Three Things That I Look in a Person Before Hiring

I read a wonderful post by Shane Parrish titled “Warren Buffet: The three things I look for in a person“.

Here he shares three qualities that Buffet looks in a person:

• Integrity
• Intelligence
• Energy

He also thinks that without the first, the other two don’t matter much.

This reminded me of my mentor and his principle’s while deciding to work with someone. His list was as below, in the order of importance:

• Integrity
• Passion
• Ambition

Again, he said that without the first, the other two are a sure recipe for disaster. However, when you add that in the mix, it plays the role of a “Philosopher’s Stone” and transforms the person.

Strangely, these are exactly the qualities that I look in a sales executive.

You can’t infer a person’s ability to sell by looking for these qualities. However, in my opinion, if you have these three qualities, one can succeed in any role that they get into. If you observe, none of these is a skill. They constitutes our character.

Skills can be learnt, but character needs to be built and it takes a long time to build one’s character.

Now, the question is how do you check for these qualities before you hire someone.

Its easy to check if someone is ambitious or passionate from their past works, social profiles and the initial discussions. The most critical and difficult thing to check for is the integrity of a person.

My mentor did a few things to check the integrity of the person:

• He would leave a 100 rupee bill in an empty room and get the person to wait in the room. The currency is not on the table but in a place where it will  be definitely be seen and observe what the person does with the bill. This tells a lot about the person and his integrity. 
• He would get one of his assistants to serve coffee/tea to the person and that person would deliberately spill some tea or coffee and observe the reaction. He always used to say that the true identity of a person comes through in their conduct with people weaker than themselves.
• In the middle of the conversation he would plan to receive a call on his phone and get all worked up about a situation on the phone and react in a way that he would not want to react/behave. He would then start chatting about the situation with the person and gradually bring up how he reacted and ask this person what he thought about his action. The response will say a lot about the integrity and character of this person.

Some other interesting ways to try and understand the person that i have found helpful for me are:

• Get someone from the team to talk to the person informally before the actual interview over a cup of coffee. This conversation will provide a lot more insight into the person than a formal conversation. 
• Make the person wait for a few hours with no one to talk to or meet. And then put them in pressure by cancelling the interview by giving some flimsy reason. The reaction to this situation tells a lot about the person than any formal interview could. (Though, post that prank, you do let your hair down and continue the interview with him or her, for sure).

What do you do to screen your hires? Do share what has worked for you in the past by commenting below or tweeting to me at @rmukeshgupta.

PS: Video of Warren Buffet talking about the importance of Integrity:

Building High Performing Sales Teams

Are you under constant pressure to deliver an ever increasing sales targets?

Do you want to explore if there is a way that you can build a culture that enables high performing sales teams and guide them to consistently push the limits and deliver quarter after quarter?

Then join me in my quest to find out what it takes to build such a culture.

In my opinion, there are three components that contribute to building a culture that enables a high performing sales teams:

1. Sales Process – Do you have a clearly defined sales process and do your sales execs follow the process
2. Manager’s role – What role do managers play and how they are measured
3. Sales exec’s incentives – How are your sales execs incentivize and measured?

Now lets check each one of these components in detail.

Sales Process:

Having  a clearly defined sales process is key in enabling your sales team to perform at extremely high efficiency. Some questions that will help you realize the strength of your sales process are:

• Do you have a clearly defined sales process, with clear accountability on who is responsible for what? 
• Who brings in the new leads? Who qualifies these leads?  How do you qualify these leads?
• What is your go-to-market strategy? Does it include coverage of the entire market?
• Is there a sales methodology that you follow
  • SPIN Selling
  • Challenger sales
  • Solution Revolution
• Does your sales team know the process that they are supposed to follow? Are they expected to follow the process? Do they follow the process? What happens if they do not follow the process?
• Do you have a win/lose analysis for every opportunity at the end of each opportunity’s closure?
• Do you have a system to capture leads, opportunities (CRM system)? How simple is this system to use? Does it always have up-to-date information?
• How often do you appraise your sales team – Annual, Half-yearly or quarterly?

