How Marketing and Public Speaking Are Connected 

What is the cost to your bottom line when it goes wrong?

Have you ever got up to present a company presentation, looked at the room and thought, OMG! I am about to wake up the audience?

We have all been there. Sitting in a meeting listening to the numbers, the product roadmap or the latest company update, nodding along and looking engaged while our minds are actually out of the window, thinking about everything else we need to get done.

Now think about the cost. How many people are in that room? What is an hour of their time worth? What could they be doing instead? And if you are Head of Sales, what happens when that same lack of engagement walks into a customer presentation?

Marketing and public speaking are connected

We often treat marketing and public speaking as two completely separate things. Marketing creates the brand, the messaging, the campaigns and the presentation decks. The sales team, armed with a wealth of information, goes out on the road and presents to customers in meetings and at events. Then the technical team gets their turn to explain the products, and leadership steps in to talk about the strategy. But your audience does not see those departments separately. They see your company.

Your presentation is part of your brand. It is not just the slides. It is the person standing at the front, what they say, how they say it, the energy they bring into the room and whether the audience actually understands why they should care.

You can have the best positioning in the world, a brilliant website and a beautifully crafted marketing campaign, but if the person representing your company cannot communicate the same message, there is a disconnect.

And your audience notices.

We have all seen the brand guide

This is where I think marketing sometimes gets a bit of a raw deal.

We create the visual brand guide. We define the key messages and straplines. We create the decks, checking the wording, making sure the messages make sense and are appropriate for the audience. We agonise over the right HEX and RAL colours, make sure the logo is noticeable but does not distract and, of course, make sure nobody has stretched it until it looks like it has been pulled through a letterbox.

Then someone outside marketing and HQ needs to present the company and nobody really knows what they are supposed to say. So they create their own key messages, use their own language and, before you know it, you have another version of the company story.

You would be surprised how many companies either do not have clear messaging that the wider business can actually use, or have a brand guide sitting at the bottom of the marketing department’s drawer while sales, product and the wider business have never seen it.

Sure, someone might have mentioned it during induction. “We have a brand guide that covers everything.”

And then induction finishes, everyone gets on with their actual job and the brand guide disappears into the ether.

Meanwhile, sales has a presentation deck from HQ with goodness knows how many slides. Product has its own technical language. Marketing has its carefully crafted messaging. And everyone is expected to bring all of that together when they stand in front of a customer.

That is where things start to go wrong.

Death by slides

We have all sat through it. The numbers, the product features, the roadmap, more numbers, a graph nobody can read and a presenter trying to get through 47 slides because someone somewhere decided they all needed to be included.

But what does the audience actually need to know?

How do we make the information relevant to them? How do we match our energy to the room? How do we make something technical interesting? How do we wake up an audience at a conference who has just gone through death by PowerPoint, or today’s slightly more modern version, death by slides?

And how do we make sure the person presenting is still on message?

Because this is not just about whether the presentation looks good. It is about whether it works.

If your audience leaves knowing everything about your product but still cannot tell you why they need it, I would suggest we have missed something.

When presentation training looks like a frivolous expense

This is where things get interesting.

When marketing asks to bring in an external company to run presentation training, it can be very easy to see it as frivolous. A nice to have. Something we can do if there is a bit of budget left over.

I completely understand why someone looking at a spreadsheet might question it.

But sit a group of people in a room and actually work through how they communicate the company, and something happens.

Magic happens.

Communication flows, thoughts become one and people start listening to each other. The technical team understands what sales needs. Sales understands what marketing is trying to achieve. Marketing hears what the experts actually need to communicate.

People start challenging the language they have been using for years. They start asking whether the customer actually understands the terminology. They start thinking about the person sitting on the other side of the table rather than simply delivering the information they have been given.

And suddenly, people are not just presenting the company.

They understand it.

That is where genuine brand unity starts.

What does that have to do with your bottom line?

Quite a lot actually.

Think about the hours lost in meetings where people are not engaged. Think about the customer presentation that did not quite land. Think about the sales opportunity where the customer still did not understand the proposition.

Think about the technical expert who knows absolutely everything about the product but cannot get the audience interested in it. Think about the sales team using different messages. Think about the leadership team saying something completely different again.

None of this necessarily appears on a marketing budget line. But it is costing you money. It is costing you time. It is costing you opportunities. It can slow down sales conversations and make the buying process harder than it needs to be. And sometimes it is costing you customers.

This is why I think Financial Controllers and Heads of Sales need to look at marketing a little differently. Marketing is not simply a cost centre producing campaigns and brochures. Good marketing creates the framework that helps the whole business communicate. It helps sales explain the proposition. It helps technical teams make complex information understandable. It gives leadership a clear narrative. It creates consistency across the customer journey.

And it helps people understand not just what the business does, but why it matters.

This is where marketing earns its place 

Marketing is not there to make things look pretty. Yes, we care about the logo. Yes, we care about the colours. Yes, we care about whether the presentation looks like it actually belongs to the company.

But that is not the point, the point is consistency, clarity, unity and making sure the business sounds like one business rather than twelve different departments all telling slightly different stories. Sometimes that means marketing needs to get everyone in a room and say, “Right. What are we actually trying to say?”

That conversation can be worth far more than another campaign.

Because when you get it right, it looks effortless, it looks like the marketing team are not doing very much.

Which is usually a very good sign that they are doing a bloody good job.

The customer simply sees a business that looks, sounds and feels joined up, they understand the proposition, they understand the value and more importantly they understand why they should care, invets time and ultimatly buy, which in turn supports your sales team. 

So, before you cut the marketing budget… 

Before you look at the marketing budget and decide that presentation training, brand guidelines or communication support are nice to have, look a little harder at the real cost.

How much time are you losing? How many meetings are not working? How many presentations are not landing? How many sales conversations are harder than they need to be? How often is your business telling the same story in five different ways? How much time is your sales team spending explaining something that should already be clear?

And what is that costing you?

Because marketing and public speaking are connected. Your people are part of your brand. Your presentations are part of your marketing. Your sales team is part of your customer experience.

When all of those things are aligned, you create something much bigger than a good presentation. You create a business that knows what it is saying, knows who it is saying it to and knows why it matters.

When they are disconnected, your audience notices. Eventually, your sales figures do too.

And then you will be scratching your head wondering why.