Have you spent many hours (or even days and weeks) doing data discovery and informal data exploration followed by a detailed research or analysis agenda and then produced some exceptional quantitative and qualitative insights only to get to the end of your one hundred slide deck and heard the words no one wants to hear in response to their magnum opus: “That’s great, Patrick. But so what?”
It is pretty disappointing to have your thoughtful and well-founded insights fall absolutely flat when you present them to your leadership team. It is also mostly avoidable. Unless your top leadership is completely incompetent (or unusually arrogant), if you do your job right and communicate your findings and recommendations in ways that matter most to leadership, you can probably use just a few solid tips on how to refine your presentation content to avoid this issue in the future.
Key Takeaways Covered In This Post:
- Get to the point: shorten your presentation, and focus on highlighting the current challenge or problem, the insights that unlock a potential solution, and the recommended change or optimization.
- Put real numbers to your findings: present a current challenge or problem in terms of impact on the business in terms of lost revenue, lost profits, productivity, etc.
- Be conservative when estimating the financial benefits of recommended improvements. Even if you think a change will have significant impact, tamp down your enthusiasm a little and go for a more conservative estimate. Nothing can spoil your credibility than pushing for changes that leadership gets behind only to produce disappointing or lackluster results.
Get to the Point, and Don’t Bury the Lede
Executive leadership has limited time and attention to review your findings and recommendations with you, so the more effectively you can get to your point and drive home your well-founded insights and recommendations, the more likely you are to get their attention. You don’t necessarily have to reveal everything in the first slide, but if you start your presentation with something along the lines of, “Did you know that usability issues and technical errors are costing us an estimated $1.2 million per week? My Director and I have come up with five high priority improvements and fixes that will recapture 75% of that lost revenue.” Now you have someone’s attention.
Share the key insights and findings that back your conclusions, and provide an overview of the methodology you used to assess and estimate the impact of the issues on your business and also how you arrived at the financial impact of your improvements/fixes.
Use Real Numbers and Financial Impact to Demonstrate Importance & Priority
I’ve hinted at this above, but make sure to convey your findings and recommendations in ways that are relevant to leadership. Yes, where user experience and customer experience are concerned, be relentlessly customer centric in how you characterize problems, errors, and potential improvements. You should be thinking critically about how you are annoying or delighting your customers and what you can do to improve, but when it comes to conveying the impact on the business, always translate this into orders, revenue, profitability, or other metrics that matter to the business.
Manage Your Own Credibility While You’re at It: Be Conservative in Your Improvement Estimates
When estimating the potential positive impact of usability improvements, error fixes, or other recommendations try to be both realistic and conservative at the same time. Be super clear about the assumptions you’ve made (and why), the methodology you used to come up with your estimates.
Take some time to stress test and validate your estimates. You can use something like a Monte Carlo simulation to account for the amount of uncertainty you want to build into your estimates. Rather than presenting an improvement of straight 10% on a key performance metric, with a Monte Carlo simulation you set up a scenario, such as the following:
Add_to_Cart Rate: 5% Improvement +/- 10%: range of improvement 4.5% to 5.5%
Begin_Checkout Rate: 10% improvement +/- 20%: range of improvement 8% to 12%
Checkout_Completion Rate: 2.5% improvement +/- 10%: range of improvement 2.25% to 2.75%
When you set up your Monte Carlo simulation, you use a random number generator to simulate a thousand or ten thousand scenarios in which you randomly generate a value for each discrete metric that falls between your low and high value range. The simulation computes the outcome for each discrete simulation expressed in terms of transactions/conversions and revenue. Then you can create a histogram of the likeliest outcomes and decide if the investment is worth it considering the ‘likeliest’ of outcomes. It is a great way to visualize the risk inherent in following your recommendations if the worst case scenario turns out to be reality.
In other words, if all of your improvement estimates ended up being at the low end of your reasonable estimates, would it still make sense to invest in the changes?
Huge Caveat: don’t use Monte Carlo simulations (or any other methodologies) when you’re talking about straight up broken stuff. If you have broken user experiences and dead ends causing you to miss out on revenue and your customers to be frustrated, just fix them. The sooner, the better. Obviously, there may be some planning involved and prioritization with other deliverables, but broken stuff should take priority over improvements in most cases (with a few obvious exceptions when the scale of sub-optimal experiences vastly outweighs the percentage of users experiencing the broken element).
Summing it All Up
Remember to get to the point. Grab your audience’s attention by letting them know you are talking about insights and recommendations with real financial implications for your company.
Communicate your insights in such a way that your audience can quickly understand the following:
- What happened: i.e. what is data telling us that relates to performance, user experience, progress toward business objectives and KPIs, etc? Use visuals that clarify and illuminate key observations and trends, and translate these insights into financial impact.
- Why it happened: i.e. what about your campaigns, media mix, creative, user experience, customer experience, technical issues explains what the data is demonstrating?
- What to do: make one or more recommendations to improve performance in some key ways that can be tied to financial impact of some kind: customer retention/growth, transactions/revenue, efficiency/cost savings, etc.
Be transparent about all hypotheses, assumptions, estimates, and risks so that your stakeholders understand the complete context and can help to prioritize and refine follow-up actions based on the best information possible. Then take some action, and rinse and repeat with more robust support of your peers and leadership in round two.
