I have known executives who spent 45 exasperating minutes trying to explain a product to me. I finally figured out that his entire concept could be described in two very simple sentences.

All of us have sat through at least one awful sales presentation, and most of us have also delivered one at some point, too. It is obvious to the audience that they are watching a bad presentation, yet every day, presenters continue to deliver presentations that do not resonate with their customers and prospects.

As we exit 2008 and enter a prolonged period of economic challenges, it will become increasingly important to deliver a concise message that connects with our audience. We are all going to have to become better presenters, and can start by avoiding the five biggest mistakes that presenters make:

Stop reading: We have all listened to a sales guy read word for word through his entire presentation. How boring. Unless your audience is a nursery school class, they can read too. Your slides are for the benefit of the audience, not speaking notes for you. They should support what you say, not repeat it.

Kill ‘em with content: For some reason, salespeople have this instinctive belief that if a few words are good, more must be great. It is what you leave out, not in, that counts.

Barney meetings: The lovable purple dinosaur is the symbol of all useless meetings. “I love you, you love me,” but nothing ever happens. These are the meetings where we listen for an hour, nod in agreement, and then never see each other again.  Every meeting needs a purpose, and more importantly, it needs clear next steps. If you want your customer to do something, ask them for it.

Product diarrhea: Nobody cares about your product. Sorry, but they don’t care about your technology either. I come from the software business, where it is common to have a 45-slide deck that is 43 slides of technological garbage. Customers do not buy technology or products, they buy benefits and solutions to their problems. Take the number of technology slides in your current pitch and cut it in half. Then cut it in half again. Use those slides instead to tell them why they should care.

It is YOUR fault: You never want to be the one telling the classic salesperson sob story where you are selling an “amazing” product, but the customer was just too “stupid” to get it. It is never the job of the customer to understand your message. Every customer buys things for a reason. Your job is to understand those motivations, and present ideas that will help their business.  It is always your fault if your message does not work. 

So what should you do? Here are four easy ways to make your presentations much better:

10 slides or less. Guy Kawasaki, the original Apple evangelist, has a rule he calls 10/20/30. Which means you should have no more than 10 slides, no longer than a 20-minute presentation, and no font smaller than 30 points. You should work continually to deliver fewer slides, less bullet points, and simpler language. 

When in doubt, take it out. If there is any question as to whether a given slide will benefit the audience, yank it. You can always verbalize something not in a presentation, but everything you leave in creates a more complicated story. In business, simplicity sells.

Ask for the business. The last slide on EVERY sales presentation should be clear, tangible next steps. You will never get what you do not ask for. So ask for the business, but make sure you can articulate how everything benefits the customer.

No surprises. Suspenseful movies are great, but nobody likes presentations like this. Provide a clear overview on the first slide. Tell them exactly what you are going to talk about and why it matters to them in the first 60 seconds. Demonstrate that you respect their time, and understand their needs.

Sales can be both the hardest and the most rewarding job in the world. It chews up and spits out those that do not take the time to understand and present from their customer’s perspective. It is merciless to those who waste their customer’s time.

Next time you fire up PowerPoint, make every word count.

The Economist calls Facebook Connect “an ingenious stab at solving several nagging problems at once.” Prior to FB Connect, users could post links back to their social network by clicking a button that said “Share This” or something similar. Now, Web users can interact with friends while on another site. For example, they can see what news stories their friends are reading or how they rated a story or what comments they left while on a third party news site.

The report points out that this greatly lowers the barrier to entry to new visitors who don’t want to go through the hassle of registering just to interact with a given site. In exchange for allowing Facebook users to stay signed into their accounts on their site, Web site owners are granted access for one day to the visitor’s public information on Facebook. Dave Morin, a Facebook Connect manager, calls this “dynamic privacy”, meaning that wherever they are on the Web, users will be able to take their privacy settings with them, choosing who among their friends will and won’t be able to see what they’re up to.

Slowly but surely authorities around the world are turning their attention to online games and virtual worlds and the tax-exempt status of the economic activity taking place within them.
They are places where people can make virtual millions selling land, property, weapons and even people. But as tax havens their days may be numbered.

In October, China’s tax authority announced that it would focus on a previously ignored sector of its economy: the trade in virtual goods and currency. Sweden and South Korea have also moved to clarify the tax rules for virtual money.

Cost plus
Many people sell gold, items and even characters via online marketplaces for many popular games - often a new World of Warcraft player will buy a character from a veteran because they don’t want to work their own way up the ranks.

The two most obvious moments when taxes could be applied are when virtual goods are sold for real money on places such as eBay or when a transaction happens in-game.

Ever since eBay removed itself from the game asset business some time ago, millions of gamers have awaited a trusted marketplace to trade wow gold and other stuff, including game accounts. PlayerAuctions is significant for a few reasons. PlayerAuctions (www.playerauctions.com) cuts out the gold-selling middleman by connecting buyers directly with sellers, it GUARANTEES all trades for buyers and sellers, and the LA-based company is backed by Itemmania, a giant in Korea’s RMT market that has more than 2.5 million registered and LEGAL users.