Manager’s role:

The role of the sales manager is the most critical in sustaining high performance in any organization. Their actions, interactions and influence on the sales executives will determine if you are able to build a high performance culture in the sales organization. Some questions that you need to reflect upon to understand if you have solved this puzzle are:

• Are the sales managers just measured on sales quotas? Are they measured on the success of their direct reports? 
• How do they deal with a sales executive who has not met his sales quota? Do they apply more pressure on him/her? Do they sit down and try to understand the reason for the miss & then coach him/her?
• How do they deal with someone who achieves his/her sales quotas but does not follow the process or could be potentially a bad influence on the culture?
• How do they run their team meetings & forecast calls? Do they use these opportunities to coach, recognize and explain good performance? Or do they focus on the transactional details about the deals in the pipeline?

Incentives: 

Arriving at the best sales incentives is a tough job. Hence, most companies end-up having simple incentive structures, primarily incentivizing with money. We now know enough that money, by itself, is not a great incentives. Though sales executives expect to  be incentivized based on the revenue that they bring in, high performing sales teams realize that money along is not a great incentive. Some questions that you need to think about incentives are:

• Is your sales incentives aligned to your long term strategy? For example, if your strategy is to increase market share & profitability, are the incentives aligned to the strategy? In this case, do you incentivise a sales executive who brings in a large deal but with low profits and a sales executive who brings in a relatively smaller deal but with higher profits, equally? 
• Do you consider other alternatives of incentives like a paid vacation, or paid education or an interaction with a celebrity or the opportunity to fulfill any of their dreams? For example, if I have a dream to publish a book, can my organization help me publish the book if I achieve my sales quota? I would value this much more than getting some additional cash. This would also enable me to be much more engaged with my organization and result in a lower turn-over.

In order to build a consistently high performing sales team, you need to have a good mix of all the three elements.

These are my thoughts. What do you think? Do share your thoughts by commenting below or by tweeting to me at @rmukeshgupta.

What can Sales Teams Learn from Performing Arts?

Selling has a lot in common with performing arts than visible at first glance.

One of the most important goal of a performing artist is to take their audience on a journey with them, the more immersive the experience, the more successful is the performance.

The same is with selling. The goal of a sales executive should also be to take the customer on a journey with them. The more immersive this experience, the more successful will be the sales executive.

Some lessons that sales executives can learn from performing artists who are very successful are:

• Weave a story: There is always a story that flows through any performance. The more interesting the story, the more interesting the story-telling, the more likely that you have a hit performance. So it is with selling. Every sales executive should lead his interaction with his customer with a story and hone is story telling skills.
• Create and manage emotions: The artists know exactly what they want their audience to feel at any given point of the performance. Emotions are a very integral part of every successful performance. No performance is deemed successful until the audience did not feel about the performance. Selling is not just about logic, value and RoI. It is also about managing the emotions of the buyers. More often than not, it is the emotions that decide the final outcome irrespective of the logic, value or RoI. So, do not ignore this important facet of selling. More important than empathizing with the customer is to take him/her on an emotional journey knowing fully well, what you want them to feel at every stage. 
• Continuous Experiment & learning: The artists continually experiment with their approach to learn what works best for them and then try to keep improving. So should sales executives. What works with a customer might not work with a different customer. It is always good for the sales executive to know his and his organizations strength and to continue to explore different approaches within these areas to have a repertoire that he can dig into in any given customer scenario.
• Hidden planning & activity: There is a lot of planning and behind the scenes activity (frenetic) that goes on to enable the performance that is hidden from the audience. All the audience sees is what it needs to see and feel what they need to feel. So should the sales executive manage the performance. He needs to manage the entire show without the customer needing to know about the frenetic activity behind the scene. He/She does not need to know the kind of madness (controlled or otherwise) going on within your organizations.
• Practice, Rehearse & more practice: It takes enormous amount of practice, rehearsals and fine-tuning to bring to life a good performance. So it should be with sales executives. The sales executives should also put in a lot of practice, rehearsals and fine-tuning before they go in front of their customers. They should also keep fine-tuning their pitch as they get feedback from their interactions with the customers.

