Aoifinn Devitt: Our next guest appeared in our 2021 Pride series. As we put the finishing touches on our fourth Pride series for 2024, we wanted to ask her back, but to talk business this time about her razor-sharp sales strategy that has a record for sealing the deal. Hear what she knows about recall and what following up a day, a week, and a month later can do to bring the message home. I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the our fourth 50 Faces podcast Pride special, in which we are celebrating the career journeys of LGBTQ+ professionals. I’m joined today by Nikki Take, who featured in our first Pride series in 2021 and shared her story as a prominent transgender advocate, inspirational speaker, and coach. We’ve watched Nikki’s presence grow and thrive over the last 3 years. She posts frequent inspirational content on LinkedIn, and we want to ask her back onto the podcast to share some of that wisdom, among other things. Welcome back, Nicky. Thanks for joining me today.
Nicci Take: Pleasure. Thanks.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, can you just update us on your current role now? And we’ll talk about some of the content you’ve been sharing on LinkedIn, some coaching for all of us.
Nicci Take: Sure. So I think last time we met, I ran my own business. I was a kind of independent consultant. I had a very small handful of clients, but I wasn’t an employee. And I think the biggest change is I now am an employee. And so I’ve joined MMC. Marshall McLennan as Mercer’s global head coach. My remit is to build a global team of deal coaches that will drop on deals over $5 million total operating revenue, any line of business, any geography, and build the team that can help us get those win rates up to industry-leading instead of where they are, which is probably average at the moment. And so that’s it. I joined officially as a partner in the business in July. So we’re kind of 8, 9 months in and it feels very much like a startup, 80-hour weeks and lots of travel and kind of pinging around the world. But I am actually thoroughly enjoying myself.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, it shows through your LinkedIn content very much. And I’m also fascinated by what a deal coach does. And now it links together to a lot of what you, for example, you, you help with effective presentations and audience connection, et cetera. Can you walk us through what a deal coach does and maybe talk us through some of the tips you might give?
Nicci Take: So we’ll start at the back end, right? So the back end is the presentation. I like to talk about the, the last 15 minutes of the sales cycle. When you are sat in front of the client trying to persuade the client to do the project and then do the project with you, that presentation or finalist presentation is the most important 15 minutes, right? And how you show up, what you say, how you do it, how you perform can all make a massive influence. And I’ve coached those for 30 years, and that’s been my bread and butter, is to come in and help people make those 15 minutes effective. I’ve kind of supervised 20,000 of them. I’ve kind of managed 6,000, which, if you think about it, that sounds a lot. I mean, 30 years is a long time for doing something, and 6,000 is a lot of pitches. I mean, it’s kind of 2 a week for 30 years gets you up to that kind of number. And we win, you know, if I’m coaching them, Before transition, we were winning 72-73% of the deals that I coached. Post-transition, it’s more like 78-79%, although it’s a much smaller number, but it’s growing. But I’m more effective as a coach as a woman than I was as a man. So that’s the first bit— is, well, I say it’s the first, it’s the last bit because it’s the last bit of the sales cycle. But in this role, we’re really coaching 3 other things as well. So if you come back Before the finalist presentation, there’s usually a written submission, a response to tender, some kind of proposal document that has to go in. And on the whole, most people make the same mistakes in that that they do in the finalist presentation. Like they have a tendency to show up and tell people what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it and not make the argument for this is why you should do the project, this is why you should do the project with us. And so that manifests itself as helping the team figure out the answers to those questions and maybe putting that into the design thinking for the solution so that the solution is actually designed around solving the client’s problems, solving the client’s problem in a way that makes them want to choose us. But practically speaking, it’s helping them write the executive summary so that the executive summary doesn’t summarize what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it, but summarizes why the client should do it and why the client should do it with us. And so that’s the second to last piece. But deals are really won really early on in the sales cycle. And so where we really have an impact is when people get into touch with us 18 months out from an RFP and that we’re working with the client team and maybe with the client to help shape the problem, shape the solution, shape the interaction so that by the time we get to writing the executive summary and doing the pitch, We pretty much already won the deal because we’ve been working on it for so long. The client’s helping us and we’re embedded into it so that by the time you get to the end, the paperwork is a formality. And we know that we can double win rates in the last 15 minutes by getting that bit right. We can almost double them again by getting the written submission right, and then we can almost double it again to 70 to 80% win rates if we’re in early shaping the deal. Then underpinning all those 3 things is what I call player coaching. And so, you know, we have in the business maybe 2,000 people that are partner level or principal level in the business who have to pitch for work. And so we’re trying to create a community around the subset of those that want to