It will be interesting to see how places like PlayerAuctions and other online marketplaces will respond to the demands for taxation of its members.

There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, says the report, yielding disparate estimates, but all studies agree that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. Reports in 2008 include these estimates:

comScore MediaMetrix reports: (August 2008)

Blogs… 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
Facebook… 41.0 million
MySpace… 75.1 million
Total internet audience… 188.9 million
eMarketer says: (May 2008)

94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12% of Internet users)

Universal McCann finds: (March 2008)

184 million world wide have started a blog
346 million world wide read blogs
77% of active Internet users read blogs

Wikipedia defines the Blogosphere as the collective community of all blogs. interconnected and socially networked. While discussions in the Blogosphere have been used by the media as a gauge of public opinion, Technorati isolates the Active Blogosphere as the ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.

But, says the study, as the Blogosphere grows in size and influence, the lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream media site become less clear. Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere. In fact, 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs.

Technorati tracked blogs in 81 languages in June 2008, and bloggers from 66 countries across six continents, finding that Bloggers have been at it an average of three years and are collectively creating close to one million posts every day. Blogs have representation in top-10 web site lists across all key categories, and have become integral to the media ecosystem.

The key findings included such things as:

* Personal, professional, and corporate bloggers all have differing goals and cover an average of five topics within each blog
* They use five different techniques to drive traffic to their blog.
* They’re using an average of seven publishing tools on their blog and four distinct metrics for measuring success
* Bloggers ae receiving speaking or publishing opportunities, career advancement, and personal satisfaction
* Bloggers are using self serve tools for search, display, and affiliate advertising, and are increasingly turning to ad and blog networks
* Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently
* 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate)
* Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers
* One-third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates

To celebrate the launch, PlayerAuctions is offering a free Papa John’s pizza for every buyer that completes three purchases by December 31st, and will waive all commission fees for any seller’s first five completed game currency orders.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

Does that hold true across the board? Well, again in 2005, another study was published concluding that the “discrimination was consistent across occupations, so that even a computer programmer buried behind a desk could suffer from the plainness penalty.” Interesting.

Here are some facts from Career Builder on the topic of workplace attractiveness:

A London Guildhall University survey of 11,000 33-year-olds concluded:

Unattractive men earned 15 percent less than those deemed attractive, while plain women earned 11 percent less than their prettier counterparts.
Overweight women are more likely to be unemployed and those who are working earn on average 5 percent less than their trimmer peers.
Two professors from the University of Florida and the University of North Carolina concluded:

Tall people earn considerably more money throughout their careers than their shorter co-workers, with each inch adding about $789 a year in pay.
The University of Pittsburgh found:

The tallest students average starting salary was 12 percent higher than their shorter colleagues.
This leads to the obvious question: what is “attractive” and what is “unattractive”?

When Career Builder asked hiring managers, they say ” it is the appearance of confidence they find attractive, not the presence of physical beauty. And they contend that attractiveness has more to do with how you carry yourself and the energy you exude — rather than having perfect features or a great physique.”

I would have to agree it goes back to confidence. How one carries himself in an interview process is almost as important as the qualifications for the job. This is just as important for both phone interviews and in-person interviews. It doesn’t matter if you are a a knock out or plain Jane. You will not get the job without some spark. It’s about your body language, how well you speak and portray your previous experiences and your overall demeanor.

Do you feel it’s common that the workplace discriminates based on looks?

The number of people leaving Ireland next year will outstrip those moving to the country for the first time in 14 years, according to Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin. The biggest exodus will be among the 170,000 workers who arrived the past four years from Poland and other east European states.

“It’s a very hard situation,” said Artur Kawczynski, 30, who lost his factory job in Galway on Ireland’s west coast 10 days ago. “I rang my friends in Poland to ask what job opportunities there are like.”

Immigrants like Kawczynski fed the manufacturing and building booms that helped double the size of Ireland’s economy during the past 10 years and made it the most dynamic in western Europe. Now the seizure in credit markets has plunged the country of 4.4 million people into its first recession in two decades, pushing unemployment to an 11-year high. Economic growth remains above 5 percent in Poland.

As many as 30,000 immigrants have already left Ireland over the past year, with a further 35,000 set to exit next year, according to estimates by Jim Power, chief economist at Friends First, a Dublin-based insurer. The economy shrank 0.5 percent in the second quarter and by 0.3 percent in the first.

“People are responding to changes in the economy,” Power said. “In a small country like Ireland, where immigrants have made such a major contribution, it’s far more visible than in a bigger economy such as the U.K.”

`More Difficult’

Poles have changed the face of Ireland. Bars sell Polish beer alongside Guinness; butchers advertise Polish sausages and pork cuts along with Irish beef.

In all, 1.2 million Poles may have moved to the U.K. and Ireland since 2004, according to Warsaw-based Centre for International Relations. Of those, 400,000 may lose their jobs, Krystyna Iglicka, a professor at the think-tank, said.