These are some lessons that I have taken from being a performing artist & a sales executive myself and they have served me really well so far.

Everything mentioned above for sales executives can also be held true for Customer service executives. They can take similar lessons from the world of performing arts to create a stunning experience for their customers.

What do you think? Do you agree with my observation or do you have a different experience? Do let me know by commenting below or tweeting your thoughts to me at @rmukeshgupta.

What Do You Do When You Lose a Deal

No matter how good you are, you are bound to lose some deals to your competition. However, all is not lost. As they say, “Losing a battle doesn’t mean you shall lose the war”.

How you respond and act in such a situation can go a long way in ensuring you continue to succeed in selling.

Here are a few questions that could help you in making the most from the lose sale:

• Do you thank the prospect for giving you an opportunity to compete for their business? 
• Do you wish them success with their purchase?
• Do you ask for feedback about what they liked in your product/service /engagement and what could be improved?
• Do you ask for a referral?
• Do you go back and check if the purchase was successful and it they were able to achieve their objectives with the purchase?
• Do you stay connected with your prospect?
• Do you share interesting articles or information to your prospect?
• Do you ask them how and on what could you work together?

Do ask yourself these questions and decide to do whatever you think is possible.

These are fairly simple things that you could do and will leave a lasting impression about you and your organization.

Most importantly, these are the right things to do as well.

What are the things that you do when you lose a deal? Do share what you do when you lose a deal by commenting below or by tweeting to me at @rmukeshgupta.com.

Happy selling!

Sales Forecasting

Every sales organization has a sales forecasting process in place. This is usually done in a meeting or on a tele-conference.During this call each sales team talk about how much sales closure do they each expect for the week, month or quarter.

This is also the meeting where senior sales managers (2 or 3 levels above the sales executives on the road) want to know the status of the pipeline and determine if they will be able to achieve their sales quota for the respective period, as they are measured on delivering their sales quotas.

Typically, everyone in the sales team is present on these meetings – from the sales executive on the road to the Head of sales and everyone in between.

These calls were very important or sacrosanct for the senior sales executives to be able to determine the health of their pipeline.

However, with the advent & large scale adoption of the different CRM systems in each organizations, these calls are no longer necessary as the CRM can help the senior managers to get the same information from the system.

These forecasting calls or meetings are still held in almost every organization. Why? There could be multiple reasons for this.

1. Inertia: No one ever questioned the need for these calls or meetings, even when the CRM systems were put in place.
2. Trust: Sales leaders did not trust the information in their CRM system. This could also explain why CRM could never fulfill its true potential – transform the sales organization.
3. Pressure: Sales leaders also use this call to motivate their sales teams (more likely, apply more pressure). They could never do that through the system. In some cases, applying more pressure works but is usually counter-productive and in the long term is never good for any organization.

Do you still need these forecasting calls/meetings?

In my opinion, you could do away with the forecasting calls totally. Instead, I would recommend that they be transformed into the following:

1. Trust: Sales leaders need to ensure that their teams know that they are expected to maintain and manage their pipeline in the system being used (CRM or otherwise). That the status in the pipeline is always up-to-date. This is a culture that will lead to the system being more trustworthy and transparent. 
2. Coach: Sales executives could use these calls instead to seek assistance or inputs from the senior managers on handling a specific sales scenarios or seek their help in closing specific deals. The sales leaders can use these call to coach their teams so that everyone benefits from their experience.
3. Culture: By building trust & coaching their teams, sales leaders can build a culture of trust and high-performance.

We also know that forecasting accuracy is never high enough for us to consider them as critical. Also, every sales manager that I have know thinks and wants to improve the accuracy of such forecasts.

