[poseycorp’s newsletter and blog are almost done telling the absolutely, positively fictional story of Clara and Marcus’s big adventures at WidgetCo. – If you need to catch up: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8.]
Monica, WidgetCo’s CEO and April, WidgetCo’s CMO, were out for a walking one:one, but Monica was moving so fast that April could barely keep up. “I’m sorry,” Monica said. “I have a lot of negative energy to expel.”
“How could you not after Jones’s shenanigans?” said April, “We need to clarify things in the market ASAP.”
“Totes. Get me a speaking platform, now. A big one.”
“With pleasure,” said April, with a satisfied smirk. Another nail in Jones’s reputational coffin.
Twenty minutes later Clara and Emily rounded up Marcus. “We have to turn that customer deck we just finished into something flashier, and we have to do it, like, today.”
“Yup,” said Emily. “All it took was one text and we got Monica on as the closing keynote speaker on the first day at Safe AI.”
“We’ll have to distill the description of our data vetting and provenance automations down into accessible language and we’ll have to add a few strong use case examples“, said Clara. “This is our chance to inspire. Marcus, do we have any customers who are ready to talk?”
“Look at you using distillation in a sentence like it’s a good thing,” said Marcus. “And yes, I’ve got two customers who want to show off how they’re NOT scraping the entire internet to feed their models, so we’re good.”
Twenty-four highly-caffeinated hours later, Emily, Clara, and Marcus watched as April polished the deck and added some tangy soundbites to Monica’s talk track.
“I’ll start on the Q&A,” said Emily to Clara and Marcus. “After we are all happy with it, I’ve got to get it through legal. We don’t get a do-over on this opportunity, so it has to be perfect.”
“Oh it will be,” said April, standing and clapping. “You guys have done amazing work. Yay team. And especially yay you, Clara. This was all your idea, wasn’t it?”
Clara was too flustered to answer. She stared at the table and mumbled, “We all made great contributions.”
After April and Emily left, Marcus turned to Clara. “It was your idea. You proposed the new company direction. You did that.”
“Well, no one even read my email until you fixed it for me, so . . .”
“We are lucky to be on the same team,” said Marcus with a big smile.
The whole team at WidgetCo is preparing their message for the broader audiences they need to reach. Fewer product facts and more inspiring examples are the right recipe for an industry keynote.
Not sure how to crush your next presentation? Navigate tough questions? Need some pragmatic, actionable communications advice? Consider Office Hours with Lisa, a great way to get bite-sized, personalized coaching. And there are tons of resources in poseycorp’s newsletter – subscribe here. Get some skills! Because it’s the great communicators who create the change they want to see in the world!
