Every Tuesday, sales expert Andy Bounds shares his top tips to improve your sales and communications. This week’s is…
Dramatically shorten your communications
Communications are often much too long, aren’t they…?
… One hour meetings that should have been 20 minutes
… 30-slide presentations that should have been 5
Here’s a quick, simple way to shorten your communications. It’s called “Keep/Bin/Move”.
With your next communication, look at every slide/chapter/agenda item, and ask whether you should…
• Keep it, if it’s important enough that it must be included
• Bin it, if your audience just doesn’t need to know it
• Move it, if it’s important enough to go somewhere, but not where it is now. For instance, this could be a slide going into back-up slides; a chapter moving to an Appendix; an agenda item becoming a separate email, and so on
Keep/Bin/Move doesn’t take long. But it makes a huge difference…
Recently, one of my customers – in only 5 minutes – shortened a presentation from 30 slides down to 12, with 9 back-up slides (the other 9 were removed). In other words, in 5 minutes, she removed the worst 60% of her presentation, leaving a snappy communication that achieved her objective – much more effective, quick and pleasant for everyone.
Action point
Got any sizeable communications coming up? Why not spend 5 minutes applying Keep/Bin/Move, to see if you can help your audience – and you – get more out of less time together?
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Andy Bounds
Emma Merry(PA): +44 (0) 7900 217 929
T: +44 (0) 151 231 6110
F: +44 (0) 151 231 6118
E: andy@andybounds.com
