The Corporate Communication Trap
It’s lurking and pervasive. It rears its ugly head during business presentations—project updates, board reports, and investor meetings. It happens during team meetings and webinars. CEOs and new hires are equally guilty of it.
It’s the corporate communication trap!
This trap is especially nefarious because it slithers its way into our assumptions about business communication and it’s reinforced by phrases like, “It’s always done this way,” or “I think it’s what the audience expects to hear.”
It’s the presentation of information devoid of relatable and illustrative content. It’s a slide deck filled with bullet points and way too much text. It’s the stick-straight, methodical presentation of information because, “that’s just how business presentations are supposed to be.”
The corporate communication trap is what gives business presentations a bad name, and falling victim to it means you and your message won’t resonate.
To avoid this trap, follow these 3 essential rules.
1. Don’t confuse “prepared and organized” with “methodical and mechanistic.”
Your presentation must be organized.
If you’re presenting last quarter’s customer success metrics, you need to define the chapters of that story. Perhaps they are, “Do our customers like us,” “Why do they like us,” and “Where can we get better?” Within those chapters you need supporting data and illustrative stories. You also need to explain why customer success is important in the first place. When building the presentation, you need to vet what level of detail is necessary to inform your audience and what’s excessive. That’s being prepared and organized.
Too often, however, presenters confuse this for methodical and mechanistic. The “mechanistic” part is gathering every shred of information, every data point, everything remotely related to the topic and piling it all into the presentation—sometimes it's slide after slide of charts and bullet points and sometimes it’s blocks of text. The “methodical” part is the presenter moving through that laundry list of information point-by-point-by-point-by-point during the presentation, often at a blistering pace.
2. Appreciate that data aren’t everything.
Data have their place in business communications.
Net promotor scores, sales metrics, project milestones, revenue under contract, KPIs, customer acquisition costs... the list goes on and on, and it’s all important. Numbers provide measurable targets and tangible proof of whether they were achieved. Numbers validate claims and add clarity to conversations.
But presentations can’t simply be a recitation of data—that’s why spreadsheets and dashboards exist.
Presentations need to make a larger point, and data is only one piece of the puzzle. Numbers need a sidekick. Numbers need a “what does this actually tell us” and “why does this matter” accompaniment.
For example, if you present the last 3 months of data from your customer feedback surveys, you need to take me beyond the numbers to bring to life what those numbers mean in the context of an actual customer. If you’re bragging to a potential customer about your fast response time with clients, you need to tell me a story that illustrates why that quick response time matters in the context of that client’s day-to-day. Put numbers into a relatable and real-world perspective.
3. Remember you’re a person talking to people.
Think back to a pivotal moment in your life—maybe when you got your first job or had a bucket-list experience; maybe it’s on the opposite side of the spectrum—when you didn’t get the promotion or your dream vacation got rained out.
Now image telling your best friend about it. It wouldn’t be a lifeless recitation of facts, there would be emotion and conviction in your voice. You wouldn’t run through the story so fast your friend couldn’t follow it; you’d play with your pacing and tone as the story unfolded. Ultimately, you would have a human conversation.
Business presentations need that same energy, emotion, and ebb and flow. Find the heart and soul of the subject and authentically connect with the people in the room or on the video call. Remembering to talk to your audience and not at them will do more to get your message across than a dozen 4-D pivot tables with 37 variables.
When you’re preparing for your next presentation at work, whether to clients or colleagues, ask yourself if you’re falling into the corporate communication trap. If so, take deliberate steps to avoid it by be being prepared but not mechanistic, bringing data to life, and talking in human terms.