“When I came to Ireland, it was completely different,” said Damian Sasiak, 25, who arrived four years ago from Poland. “I remember when I changed a job three times in a day. It’s much more difficult now.’

Sasiak reckons that numbers at the gigs he organizes for Poles have fallen by a third to 350 as people leave. Three weeks ago, Chaplins, a pub in central Dublin, closed the Polish-themed bar it ran on its first floor for two years.

`Collapsed’

At first, the bar, which opened three nights a week, sold Polish beers such as Zywiec and showed Polish soccer internationals was “flying,” said George Bourke, manager of Chaplins, which lies close to the banks of the River Liffey.

“As people started to get laid off and going home, business collapsed,” said Bourke. “Some nights we would have maybe two people up there.”

Zagloba, a Polish bar across the river from Chaplins, stopped serving pierogi, stuffed dumplings, and golabki, cabbage rolls, after sales dropped by about 30 percent in recent months, according to Renata Nowak, its manager.

“Ireland is going down, while Poland is going up,” said Slawka Gruzewska, 23, an air steward for Dublin-based Ryanair Holdings Plc, at the bar. “Poland will be the new Ireland.”

In Ireland, immigrants hold 16 percent of jobs, according to Power. One in three catering positions is held by a foreigner, and they account for 16 percent of the construction industry.

Try Elsewhere

“Jobs are likely to be lost in all these sectors over the next couple of years,” said Power. “People are going to go home or try other places where the economy is better.”

Poland’s government is targeting average economic growth of 5.1 percent this year and next, boosted by EU investment in roads, consumer spending and building of new offices and apartment blocks. The unemployment rate there has halved to around 9 percent over the last two years.

By contrast, Irish joblessness is rising, led by a 18 percent decline in construction work in September from a year earlier. Irish house completions will fall 45 percent this year, as real estate prices slump, according to Dublin-based Davy, Ireland’s largest stockbroker.

Not everyone is planning to leave. Hourly pay in Poland is 3.80 euros ($4.78) per hour, a quarter of the Irish level, according to the IW economic institute in Cologne, Germany.

“There are plenty of jobs in Poland,” said Piotr Czyzewski, 34, who organizes mortgages for Poles in Ireland who want to buy property at home. “But the money isn’t so good.”

And the slowdown is benefiting at least some Poles in Ireland. Jolanta Czarnecka runs a tourist company in Dublin, taking her compatriots sightseeing all over Ireland.

“My customers say they want to see it now, because they’re leaving in two months,” said Czarnecka, 35, who runs Jolanta’s Magic Tours. “They’re going home for Christmas and don’t know if they’ll ever come back.’

Your visibility will increase with powerful publicity. Publicizing your business, you or your services will help increase the value of each to you and your whole target audience.

The idea is that publicity will bring the news of your company to the world, online or off, computer or no computer. The basic weapons that can be used to do this are a press kit, a company background piece, press releases, story ideas, and articles or columns about your firm, as mentioned in the article section above. As you can see there are many vehicles to distribute through the media, even though the most important of all is the press release.

A press kit can include the background piece, press releases, photos, story ideas, reprints of previous articles about your business, a list of customer references and anything else that the news media might find newsy or just be a simple fact sheet on you and your company. If you provide the media with news that will appeal to their readers, you will gain instant credibility and have a very valuable promotional relationship. This can be very powerful from a marketing point of view.

There are also a host of online magazines that might want to post your story, article or information. (This is related to both press releases and the article campaign mentioned above.)

A publicity campaign should begin with a master plan. The more newsworthy you make your company, the more coverage you’ll get. And publicity will earn credibility that advertising just can’t buy. Your goals should be uniqueness, timeliness and top-of-the-mind awareness. With publicity and visibility, your company profile raises and your client and prospect level rise as well. Market For Profits will put this together and manage it on a consistent basis for you.

One successful story about your company can result in free publicity is advertising worth hundreds and thousands of dollars.

Part of managing the total marketing campaign and especially the Public Relations portion is supplying the media with a unique story that will grasp their reader and viewer audiences. Press Releases also have a dramatic impact on customers and your targeted prospects.

PR is one of the most cost effective parts of marketing that an organization can undertake. The cost is in the development of an organized campaign and the writing and distribution of press releases. There is usually no cost associated with printed pieces or placement into publications. Because of this it is considered to be very cost effective. There is definitely a knack to writing a “newsworthy” press release even though sometimes the goal is awareness and promotion. Editors do not like promotion so crafting a press release to appeal to an editor is key. Now there is no guarantee that any press release will ever be published but with a consistent professional newsworthy approach with reputable editors of reputable publications, probability is good that some press will be gained and awareness will increase. Press releases are also great vehicles for communicating with clients and prospects. Putting them on a website is a very effective means of promotion to your captive markets. It also further substantiates your place in the marketing and your credibility in your field.