Accurate sales forecasts is an oxymoron.

I would however, recommend that you should do away with your forecasting calls/meetings and rely upon your system to monitor the health of the pipeline.

What do you think? Do share your thoughts on this topic by commenting below or tweeting your thoughts to me at @rmukeshgupta.

PS: You could also look at my thoughts on Sales Review Meetings and sales quotas.

What’s the Measure of a Sales Managers Success

One of the most important pillar of building a high performing sales team, is the performance of your sales managers. So, how do you evaluate the performance of a sales manager?

If your organization is like most of the sales organizations, the answer is very simple – Does he hit his sales quota?

Sales organizations function like a clear top-down organization. The sales VP or CSO or whatever he is called gets a quota (based on the CEO’s commitment to the stock market or to the board members and investors), say $100 Million.

He then adds a cushioning factor and distributes this to his direct reports. Lets say he has 4 direct reports – the total sales quota for these reports add up to $110 Million. They then distribute this among their direct reports with a cushion added to their quotas. You get it.

However, the question is, if this is the best that we can do? Also, does this improve the effectiveness of the sales organization or undermines it? Does it truly measure the sales managers effectiveness on what they are supposed to do?

In my opinion, this is not the right way to measure the sales managers performance.

Why?

Because, sales quotas should be the measure of success or failure only for those who actually go out and sell for a living.

The role of a sales manager is to enable his team to exceed their sales quotas. The key word there is – ENABLE.

The primary responsibility of a sales manager should be the following:

• Recruit well.
• Ensures that they are become productive quickly
• He needs to monitor their effort, attitude and performance.
• He needs to coach his team as per each individuals requirement.
• Reinforce positive behaviors and discourage non-positive behaviors.
• Needs to help/coach each of his sales executives to exceed their sales quotas

So, if they are responsible for the above, how should they be evaluated?

In my opinion, a combination of the below could serve as a starting point:

• Has the entire sales organization exceeded its sales quota?
• Has everyone in his team exceeded their sales quota?
• As they say, the strength of any team is equal to the strength of its weakest link. Who in his team is the weakest performer and by how much in comparison to his quota? This should have a bearing on the sales managers evaluation.

This also means that all the managers of the sales managers should also be evaluated using similar metrics.

One drawback of this model is that this could tempt the sales managers to set low sales quotas for all their sales executives to ensure that they all over-achieve their quotas and hence the sales managers get good evaluations. The counter-balance here is for the CEO to achieve by setting the bar high for the sales organization quarter after quarter.

These are my thoughts on this topic. Do you agree with my thoughts? Do let me know your thoughts on this topic by commenting below or tweet them to me at @rmukeshgupta.

The changing role of a sales executive

In today’s environment, sales executives serve one purpose – to sell your products and services to your prospects and customers.

In a B2B environment, we are slowly realizing that the nature of how we sell has and is changing rapidly. We started with selling products and services based on features and benefits. Then we moved towards solutions selling. Slowly, but steadily, we are now moving towards consultative selling or even challenger selling models.

All of these models are still geared towards the “Push” model of selling. We have built a product or service, it will will help you solve a problem that you may or may not know about. By making you aware of the problem & framing it in a way that only my product or service can solve it, I entice you to buy the product or service that I sell.

Push products or services

Sales executives are measured on how well and how much do they sell these products and solutions. They get big commissions based on their ability to sell.

There are two trends that we need to see and take into account:

1. We are moving from an era of mass production to an era of mass customization (in every sphere of life). You can even order a car to be customized to your requirements. 
2. We are also moving away from mass markets to niche market segments.

Organizational skills required to succeed in a mass-production, mass-market scenario is very different from the skills required to succeed in a mass-customized, niche market reality.

In an era of mass production, it was more important to produce in large quantities (efficiency of scale) and find ways to sell the inventory at a high enough price to turn in profits. So, to succeed in this world, you focus on producing in large quantities to reduce your cost/unit, hire an army of sales people, train them on different selling techniques, teach them about your product, give them a quota (with the possibility of earning a lot of commissions) and let them loose in the market.

