England was humiliated yesterday. Not by its football (soccer) team, or football ‘fans’, for once, but at the FIFA held unveiling of the countries chosen to host the football world cups for 2018 and 2022.
England pulled out all of the ‘big guns’ to help. The shiny new Prime Minister, a squeaky clean sporting royal in the perfect form of David Beckham and real royalty in the near-godlike form of HRH Prince William. Funny that when Vlad Putin couldn’t even be bothered to show up.
The rumours that we might win grew throughout the day, and, according to many observers, we also gave the best presentation. A quick peek suggests that the 4 key presentations from our competitors can be summarised thus:
- England- excellent combination of answering the questions set by FIFA and emotional stuff around the theme, ‘how football changed my life’.
- Russia (Lots of pretty girls and a huge budget for the event),
- Holland/Belgium ( Weird and disjointed) and
- Spain (a simple ramble through a few points that the speaker seemed to be making up on the spot). See here for a detailed view of the 4 presentations http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/at-least-england-win-the-prize-for-best-delivery-2149642.html.
The media seems confused by this ‘anomaly’. They moan that we had the best technical bid, we had the best costing and economic scheme and the panel gave us the best marks for the presentation and we lost? How can that be the case they ask? But anyone who has a real job in sales, or business development will understand only too well what happened. It’s simple.
All of us who do that kind of thing every day, as opposed to once in a century, know what it’s like to splash away time and piles of money pursuing seemingly attractive opportunities for new business from huge organisations, and failing, even when all seemed to be going so well. It’s a painful lesson that is soon learned by the successful and ignored by the corpses buried beneath our feet.
People tend to buy things from people they know, like and trust. And they are influenced by the ‘brand’ of the organisation bidding. In this case, the English bid team failed to convince FIFA officials that they were the right country to host the 2018 or 2022 world cups because they didn’t have strong enough relationships at the most senior levels of sporting politics, and the UK’s ‘brand’ is not as strong as Russia or Qatar. Simple really- The FIFA ‘Exco’ didn’t like us, trust us or believe that we were worth taking a chance on- no matter who we brought out to cheer for us.
Without trust, relationships or the right ‘brand’- the presentation is irrelevant.
This is a part of my Fit, Focus & Flair model. To be great, a presentation must be a perfect FIT for the situation; the content must have complete FOCUS on it’s purpose and message; and it must have enough FLAIR to stand out on the day, and in our memories. Learn more about developing your Fit, Focus and Flair.