learn how to win, calling it Partners That Win, and work on their individual skills to help them think about solutioning right, writing executive summaries right, doing the pitching right, getting the presentation skills and all the rest of it right. And so we work with them on multiple deals over multiple years to improve their skill set so that they get better at it. And the idea there is principally I’m helping them on the big deals, but they’re working on lots of little deals. And the stuff that they’re learning from us on the big deals is directly relatable to the small deals. You still should approach them in the same way, and your success rates will increase if you do the right things. So it’s player coaching, which for me is the most important bit, which is an interesting change because my relationship with organizations used to be I was a consultant that was brought in to help you win the big pitch, and I would get paid on results. And now, like, I’m here in my head, this is my last gig, right? So I’m 56. I know I don’t look it, it’s makeup, it’s amazing. But I’ve got 10 years left really. And the idea is to be here in 10 years, but having completely shaped the way the organization thinks about going after business and actually goes after and presents completely differently. So I’m playing a long game. I don’t need them to win everything right now. Like I need them to learn more this year. Than last year, than the year before. If I can make all of these 2,000 partners that pitch a little bit better each year, eventually they’ll become 2,000 partners that win in 5 years’ time.
Aoifinn Devitt: And so it continues. Well, I wanna go into some of your specific pieces of wisdom because I think sometimes they seem very simple and like they should be obvious, but I would imagine they’re less obvious because not everyone is winning all the time. And one of the recent ones you put is people buy based on what they remember. Tell us a bit more about that. It seems obvious, but obviously it’s not.
Nicci Take: So if you imagine you, you finalize presentation, right, they’ve got an hour, sometimes longer. Like, I’m coaching one at the moment where they’ve got 3 hours in front of the client. But generally speaking, people are going to make a fairly big decision. They’ll read the RFP and they’ll invite you in and 2 of your competitors, and they’ll give you an hour or 90 minutes to come and explain what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it. The amount of information they can take on board if it’s done really well. Like, if you understand the science, you understand how to get people’s attention, you understand how to get them to remember information, if you’re really, really good at it, you might be able to get 60-70% of your content remembered by the audience. And there was research done by a guy called Ebbinghaus in 1883 who showed that— it’s called the— he’s German, so it was called the Curve of Forgetting. So obviously in English we call it the forgetting curve, but it’s really depressing. Like it’s 75% of information over the first sleep, 75% over the next week, and 75% over the next month is forgotten. And then 75% again the next week and then 75%. So by the time you get to 3 weeks after you made a pitch, they can barely remember your name and what you proposed, let alone the reasons for buying off you. So that’s the first problem. The second problem is the bedrock of memory is repetition. Like, you remember that which is repeated. It’s optimized around 5 to 6 times. Like, if you hear something 5 to 6 times, you can probably remember it. If you actively make a decision to learn something, that’s probably optimum as well. Like, if you want to learn your credit card number, go buy 5 different things in the next hour and you can probably remember your credit card number. So 5 to 6 times repetition of something and you remember it. So if I’m a buyer and I’ve asked you to tell me what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it to solve my problem, and I spend an hour listening to you, and then straight away I spend an hour listening to your competitor, and then straight away an hour listening to the next one, like what I remember are all the things that you all said. And so if you all said it needs this, it needs a PMO and it needs some process, it needs some technology, it needs some people, I don’t see the differences. Like, I remember the similarities. And so if I don’t evaluate it there and then, I evaluate it tomorrow or worse next week or worse in 3 weeks’ time. I’m trying to recall what I can remember from these 3 presentations, and it’s not a lot. And what I do remember is probably what all 3 people said was important. I don’t remember the differences. I remember all the similarities. And so when I’m making a purchasing decision, It’s a commodity. I can’t remember the value in dealing with anybody. It all seems the same. It all feels like they can all do it. It’s down to how much are they going to charge and who do I want to work with, which is a commodity. You’re in that relationship price space. And so you’re going to get into a conversation where we say, I really want to deal with you. I can really like you, but you’re out on price. If you can bring it down by 2 basis points, I’ll give you my assets kind of thing. You fail to establish that there’s more value in dealing with you than somebody else. So to my mind, it’s all about memory. The trick for sales is number one, how do I get them to pay attention? Then when I’ve got them paying attention, how do I get them to remember the reasons for buying the project and the reasons for buying off me? And then how do I get them to recall that 3 weeks later when they’re sat in a room trying to make the decision? And that’s the cognitive psychology of what I do. Which is, you know, the memory stuff. The behavioral stuff is almost the same. People won’t remember what you say, but they’ll remember how you make them feel, and they’ll often make an irrational emotional buying decision and then post-decision rationalize.