In order to motivate them to sell more, you link their payout to their sales. You then find ways to improve your production, reduce cost and increase sales. You filter & invest in ideas that have the biggest addressable market with minimal or no competition. You keep repeating the process in order to be successful.

This process wont work in a world of mass-customization. In this era, you need your sales executives to listen & understand the unique nature of your prospects and customers  business. Then figure our their unique requirements or challenges. Then be able to create a concept of a product that could solve this challenge. They need to be able to customize your product (if not help create from scratch) to suit the needs of the customer/prospect. You do not need an army of sales executives who are solely tasked to sell your products or services. You need sales people to be folks who understand the  businesses of their prospects or customers, understand your strengths and abilities and are able to create a custom solution that solves a challenge for your prospects/customers.

In this world, the way you compensate your sales team also will change. You no longer are required to incentivize them for selling the standard product/service. You need to retrain them to be able to better listen better, identify trends, understand all aspects of a businesses. The primary incentives will be based on their ability to come up with creative ideas on how to address the challenge of your customer quickly, cheaply & completely. They will be expected to come up with ideas for products/services or niche market segments which can be addressed by creating new solutions.

They will be required to be morphed into the eyes and ears for the organizations, always scouting  for new niche market segments and unique customer/prospect challenges to address. They will also provide fodder to the innovation engine of the organization, helping build new products/services (as they are the closest to the world of prospects or customers).

Do you think you are ready for this new reality? How far do you think we are from this reality?

Do let me know your thoughts by commenting below or tweeting it to me at @rmukeshgupta.

The Challenger Sales model & its relevance in the selling models of the future..

I recently read the book – The Challenger Sale and would like to share my impressions from the book.

My personal opinion on the relevance of this model:

1. In order to succeed this model requires a change in the culture of the sales organization (from top to bottom), which we have observed is a very very difficult thing to achieve. Very few organizations have leaders who are capable of driving such a change initiative to success. 
   
2. As this book is based on the research on reps that were successful in selling when everyone else was failing, this assumes that what worked in the economic downturn will work always. Though I do agree with some of the components of the model, I do not think that this is a long term solution that will change the way B2B sales organizations will function in the future.
3. This model is still built around the seller and not around their customers or prospects.
4. The innovation in sales models for the future is still due.

Some impression from the book:

This book has come from the findings of a long and serious study of sales organizations and their customers feedback over a long time. As with all findings from a survey, I would take the findings with a grain of salt.

The entire set of recommendations flow from the study of the sales reps who were successful when everyone around them failed to hit quota and expands from there.

The key message from the book is the following:

If you want to succeed in B2B selling in the future, you need to be able to incorporate a challenger mindset in your sales teams and back it up with building a corresponding culture & support capabilities in the  sales organizations

So, what constitutes a “Challenger mindset” for a sales rep:

• Ability to offer customers a unique perspective
• Strong two-way communication skills
• Understanding of the individual customer’s value drivers
• Comfortable discussing money
• Ability to pressure customer
• Creates and maintains a creative tension with the customers

What is the Challenger sales model:

A sales model through which you are consistently able to maintain a creative tension with your customers and prospects by:

1. Teach them for differentiation
   
2. Tailoring the message based on the recipeint and his value drivers
3. Taking control of the sales process (from start to finish and not just during the final negotiation phase)

Let’s consider each of these a bit more elaborately:

Teaching for differentiation: 

The primary argument here is that as a supplier, it is getting increasingly important for you to know more about your customers business and to be able to bring insights to your discussion with them. So much so, that you are able to get your customers to see their business in new lights.

Every interaction with you, would then be something that they will look forward to rather than dread.

The most important aspect of this activity is to ensure that all of these insights lead the customers to a problem that they would like to solve and which could be best solved by the products or solutions that only you can provide.

