The Presentation Agency

A presentation startup built to help presenters make more connections with their audience hit the news feeds last week, catching my attention. Called Present Now, the company promises to reduce the cost of customer acquisition and increase the ROI of speaking events through a smartphone form process. As the site’s slogan goes:

Your Presentation + Audience Smart Phones = New Connections

The simplicity and promise almost sold me on the product, but from a technical perspective Present Now is really built for individuals without a web presence. After all, what the startup offers is a mobile compatible web form hosted on Present.me.

To capture new leads, the presenter tells audience members to go to present.me and enter a code (e.g. the presenter’s name). After that the audience member fills out their personal contact information so the presenter can follow up with them at a later date.

Smart? Totally. Present Now drives home the importance of building the information capture process into every presentation, especially when presenting to people you don’t already know. A lot of presenters throw their email on the intro slide and expect people to contact them, but we all know this hardly ever works. Present Now reminds us that we must formalize the process so we can turn our audience into customers.

Until Present Now can offer a more seamless process though (e.g. the Bump of presentations), most presenters are probably better off simply hosting a mobile compatible web form on their own server. Whichever route makes most sense for each individual, there’s no questioning the power of building a process for increasing leads and following up.