360 Degree Presentations #2: MailPoet’s Kim Gjerstad Credits The Team

At WordCamp Europe 2013, MailPoet’s Kim Gjerstad got started on the right foot, establishing audience rapport by opening with a joke. The opening joke is a classic, important way of getting presentations rolling, but there’s more housekeeping to attend to and Kim moved right into a few seconds where he acknowledged the rest of the MailPoet team; there were a handful of folks pushing MailPoet toward its market position, and Mr. Gjerstad is one of the partners.

But the team thing goes farther than merely being nice, or inclusive. Yes, it’s important that you make your coworkers, or bosses, or charges, or all of the above feel good whenever you have the chance—and there’s no better opportunity for that than when speaking in public. But talking about your team is also an opportunity to display humility and simultaneously state for the record that your company has some heft, and does business process planning and business process management.

Team credit is also a secondary opportunity to establish audience rapport; Kim Gjerstad credits the rest of the MailPoet team effortlessly, and in just a few seconds signals his willingness and desire to share … a solid prelude to the meat of his presentation; you believe Kim and in his honesty, so when he tells you about MailPoet’s operational guts later, you believe that, as well:

Compare this, to the way we credit The Answer Guy Team. Our on-line team page serves a whole different purpose; I’m telling you that I’m in charge (I am The Answer Guy, after all 😉 ), and that the folks who do work here are valuable enough to Answer Guy Central’s mission (and generally not equity holders) that providing easy public access to their identities and contact information doesn’t suit our always-available public-facing business process standards.

In other words: presentations and performances serve a (mostly) different purpose than dry, fact-based documents. And Kim Gjerstad performs effortlessly in his 360 Degree Marketing Presentation for MailPoet.

We’ll be talking about how MailPoet decided the right time and the best business process for expanding their team a bit later. For now, if team building business process is feeling like a problem, you can contact me here.