Aoifinn Devitt: Really interesting. And you had some very practical suggestions in one of your LinkedIn posts, which is regarding following up within 24 hours with one of those memorable whatever takeaways you want to remember, and then a further follow-up within 30 days, I think.
Nicci Take: So the mantra we use is, because we want to make everything memorable, a day, a week, a month. And that’s a day, a week, a month isn’t just built into the sales piece, it’s built into my team, which is we call the pilot team. It’s built into our, our operational procedures. Everything is a day, a week, a month. So every time we have a meeting with somebody, During the meeting, one of us will take notes of what was discussed, what was agreed. We call that decision log and what actions need to happen. And that’s an action log. And then we email everybody in the meeting 24 hours after, not immediately, right? They have to have had a sleep. So the science says that once they’ve gone into REM sleep and laid down the memories, that what you need to do is rebuild the connections. And so that everyone will get an email from us after asleep, it’ll be in their inbox 9:00 next morning. And in that inbox it says, here’s the meeting, this is the actions, this is the decisions, and then here’s the notes at the bottom, all on one page because nobody scrolls down, right? What that does is repeat everything a week later. So on the week anniversary of the meeting, another email goes out. If there isn’t already a meeting set up, a 15-minute touchpoint, which sometimes we’ll do, there’ll be another email that goes out that has an update status on the actions. And it goes out exactly a week, and then there’s another one that goes out exactly a month. So every meeting we have kicks off a day, a week, a month action, and that does a number of things. The first thing is it keeps up the counter behind whatever project we’re on. You know, everyone knows they’re going to get this day, a week, a month kind of flow of information from us. And then we’re practicing what we preach because that’s the flow of information that should happen with our clients. So when we’re doing the deal coaching, which is helping the team kind of focus. We’re doing the same thing, like we’re encouraging them to talk to their clients a day, a week, a month. If they have a meeting with the client, they should do the same thing we do with them. Follow up after one night, follow up after a week, follow up after a month. And then if you keep that day, a week, a month mantra behind, what you’re doing each time is you’re spiking recall on whatever the significant messages are. And from a sales point of view, yes, the value proposition. Whatever that is, the simpler, faster, better, or, you know, whatever the value proposition is, is in the subject line and gets repeated today, a week, a month.
Aoifinn Devitt: I know it’s very fascinating and I’m sure there’s some obviously long decision cycles where you have to keep going back a month, a month, a month. But really fascinating to have that sort of structure in place. And among other tips, we don’t have to go into each one in detail, but I would refer listeners to your Corporate Drag Queen Chronicle and your set of notes, but also not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. In terms of a presentation pitch and equally paying attention to your fellow presenters so that one doesn’t end up with a set of contradictions. But anything else you want to leave us with just in terms of word of wisdom or any additional insight? It’s been a great conversation.
Nicci Take: I guess if I had one piece of advice to people who are pitching or giving presentations, it’s to remember that presentations are not about the presenter. They’re about the audience. And so more often than not, we think we need to demonstrate to them that we’re the expert, and so we think about what we want to say and what we want to show them. And you’re much more successful if you sit and think, right, what do I need this audience to do? What do they need to see and hear in order to do that? And think of it from the audience’s point of view. And if you give them what they need and what they want, you’re much more likely to have a successful presentation and end up with what you want. And so it’s always about the audience, not the presenter.
Aoifinn Devitt: It is. That is excellent advice. But this is a podcast that is about the guest, and this has been about the wonderful Nicky Taitt, who has been just as contagiously hilarious in this podcast as you were 3 years ago. But now it’s been added to with all the wonderful actionable pieces of wisdom that you’ve shared with us. So thank you so much for coming here and sharing your insights with us for a second time.
Nicci Take: Pleasure. Thanks, Aoifinn.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring people on their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guests.
