Saturday, June 5, 2004

Talking to 'big dogs' is tricky

Dave Murphy

Suppose you have a great idea, but you need to sell it to The Powers That Be. If you're a midlevel manager or lower, this might be your one chance to impress the chief executive officer and others near the top. You know what you want to say, but do you really know how to say it?

A DVD called "Speaking to the Big Dogs: A Boardroom Survival Kit," featuring comments from 17 top executives, has all kinds of useful information about what to do and what to avoid. The DVD from Frederick Gilbert Associates of Redwood City (http://www.powerspeaking.com/) comes at a wince-inducing price of $239 but is far more useful than any other book or seminar I've come across. When you consider the career stakes involved, $239 might be a bargain.

What comes across particularly clear is that such a presentation isn't like some PowerPoint speech that you give to the Rotary Club. Listeners will be impatient and might pursue their own agendas, so make your crucial point quickly, then use the rest of the presentation to back it up. If you have 30 minutes, figure that 10 or 15 minutes is really yours and the rest is for questions and interruptions.

"You've probably never seen a commercial that's too short," Edwards Lifesciences Chief Financial Officer Corinne Lyle says on the DVD. "If you keep that in mind, you can convey a huge amount of information in 30 seconds."

Other key elements on the DVD include:

-- Getting a sponsor is crucial. You need to persuade a top executive to put you on the agenda, and sometimes even meeting with that person is difficult.

"What I used to do was say, 'I'll come in Saturday and Sunday. I'm here at 5 in the morning; I'll be here at 7 at night. When would you like to do it?' " says John Kispert, CFO at KLA-Tencor in San Jose. "That always pushes people like me to say, 'OK. You want a meeting bad.' Calling me from your car phone while you're going home at 5:30 isn't going to help you get on the calendar.

"I'll react to anybody's passion -- to get in front of us or get in front of me to plead a case or get something moving."

-- Adapt your style. "I process data in pictures and charts," says Steve Blank, the founder of E.piphany in San Mateo. "I have to tell you very few CFOs do. You put up a picture to a CFO and their eyes will glaze over. Put up the same information in numbers and they could spend an hour. Other people process text. Others process animation."

Blank says that trying to understand the learning styles of people in the room is crucial. "You might be surprised: What was a great pitch to you and your peers actually turns off an entire audience."

-- Watch the audience's reaction. If people look bored, make the presentation more interactive. If people talk about an unrelated issue, gently bring them back to your topic. If a crucial piece of information is obviously missing, see if you can continue the presentation at another meeting.

In short: Adapt.

"All of a sudden there's a side conversation and the briefing is going in a different direction -- but in the direction that the executives want it to go," says Robert Drolet, a retired brigadier general. "You have to be willing to abandon your presentation, pick up on that conversation and try to lead it to where you want to go."

On the Fringe runs Saturdays. E-mail Dave Murphy at dmurphy@sfchronicle.com.