Penelope Trunk is one of my favorite career advice bloggers. In one of her older posts, she provides advice on how to get your company to listen to your ideas. While the underlying principles are pretty basic, I find them very valuable and applicable to presenting a recommendation and gaining buy-in at most companies today.
I think often, it’s easy to have an idea that you think is great, and you expect upper management to agree and implement it. In reality, it’s so much more beneficial if you sell your idea in a way that makes it a no-brainer for the decision makers. What’s important to them, and what will their concerns be? If you craft your story in a manner that answers all of those hesitations upfront and also sells your idea, you’ll have better success than expecting them to know the answers.
Penelope provides three tips for selling your idea in, which I think are very useful in crafting any presentation. Know your audience and think about it from their perspective before you try to sell it in.
Nancy – I also love Penelope Trunk. She has a very interesting background which I believe gives her a unique perspective. She has been very successful, so she must be pretty good at selling a story!
Nancy,
A couple of years ago, when I was first hired, my first major project was to visit various departments across campus and convince them to spend their budget dollars on renovations and clean-up in order to drive enrollment goals. It was a pretty tall order but Trunk’s general strategy worked well. I didn’t realize at the time, but we basically followed her advice. The first step was to think about how the changes would help the specific department we were speaking with, related it back to admission and enrollment (i.e. college-level budget goals) and laid out attainable recommendations. It’s served as a good model for other ideas I’ve had to pitch over the last 5 years.
Thanks for the post!
nick