Situation and Mission

The US Marines use the Five Paragraph Order to communicate verbal battle orders with an acronym SMEAC.

• Situation
• Mission
• Execution
• Administration and Logistics
• Command and Signal (Communications)

For more information see wikipedia

I’ve also used it a lot for non-military planning and I believe we can improve our presentations by using it as a guide. The last three points of the acronym are fairly straightforward and a lot has been written about them, but not so much on the first two.

Situation

The military analyses the enemy forces and our own. When you are giving a presentation to make a sale or to convince a person or a group to take a course of action, do you analyse those people? For instance:

• Who will be there?

• What are their names and positions?

• Have you met them? Do you need to before the presentation?

• What is their role in the organisation?

• What is their role in the course of action or sale? Are they the final decision maker, or do they have user or technical roles that can say no?

• How influential is each of them?

• What is the personal win for each of them if your proposal is approved?

• Is there a downside for them?

• What message does each need to receive?

• Can these messages be grouped?

• What is each’s likely course of action?

So before you’ve even looked at the structure of your presentation, you need you analyse your audience in detail.

Mission (Aim)

The mission or aim is an short unambiguous statement of what you wish to achieve, and answers the questions “Who, What, Where, When, and Why”. For example:

“To convince the Board to allocate $5 million for development of new markets in Asia to increase profits by 4%”.

Before you commit to the aim, you need to test it as follows:

• Is it the best I can do?

• Does I have a reasonable chance of succeeding?

• If it succeeds will the result be favourable?

If the answer is negative to any of these questions, review your aim.

Semper Fi

I was first alerted to this myth by Rolene Liebenberg and found the video on Lisa Braithwaite’s excellent site Speak Shmeak. Trainers, especially presentation trainers keep pushing the myth that only 7% of meaning comes from the words we use and quote Albert Mehrabian as the scientific source. He never said this and the video explains what he really meant.

Note the emphasis on “You”. Another brilliant presentation

These guys will do me out of a job!

Click here for pdf

I was inspired to put this worksheet together from a discussion thread on linekdin. to quote the thread owner Tony Robinson Sales trainer, coach and consultant ;

What is it that you really sell?

Some years ago a Harley Davidson marketing executive, when asked this question, famously said..”what we sell is the ability for a 43 year old accountant to dress in black leather and ride into small towns and have people be afraid of him.”

Harley Davidson don’t sell motorcycles….they sell dreams and lifestyle…and they have been very successful at that!

Similary shovel salespersons sell holes, not shovels, so what is it you are really selling the customer?

You can clarify your offer using the worksheet. Start from the left column, your product, service or solution, plus the features and benefits you think th ecustomer may be interested in- no surprises there, it’s what most sales people have been trained to do.

Then go to the customer’s side. What is their situation? How can they gain pleasure or avoid pain or both- the two drivers for purchasing.

For example, why would anyone buy an Armani suit? They’re very expensive and made of ultrafine marino woolen fabric that wears faster than a more sturdy suit. One reason may be to gain pleasure – to have a feeling of lightness, revelling in the craftsmaship of a finely woven garment that others can’t afford. Another reason may be to avoid pain, the pain of humiliation as your merchant banker friends snigger behind your back at your lack of big city savvy.

It’s the alignment of your product benefits to the cusotmer’s pain or pleasure that helps the sales process, so it deserves some thinking time. Column 3. Then you need to decide how you are going to present it.

I hope the worksheet helps. I’m going to use it in my next Sales 101 course – thanks for the inspiration, Tony