So, it is about using insights to show your customers challenges or missed opportunities that they currently do not see in their business, leading to your unique strengths as a solution provider to address the very same challenge or opportunities

Also, the capability to develop such insights for each of your customers or prospects is something that the entire organization needs to develop and then equip their sales reps with these insights and enable them to scale to other customers.

Tailoring for resonance: 

B2B selling is getting more and more complex as decision makers in the buyer organizations do not sign the dotted line until there is enough buy-in from with-in their organization for the supplier.

So, it becomes important that the sales executives are able to garner this support even before they approach the decision makers. In order for them to be able to do so, they need to be able to identify the value drivers for each layer of the organization and have insights led conversations with each of them, tailored to their view of world.

Taking control of the sale:

This is the ability of the representative to be able to create momentum in the customer/prospect organization for the selling process. His/her ability to predict/identify roadblocks and being able to move them.

This also means that he or she is able to keep the discussion ahead and also getting more buy-in across the organization.

This is a key skill that the sales rep needs to build. The other two components of this model is more an organizational capability.

Have you read this book as well? Do let me know your thoughts on the book and the model itself? Also, do you know of any other book that you think proposes the sales model of the future.. Do let me know your thoughts by commenting below or tweeting your thoughts to me at @rmukeshgupta.

 

PS: The introduction to the book by CEB is below:

 

 

Another review of the book:

 

 

 

Building an effective marketing strategy..

I am surprised at the lack of organizations with good marketing strategy. Doesn’t matter if they are  large MNC’s with millions of dollars of marketing budget or a start-up with minimal budget.

I am sure that everyone in the marketing world understands the importance of having a solid strategy!

Most marketing efforts fail in the face of unclear strategies. Good strategy can not only improve the effectiveness of your efforts but will help in reducing the total cost. But most importantly, it will help your customers to buy more from your sales teams.

With the emergence of new media, more and more marketing teams seem to forget that they are still media. They still need a strategy to market their products and a media strategy will only be a small but integral part of the overall marketing strategy.

Let us take an imaginary organization and try to  build a marketing strategy for them.

Imaginary Organization:

• A Large MNC in a B2B scenario.
• A Large base of existing customers.
• A large & varied product mix.
• A big sales and marketing team.

Now, if you have worked in an organization like the one I describe above, you would already know the various pressures involved.

Segmentation: 

The first step in building a marketing strategy is to the decision around segmentation – Market and customer. I would prefer a customer based segmentation as it helps the marketing team to always know whom they are trying to market to.

There are 2 kinds of customers:

• Existing customers
• Prospects

Developing strategy for Existing customers:

I would further segment existing customers into different categories based on a “Jobs to be done” metaphor.

A lot of companies prefer to segment based on industry, geography, size, etc. However, in my opinion the best way to cluster companies is from a “Jobs to be done” metaphor (more information on the “Jobs to be done” metaphor defined by Clay Christensen).

Examples could be like the ones below:

• Customers who are on a growth path and focus on top line growth. 
• Customers who want to focus on reduce cost and hence focus on bottom line growth.
• Customers who want to bring new products to market faster, cheaper and with more success.
• Customers who want to improve their cash flows.
• Customers who want to focus on reducing debt.

Segmentation like this means that you can tailor a message that will resonate with all the companies in a segment, irrespective of their industry, size or geography.

1. Decide on the segments that the marketing teams would focus on.
2. Design the messaging for these segments.
3. Design activities around these segments.
   1. Build a media strategy (incl. social and traditional media)
   2. Build a contact strategy
   3. Build a content strategy
4. Explain & Align with the respective accounts team.
   1. This strategy can only succeed if every account team handling existing customers understands the segmentation and are able to tag their accounts in the CRM system based on the segmentation that marketing has defined.
   2. Also, this segmentation information can help the account teams to identify the products/solutions that they want to position to these customers based on the customer priorities, which, in-turn, makes it far more likely that they will get the sales.
   3. Third step is for the account teams to identify the contacts at these customers and tag them in the CRM system as the stake holders for the specific segments that they have classified. For example, if the customer is classified in the segment “Improve inventory turns”, then the account teams identify the key contacts in the manufacturing, finance and controlling functions of the customer organization. Marketing can then use this information for their contact strategy.
5. Execute & adjust the strategy as we go along.