Aoifinn Devitt: Our next guest appeared in our 2021 Pride series. As we put the finishing touches on our fourth Pride series for 2024, we wanted to ask her back, but to talk business this time about her razor-sharp sales strategy that has a record for sealing the deal. Hear what she knows about recall and what following up a day, a week, and a month later can do to bring the message home. I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the our fourth 50 Faces podcast Pride special, in which we are celebrating the career journeys of LGBTQ+ professionals. I’m joined today by Nikki Take, who featured in our first Pride series in 2021 and shared her story as a prominent transgender advocate, inspirational speaker, and coach. We’ve watched Nikki’s presence grow and thrive over the last 3 years. She posts frequent inspirational content on LinkedIn, and we want to ask her back onto the podcast to share some of that wisdom, among other things. Welcome back, Nicky. Thanks for joining me today.
Nicci Take: Pleasure. Thanks.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, can you just update us on your current role now? And we’ll talk about some of the content you’ve been sharing on LinkedIn, some coaching for all of us.
Nicci Take: Sure. So I think last time we met, I ran my own business. I was a kind of independent consultant. I had a very small handful of clients, but I wasn’t an employee. And I think the biggest change is I now am an employee. And so I’ve joined MMC. Marshall McLennan as Mercer’s global head coach. My remit is to build a global team of deal coaches that will drop on deals over $5 million total operating revenue, any line of business, any geography, and build the team that can help us get those win rates up to industry-leading instead of where they are, which is probably average at the moment. And so that’s it. I joined officially as a partner in the business in July. So we’re kind of 8, 9 months in and it feels very much like a startup, 80-hour weeks and lots of travel and kind of pinging around the world. But I am actually thoroughly enjoying myself.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, it shows through your LinkedIn content very much. And I’m also fascinated by what a deal coach does. And now it links together to a lot of what you, for example, you, you help with effective presentations and audience connection, et cetera. Can you walk us through what a deal coach does and maybe talk us through some of the tips you might give?
Nicci Take: So we’ll start at the back end, right? So the back end is the presentation. I like to talk about the, the last 15 minutes of the sales cycle. When you are sat in front of the client trying to persuade the client to do the project and then do the project with you, that presentation or finalist presentation is the most important 15 minutes, right? And how you show up, what you say, how you do it, how you perform can all make a massive influence. And I’ve coached those for 30 years, and that’s been my bread and butter, is to come in and help people make those 15 minutes effective. I’ve kind of supervised 20,000 of them. I’ve kind of managed 6,000, which, if you think about it, that sounds a lot. I mean, 30 years is a long time for doing something, and 6,000 is a lot of pitches. I mean, it’s kind of 2 a week for 30 years gets you up to that kind of number. And we win, you know, if I’m coaching them, Before transition, we were winning 72-73% of the deals that I coached. Post-transition, it’s more like 78-79%, although it’s a much smaller number, but it’s growing. But I’m more effective as a coach as a woman than I was as a man. So that’s the first bit— is, well, I say it’s the first, it’s the last bit because it’s the last bit of the sales cycle. But in this role, we’re really coaching 3 other things as well. So if you come back Before the finalist presentation, there’s usually a written submission, a response to tender, some kind of proposal document that has to go in. And on the whole, most people make the same mistakes in that that they do in the finalist presentation. Like they have a tendency to show up and tell people what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it and not make the argument for this is why you should do the project, this is why you should do the project with us. And so that manifests itself as helping the team figure out the answers to those questions and maybe putting that into the design thinking for the solution so that the solution is actually designed around solving the client’s problems, solving the client’s problem in a way that makes them want to choose us. But practically speaking, it’s helping them write the executive summary so that the executive summary doesn’t summarize what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it, but summarizes why the client should do it and why the client should do it with us. And so that’s the second to last piece. But deals are really won really early on in the sales cycle. And so where we really have an impact is when people get into touch with us 18 months out from an RFP and that we’re working with the client team and maybe with the client to help shape the problem, shape the solution, shape the interaction so that by the time we get to writing the executive summary and doing the pitch, We pretty much already won the deal because we’ve been working on it for so long. The client’s helping us and we’re embedded into it so that by the time you get to the end, the paperwork is a formality. And we know that we can double win rates in the last 15 minutes by getting that bit right. We can almost double them again by getting the written submission right, and then we can almost double it again to 70 to 80% win rates if we’re in early shaping the deal. Then underpinning all those 3 things is what I call player coaching. And so, you know, we have in the business maybe 2,000 people that are partner level or principal level in the business who have to pitch for work. And so we’re trying to create a community around the subset of those that want to