David Kippen, Ph.D.'s Blog

It would probably be easiest to clarify my point in a personal, anecdotal context. But I'm sure most of the details will apply in slightly different form to anyone who must deliver results in a client-facing role.

I lead large research and consulting engagements for TMP Worldwide. This work often entails gathering current workforce information, travel to remote corporate locations, talking to a variety of different people from senior leadership to front line staff, and, at the end of the day, distilling down what my team and I have heard into what it all means for the employment brand position--and often, detailing the strategic and operational challenges and/or opportunities this positioning will require or allow.

Now, as you can imagine, this is typically a lot of information. When we deliver it, until recently, our method was to share a large powerpoint deck that one or more members of the team presented against (in the sense of a counterpoint, not an antagonism).

What happens next? Well, the client's typically delighted, we're warmly thanked...and now the real work begins.

Because most large organizations require many lines of influence for anything new to gain traction, our client's next task is to in-sell these insights to all relevant influence leaders. And unless the primary client is a strong presenter and has been deeply involved in the information gathering process thus far, this is where things sometimes fall apart.

Put yourself in the client's shoes and you'll quickly see why this is so. Let's say you're a Director of Recruitment. You've successfully spearheaded the drive to develop a brand position, from vendor selection to today, when results are presented. You've allocated a good chunk of the organization's change to this effort and you now have a distilled presentation in your hands, ready to share with all the internal sponsors you've lined up to get the work done.

Over the coming weeks--and remember, the clock's ticking; you need to get creative moving but can't do it until you're confident the brand position has been blessed--you'll hold a series of meetings with a bunch of senior stakeholders. If you've done your homework, they'll all know about the project, if you've aligned things right to this point none are overtly antagonistic to the effort, but let's face it: most of them have multiple priorities and won't really pay much attention, post budget approval, until this point.

In advance of each meeting you'll send out your PowerPoint deck. If 10% of your stakeholders even open the attachment prior to your meeting date you consider yourself lucky. Roughly half of the meetings start late, fully a third must take place in half an hour (or less, if the meeting starts late), and in each meeting you kill precious minutes with a recap of rationale, methodology, markets, and so on.

You've got one chance, one opportunity. Everything's on the line with every meeting. Will you choke up? Or will you manage, in the few minutes left over near the end of the meeting, to share the position, address questions, steer your sponsor around dead-ends, and bring him or her around from skepticism to support? (Remeber, once the sponsor says he or she will support it they've got skin in the game, too; it takes much more organizational authority and costs more credibility to say "yes" than to say "no.")

You get the point. The materials matter. So now, back to where we began: what would narrative do for the vendor and for the client?

Clearly, any narrative you deliver must be supplemental to the PowerPoint decks you already deliver. While you can do any number of creative things in a presentation, most clients will feel like you haven't done your homework without a PowerPoint deck. That said, there are three key areas in which supplemental narrative will offer a huge assist:
--speaker notes
--executive summary
--detailed results

Remember, no matter how well you do, it's your client who must ultimately meet with at least some stakeholders 1:1. At a minimum, providing speaker notes allows your client to connect the dot-points with emphasis on the points that feel intuitive to you (because you were part of the research) but may not feel intuitive to the presenter.

An executive summary (no more than three pages, but one is ideal) provides your client something to send along in advance of meetings that his or her sponsor probably will read. This short document not only gains back the time your client would otherwise lose in describing the means, method, markets, etc., but provides a careful framework for understanding your results--and if you like, the results themselves. With this in hand, your client can spend their golden fifteen or twenty minutes on the stuff that matters--addressing questions and gaining alignment.

In my view, providing detailed results is a no-brainer, but this is one piece you'll have to charge more for and as a result, you may have to fight for both the funding and the time they'll require. Why bother? It's a simple choice. Assuming your client organization is medium to large (10,000-100,000 employees) provide detailed results and your work will live on in the organization for years. Provide a slide deck and it will die within one. What those results look like will naturally depend on the project but I'd suggest that you follow Jim's suggestion and tell the story of the project rather than just reporting on what you found.

Thanks, Jim, for bringing me back to this.