I was at a speakers’ function once when the conversation turned to those who make the big dollars on the podium. Referring to one particular keynoter who charges around $100K for an address, one of the people in the group observed, “That’s $1700 every minute they’re onstage.”
Are they worth it?
It would be an interesting exercise wouldn’t it to pause a video of such a presentation every 60 seconds and ask ‘was that worth $1700?’ because I suspect that not every minute is worth the same amount. I suspect there’s some variation of a flight of stairs of value, with relatively little ‘value’ at the beginning while everyone settles in and the speaker introduces themselves, a building and paced period of value-delivery in the middle as they extrapolate a story, and then a sustained and high value end-game where they leave the audience inspired before exiting.
Skilled speakers are experts at pacing their presentations to deliver that shape of experience. With so much at stake over such a condensed period of time, they have to. It’s a lesson more brands could learn from – pacing the delivery of their experience to offer critical value at critical moments.
So many brands don’t of course. They flat-line. Or they climb and dive. Or they fish-line (quick spike up, followed by long slow decline over an extended period. Draw it, you’ll see what I mean.) And the reason is that they don’t put conscious thought into their brand experiences. They don’t design them to deliver emotive out-takes. If they design them at all, they do so logistically to deliver a product or service which they hope will produce an emotive out-take.
Try this simple exercise some time.
1. Plot the shape and duration of how you want customers to feel over the course of an interaction. In particular, what moments of the transaction need to be real highs.
2. Ask your frontline staff to map the shape that they believe summarises how customers react across that timeframe now.
3. Work through what you would need to deliver your customer at each point of that experience in order to lift how they feel at critical moments.
It’s a revealing process. One man, asked to draw steps 1 and 2, drew two parallel lines right across the whiteboard.
“See the top line,” he said with a smirk, “that’s what we want to deliver.”
And the bottom?
“That’s what we actually deliver. It’s a parallel universe.”