learn how to win, calling it Partners That Win, and work on their individual skills to help them think about solutioning right, writing executive summaries right, doing the pitching right, getting the presentation skills and all the rest of it right. And so we work with them on multiple deals over multiple years to improve their skill set so that they get better at it. And the idea there is principally I’m helping them on the big deals, but they’re working on lots of little deals. And the stuff that they’re learning from us on the big deals is directly relatable to the small deals. You still should approach them in the same way, and your success rates will increase if you do the right things. So it’s player coaching, which for me is the most important bit, which is an interesting change because my relationship with organizations used to be I was a consultant that was brought in to help you win the big pitch, and I would get paid on results. And now, like, I’m here in my head, this is my last gig, right? So I’m 56. I know I don’t look it, it’s makeup, it’s amazing. But I’ve got 10 years left really. And the idea is to be here in 10 years, but having completely shaped the way the organization thinks about going after business and actually goes after and presents completely differently. So I’m playing a long game. I don’t need them to win everything right now. Like I need them to learn more this year. Than last year, than the year before. If I can make all of these 2,000 partners that pitch a little bit better each year, eventually they’ll become 2,000 partners that win in 5 years’ time.
Aoifinn Devitt: And so it continues. Well, I wanna go into some of your specific pieces of wisdom because I think sometimes they seem very simple and like they should be obvious, but I would imagine they’re less obvious because not everyone is winning all the time. And one of the recent ones you put is people buy based on what they remember. Tell us a bit more about that. It seems obvious, but obviously it’s not.
Nicci Take: So if you imagine you, you finalize presentation, right, they’ve got an hour, sometimes longer. Like, I’m coaching one at the moment where they’ve got 3 hours in front of the client. But generally speaking, people are going to make a fairly big decision. They’ll read the RFP and they’ll invite you in and 2 of your competitors, and they’ll give you an hour or 90 minutes to come and explain what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it. The amount of information they can take on board if it’s done really well. Like, if you understand the science, you understand how to get people’s attention, you understand how to get them to remember information, if you’re really, really good at it, you might be able to get 60-70% of your content remembered by the audience. And there was research done by a guy called Ebbinghaus in 1883 who showed that— it’s called the— he’s German, so it was called the Curve of Forgetting. So obviously in English we call it the forgetting curve, but it’s really depressing. Like it’s 75% of information over the first sleep, 75% over the next week, and 75% over the next month is forgotten. And then 75% again the next week and then 75%. So by the time you get to 3 weeks after you made a pitch, they can barely remember your name and what you proposed, let alone the reasons for buying off you. So that’s the first problem. The second problem is the bedrock of memory is repetition. Like, you remember that which is repeated. It’s optimized around 5 to 6 times. Like, if you hear something 5 to 6 times, you can probably remember it. If you actively make a decision to learn something, that’s probably optimum as well. Like, if you want to learn your credit card number, go buy 5 different things in the next hour and you can probably remember your credit card number. So 5 to 6 times repetition of something and you remember it. So if I’m a buyer and I’ve asked you to tell me what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it to solve my problem, and I spend an hour listening to you, and then straight away I spend an hour listening to your competitor, and then straight away an hour listening to the next one, like what I remember are all the things that you all said. And so if you all said it needs this, it needs a PMO and it needs some process, it needs some technology, it needs some people, I don’t see the differences. Like, I remember the similarities. And so if I don’t evaluate it there and then, I evaluate it tomorrow or worse next week or worse in 3 weeks’ time. I’m trying to recall what I can remember from these 3 presentations, and it’s not a lot. And what I do remember is probably what all 3 people said was important. I don’t remember the differences. I remember all the similarities. And so when I’m making a purchasing decision, It’s a commodity. I can’t remember the value in dealing with anybody. It all seems the same. It all feels like they can all do it. It’s down to how much are they going to charge and who do I want to work with, which is a commodity. You’re in that relationship price space. And so you’re going to get into a conversation where we say, I really want to deal with you. I can really like you, but you’re out on price. If you can bring it down by 2 basis points, I’ll give you my assets kind of thing. You fail to establish that there’s more value in dealing with you than somebody else. So to my mind, it’s all about memory. The trick for sales is number one, how do I get them to pay attention? Then when I’ve got them paying attention, how do I get them to remember the reasons for buying the project and the reasons for buying off me? And then how do I get them to recall that 3 weeks later when they’re sat in a room trying to make the decision? And that’s the cognitive psychology of what I do. Which is, you know, the memory stuff. The behavioral stuff is almost the same. People won’t remember what you say, but they’ll remember how you make them feel, and they’ll often make an irrational emotional buying decision and then post-decision rationalize.
