Context Matters
I looked around the room and everyone was smiling - some even laughing.
The guy who put them in that mood was someone who has been in executive management at ad networks with 9-figure exits, and I won’t embarrass him by naming him. I will say, however, that his presentation stood out in stark contrast to the ones that came before.
The rest of the day had been characterized by pitches of the “me, too” variety. Sales reps would kick off by ignoring the fact that we had perceived them as a player in the video space, and spent the first half of their pitch overcredentializing themselves.
Invariably, each would describe his or her particular offering as number one, as measured in some nonstandard way by one measurement firm or another. This would lead to getting hung up on comScore numbers or incredulous stares as sales reps tried to dance around obvious flaws in their view of the competitive set.
Each of those presentations felt like a conflict, as if someone was trying to make us believe claims that were literally unbelievable. And then this one guy showed up to pitch us, and suddenly we were all smiles.
I spent a lot of time thinking about why that presentation was so good.
He did a few smart things. One was to acknowledge that he belonged in the room, and he stopped trying to justify being invited.
Another was to ignore the “we’re #1” thing.
But these were both tactical decisions. What really impressed me was his strategy.
Five minutes’ worth of work told this guy that we had a reach problem. Well, that’s assuming that placing a phone call and asking us about our biggest challenge with video takes five minutes.
And when he discovered our challenge, he led with it. Coming into the room, he acknowledged the problem and the first sentence out of his mouth was about how he was going to solve the problem.
Yes, he went to the white board and sketched out all those esoteric and geeky things that digital media buyers needed to know in order to have confidence in his solution. But they were all presented in the context of how to solve our problem.
By lending the right context to the presentation, he was able to get across all the other concepts that the other presenters failed to communicate. By keeping things focused on solving the key problem, he didn’t face a room of objectors, but a room full of people willing to give him agency over how to solve an ongoing issue.
He worked with the agency instead of against them. And it meant the difference between a great pitch and a crummy one.
