The Six Highest-Rated Tools, Tips and Tricks (part five)

Here is another of the ideas participants find most helpful in my Schulich School of Executive Education course Advanced Account Management and High-Yield Selling.

The Chunk Outline
How to decide what to say in any situation even with 5 minutes or less to prepare

You’ve all been there. The Big Client calls and wants an update right now, or you’re in a meeting and the accountant needs a status report you hadn’t counted on giving.

How do you pull your thoughts together so you sound polished, even though you are frantically rummaging through the drawers of your mind searching for the missing sock of last month’s numbers?

Our experience is that sounding prepared has less to do with content than it does with how your comments are structured.

In fact, when we test this in seminars with small business leaders, they always rate well-structured presentations, even those with weaker content, as more satisfying than those where the presenter rambles around tossing out stray facts as they occur to him.

Here’s the process.

Let’s assume you are in a meeting and someone asks you to expound on a topic you know reasonably well, but have not prepared. Ask for a minute to gather your thoughts (really! Junior people are afraid to appear unprepared. Senior people know they are, and take the time to get it right.)

1. You need an agenda of no more than 3 points. Always advance-organize      listeners with an agenda, even if you are only speaking for 5 minutes.      Never have an agenda with more than 3 items. We like the “What, So What,      Now What” approach. It sounds like this:

“I’ll cover where we are today, the implications and then the action plan”

“I’ll answer your question by reminding you of the situation and how we see its impact, and then I’ll share where we’re going with it.”

“Well we all know what’s going on, so let me quickly summarize our understanding and what we’ve learned, before I go over the action plan.”

You could use another organizing principle if it works better for you of course: national situation, local situation, next steps; past, present, where we go from here; what A said, what B said, what C said…in any case, the trick is to make the audience feel comfortable that you have a handle on the content so they can relax and listen.

2. For each agenda point, touch on no more than 3 to 5 key facts in the same      order as the agenda. Do not give in to the desire to teach everyone the      minutiae of the situation. They are not interested, and it will take too      long.
3. Summarize each agenda point. Say, “So, the key messages are …” in the same order      as the agenda.
4. Close by clearly recommending a course of action, and indicating what you      are prepared to do to make it successful. Say, “As a result, I am      recommending…and I am prepared to…if you will…”

The Chunk Outline Summarized

                                     

Chunk   1	Chunk   2	Chunk   3
Agenda 1   “What”	Agenda 2   “So What?”	Agenda 3   “Now What?”
Current Situation   Where we are now   Problem	Implications   Where we want to be   Alternatives	Indicated Action   How to get there   Solution
Body 1	Body 2	Body 3
3 – 5 points to   match the agenda	3 – 5 points to   match the agenda	3 – 5 points to   match the agenda
Summary
“So, the key   messages are …” in the order of the agenda.
Recommendation
“As a result, I am   recommending…and I am prepared to…if you will…”

 

Next time I’ll close this system with How Executives Make Decisions, the 6 heuristics senior managers use to decide what to do under pressure.