Aoifinn Devitt: Really interesting. And you had some very practical suggestions in one of your LinkedIn posts, which is regarding following up within 24 hours with one of those memorable whatever takeaways you want to remember, and then a further follow-up within 30 days, I think.
Nicci Take: So the mantra we use is, because we want to make everything memorable, a day, a week, a month. And that’s a day, a week, a month isn’t just built into the sales piece, it’s built into my team, which is we call the pilot team. It’s built into our, our operational procedures. Everything is a day, a week, a month. So every time we have a meeting with somebody, During the meeting, one of us will take notes of what was discussed, what was agreed. We call that decision log and what actions need to happen. And that’s an action log. And then we email everybody in the meeting 24 hours after, not immediately, right? They have to have had a sleep. So the science says that once they’ve gone into REM sleep and laid down the memories, that what you need to do is rebuild the connections. And so that everyone will get an email from us after asleep, it’ll be in their inbox 9:00 next morning. And in that inbox it says, here’s the meeting, this is the actions, this is the decisions, and then here’s the notes at the bottom, all on one page because nobody scrolls down, right? What that does is repeat everything a week later. So on the week anniversary of the meeting, another email goes out. If there isn’t already a meeting set up, a 15-minute touchpoint, which sometimes we’ll do, there’ll be another email that goes out that has an update status on the actions. And it goes out exactly a week, and then there’s another one that goes out exactly a month. So every meeting we have kicks off a day, a week, a month action, and that does a number of things. The first thing is it keeps up the counter behind whatever project we’re on. You know, everyone knows they’re going to get this day, a week, a month kind of flow of information from us. And then we’re practicing what we preach because that’s the flow of information that should happen with our clients. So when we’re doing the deal coaching, which is helping the team kind of focus. We’re doing the same thing, like we’re encouraging them to talk to their clients a day, a week, a month. If they have a meeting with the client, they should do the same thing we do with them. Follow up after one night, follow up after a week, follow up after a month. And then if you keep that day, a week, a month mantra behind, what you’re doing each time is you’re spiking recall on whatever the significant messages are. And from a sales point of view, yes, the value proposition. Whatever that is, the simpler, faster, better, or, you know, whatever the value proposition is, is in the subject line and gets repeated today, a week, a month.
Aoifinn Devitt: I know it’s very fascinating and I’m sure there’s some obviously long decision cycles where you have to keep going back a month, a month, a month. But really fascinating to have that sort of structure in place. And among other tips, we don’t have to go into each one in detail, but I would refer listeners to your Corporate Drag Queen Chronicle and your set of notes, but also not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. In terms of a presentation pitch and equally paying attention to your fellow presenters so that one doesn’t end up with a set of contradictions. But anything else you want to leave us with just in terms of word of wisdom or any additional insight? It’s been a great conversation.
Nicci Take: I guess if I had one piece of advice to people who are pitching or giving presentations, it’s to remember that presentations are not about the presenter. They’re about the audience. And so more often than not, we think we need to demonstrate to them that we’re the expert, and so we think about what we want to say and what we want to show them. And you’re much more successful if you sit and think, right, what do I need this audience to do? What do they need to see and hear in order to do that? And think of it from the audience’s point of view. And if you give them what they need and what they want, you’re much more likely to have a successful presentation and end up with what you want. And so it’s always about the audience, not the presenter.
Aoifinn Devitt: It is. That is excellent advice. But this is a podcast that is about the guest, and this has been about the wonderful Nicky Taitt, who has been just as contagiously hilarious in this podcast as you were 3 years ago. But now it’s been added to with all the wonderful actionable pieces of wisdom that you’ve shared with us. So thank you so much for coming here and sharing your insights with us for a second time.
Nicci Take: Pleasure. Thanks, Aoifinn.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring people on their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guests.
