One of my favorite projects was for a Turkish client who was attending the IMF meetings in Washington, DC.

(Most of you will be familiar with the term “IMF,” but for those of you who are not, it stands for “International Monetary Fund.”)

The IMF meetings happen twice a year, and they are basically a big party for finance people. Around the core meetings of the Fund is a small universe of peripheral meetings in hotel suites: Central banks meeting with other central banks, regular banks meeting with corporate clients, etc, and of course lots of alcohol being consumed and tuxedo-only events being held.

Our client was meeting with a bank’s FI (Financial Institutions) people, but their real goal was to get on the radar of the industry’s analysts, who were only covering the largest company from Turkey, and our client was the second-largest.

So the problem we needed to solve was: How do we get analysts to pay attention to our client, when our client would not be meeting with the analysts, our client would be meeting with the FI people.

(As one of my contacts put it during our research, “Analysts don’t like these things, they prefer to stay home and read books and go to bed early.”)

So what we ended up doing was designing a slide deck the FI people would like, but that would include some information the FI people would suspect was interesting but could not understand. They would have to take the presentation back to the office and give it to an analyst to figure out.

Basically, we were following one of my all-time favorite strategies: If you give a cockroach a poison that kills him on the spot, you’ll only kill one cockroach. So what you want to give him is a delayed-reaction poison, so he takes it back to the nest and it kills the other cockroaches, too.

That’s an unpleasant metaphor, being that it involves death and it makes bankers sound like cockroaches. But you know what I mean. Sub in a more pleasant image if you can.

Anyway, what’s the point of this for your own presentations? There are two:

1. Remember that one of the Three Questions is “What do you want them to do?” Get really specific about what you want them (your audience) to do, and perhaps limit your expectations. Maybe the presentation can’t accomplish your larger goal (in this example, get analysts to pay attention to us). Maybe the presentation can only accomplish the first couple steps (get the FI person to hand it off to an analyst). It’s like that old joke: What’s the best way to eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
2. Remember that the people sitting in front of you are probably only part of your audience. You are probably also trying to reach people who are not in the room, so your job is to give your audience the motivation, and the tools, to go back to the nest and get done what you really need done.