Developing strategy for prospects:

The only major difference in defining the strategy for existing customers and prospective customers is for the marketing team to define a persona for prospects in each of the segment that they want to focus on.

• By persona, I mean, define the characteristics of the companies that you would want to prospect. This is a very important step that many marketing teams miss, thereby, leading to low conversion rates and high cost for customer acquisitions.
• Once these personas are defined, the marketing teams can then decide to work with the market research organizations to identify companies that fit the persona and map the individuals.
• This also helps the marketing teams to design specific messaging that will suit the respective personas.
• Media strategy is key in this case as the importance of branding and building relevance in the markets. Positioning is much more effective in this case.

One of the most important part of the strategy is also to set-up clear measures of effectiveness which can then be used to monitor progress and course correct if required.

Key metrics Marketing effectiveness: Just as the strategy is defined separately for existing and prospective customers, the KPI’s also will need to be defined separately for each of these segments.

• For existing customers:
  • No of additional deals done with each of the existing customers
• For prospective customers:
  • No of net new customers added in the pipeline
• Changes in Brand equity

If you understand this strategy, it is clear that in order to work, this strategy needs your marketing teams to work closely with your sales and business development teams, lack of which is a topic for a separate blog post.

How do you develop your marketing strategy? Have I missed something here? Do let me know by commenting below or tweeting your thoughts to me @rmukeshgupta.

PS: Clay Christensen’s talk about Disruptive innovation and about Jobs to be done

Great resources to create sticky presentations

Each and every one of us in the profession of selling, end up presenting (either about the products or solutions that we are selling, or about the company we represent or to showcase ourselves).

And most of us still struggle even after years of delivering presentations for a living.

Hence, the term, death-by-powerpoints.

This is a key skill and something that we need to continuously  work upon. In Stephen Covey’s words  -”Sharpen the saw”!

After having gone through a lot of reading, listening and presenting, I have realized the following:

• I deliver great presentations if I don’t use the standard slides created by our organizations. I use these slides at most as my back-up and only use them when I have to dive deep into a topic which one of the slide covers. 
• My best presentations are when I am able to weave a story. Even better when members of the audience are the protagonists of the story.
• When I can’t avoid using pre-built slides, I do best when I am able to use these as anchors and engage the audience by getting them involved.
• The best presentations are when I have practiced a lot, but still deliver free style. 

There are two parts of delivering great presentations:

1. Creating great presentations. 
2. Delivering these presentations.

The resources that I always turn for creating great presentations is – http://www.presentationzen.com. Garr Reynolds has also written a book by the same name. Its a great book to refer to when in doubt and creating a presentation.

I also refer to the research done by Nancy Duarte and her dissertation of what makes great presentations to decide on the flow of my presentation.

Brothers – Dan and Chip Heath have written a great book about Making Ideas Stick. They talk about a simple metaphor to remember if we want to make an impactful presentation (SUCCESS – Simple, Unexpected, Credible, Concrete, Emotional and tell a story. You can find a lot of information on this at their website (http://www.heathbrothers.com/).

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year!

What resources do you turn to when you want to improve your presentation skills? Do let us know by commenting below or tweeting to me at @rmukeshgupta.

PS: Some information that you should check out when possible are:

Nancy Duarte’s TEDx dissertation of what makes a great presentation, both in terms of flow and content:

You can  hear Dan Heath talk about making sticky presentations here.

You can also listen to Garr Reynolds  TEDx Talk - Story, Imagery, & the Art of 21st Century Presentation:

Some of the before/after slides that Garr has created is as below to serve as an example for all of us:

Sample slides by Garr Reynolds from garr