This is my failure story when I learned the importance of choosing the necessary slides.

Select the necessary slides for each customer

My first mistake was that I had a business trip to Europe to visit several customers. At that time, it was my first international business trip and so I spent so long time preparing presentation slides. However, I prepare one file and planned to use the same presentation deck for all customer meetings. So there was no modification and consumerization at all!
I thought I could skip the slide that each customer was not interested in.

But the reality was I didn’t skip the slides because it was not clear to me which slides I had to skip for each customer.

I was nervous because it was my first international business trip. My mistake was we didn’t have time for the “Get customer information” and the “Discussion” part. This was not one time but a couple of times.

“Have you ever felt that time passed so fast in customer meetings?”
When I finished half of the presentation slides, I realized that we had only 10 minutes left and I needed to explain 20 slides, including the key slides…

I should spend some time selecting the necessary slides for each customer meeting.

Think about the priority of the slides.

The other case is that I planned to briefly explain the slide that is not important, but the customer asked me many questions, and it took me 15 minutes to explain the slides, so I ran out of meeting time. I thought the customer is not interested in the slides. But the reality was my guess was wrong. It’s difficult to guess customers’ interests. I should place the unimportant slide at the end of the presentation. If I did so, we can achieve most of the purpose of the meeting, even if I didn’t have time to explain the slide.

At that time I learned the importance to make sure the priority of necessary slides. I should talk about the highest priority slide first then talk about the less priority slide. 

This was a painful result since I spent a lot of time and money on a business trip and I couldn’t get the necessary info and lost the opportunity to discuss. This experience changed my style and I always prepare the presentation slide for each customer and make sure which slides are necessary and which slides have high priority.

Thank you for reading this post.

We have to make sure of our game plan. Please check the detail on how to make a plan.