, brand, product, or service in a similar way. Sketching imaginary characters with a name, a face, and a story makes it easier for people to generate and evaluate ideas. Musing about a day in the life of Fiona Wright, “a middle-aged female manager with two digital native children, who’s interested in technology and gastronomy” could e.g. facilitate brainstorming about the functionality and the GUI of a new restaurant finder app. Defining and fleshing-out personas may also help you with personalizing your presentation for a specific audience, and building a narrative that resonates with a number of (possible) archetype customers in the room.

Starting from a sheet with made-up demographic information, such as their name (or nickname), age, gender and family situation (some marketers even search the web for a picture of a look-alike), these are a few other questions to ask and – consequently – assumptions to make about your targets:

• What is their job, level of seniority and role in their company or organization?
• What do they do in their free time? What are their personal interests?
• What does an average day in their life look like?
• What do they value most? What are their goals? How do they get motivated?
• What are their main challenges and pain points in their job? In their daily lives?
• What could be their most common objections to your product or service?

The answers to the above questions will empower you to tell a better story, by putting yourself into the shoes of (some in) your audience and establishing an emotional connection with them – as they’ll help you better understand what they think, believe, do, feel and need. In older posts I have described a few tools for characterizing, predicting and influencing the reactions of people in the room. Drawing a power quadrant, an influencer quadrant, and a personality quadrant for each of the personas you create will enable you to adapt your content and presentation style to their anticipated behavior. More reading:

• Design for Interaction: Ideation and Design Principles (by Dan Saffer)
• A Closer Look At Personas: What They Are And How They Work (by Shlomo Goltz)
• The missing link between business, marketing, and customer strategy: buyer personas (by Tony Zambito)
• To whom it should concern (by me)
• Friends and foes (by me)
• Dealing with introverts and extraverts (by me)
• The back of a roll of wallpaper (by me)
• Five elements of a story and how to use them in a business presentation (by me)

Keep calm and be relevant

Here’s a question that I received in reaction to one of my earlier posts on this blog:

“Can I present the same slide deck to different audiences, or do I have to customize my visuals every time again?”

This is certainly a good topic to discuss, but IMHO it’s too much focusing on the ‘material’ aspects of your talk: the visuals you prepare and present.  If you understand what’s preoccupying the people in the room, you can be relevant to them, even without projecting one single slide. Yes, you can…

Did you ever consider looking up the participants’ LinkedIn profiles before the meeting starts? Try conducting a dialogue with them, instead of the usual monologue? Ask questions about their interests and needs? Address them with the right messages at the right level of (technical) detail?

In three of my older posts I have described tools that may help you characterize your audience, and adapt your content and presentation style to their anticipated behavior: the power quadrant, the influencer quadrant, and the personality quadrant.

If knowing your audience is step one, then managing their expectations is certainly step two. Provide them with a heads-up on what you are going to present and — even more — how you will present it to them. What are the goals of your presentation (if you’re smart, you can already link them to the call to action that will come later)? When can they ask questions (should they interrupt you or did you plan a Q&A session the end)?

As an illustration, here are three samples of visuals I have used to manage my customers’ expectations ― and get them into the mood for a good conversation…

In my first example, I am exploiting the fact that I am Belgian. Belgium is the country known for its surrealist painters, like René Magritte. Therefore, I often use the “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” image below to inform my customers about what they may expect from the meeting and what they should not hope for.

Another visual I show from time to time is Dilbert’s “PowerPoint poisoning” strip. Even when I have only 10 or 20 slides on hand, I try to engage my listeners by asking them if they’re prepared to go through the next 844 slides with me.

And finally, when I want to satisfy my audience’s hunger for information ― and free myself from having to present all the details ― I put up a “keep calm and read this at home” slide (and hand out a copy of it after the meeting), inspired by the 1939 “Keep Calm and Carry On” pre-war campaign of the British Government.

 My posts about the three quadrants I mentioned above:

• To whom it should concern (by me)
• Friends and foes (by me)
• Dealing with introverts and extraverts (by me)

Walk and do look back

Past summer vacation I went trail hiking in the mountains. Already during the first walk, I found out that one of my travel companions was obsessed with topographic map reading. As such he was certainly of great help for planning the excursion and keeping the herd on track.

But, untrained as I was  (and maybe getting a bit older and slower too), this same person also turned out to be a major source of irritation. I can assure you that it is frustrating to be constantly trailing 100 meters behind a self-declared leader, who is only concentrating on his map and not paying attention to the folks that aren’t able to keep up with his pace – and as such getting (literally and figuratively) disconnected from the group.

Unfortunately, I have seen the same happen with professional speakers too. Though they carefully prepared their slides and rehearsed their presentation, they neglected to pay attention to the (non-verbal) feedback from the people in the room.

So, here’s a piece of advice to all business presenters: your audience is far more important than your slide deck. Pause, repeat and summarize often. And slow down your talk when people start dropping out.

And for my hiking buddy, there are also some leadership lessons to take away: don’t waste your energy scrutinously executing a plan, when your associates are not at the same speed (yet). Walk on, but don’t forget to look back from time to time!

Additional reading:

• Am I Hiking Too Fast For You? (by Brendan Leonard)
• 6 Reasons Your Audience Is Ignoring Your Presentation (by Jeanne Trojan)
• What to do when you’re losing your audience (by Olivia Mitchell)
• Three Differences Between Managers and Leaders (by Vineet Nayar)
• P+R (by me)