Paying Attention To Detail

When you work with really smart people, you learn a lot. This is especially true when you work with smart clients. Great clients help improve your game. We were on a call with a prospective client, and were planning a dry run for a proposal walkthrough. This was a preparation call to present to their executive team. We had scheduled 90 minutes for the dry run, and I did not expect the team to take the entire time for the presentation. I had anticipated only about 30 minutes since we only had about 12 slides in total.

Overall, I liked how prepared this prospective client was. In one of the slides referenced below, we had used bullet points. Can you spot the errors? For the second bullet point, we had added a colon, while the other lines did not have a colon.  We also capitalized on the words on lines 2 and 3 while not doing so for line 1. We should practice consistency throughout the presentation. The client caught these errors and asked us to change, as his marketing team would be on the call. This is something we missed, and little details like these always matter.

Here is another example below; you will notice that we missed a full stop on the first bullet point while the rest had it. Again, consistency is the key. If you add full stops or not, you need to ensure that it is consistent throughout the presentation.

In addition to this, the prospective client shared his wisdom on a host of other things, and we could learn so much from the conversation. We ended up using the full ninety minutes, and it was time well spent and great lessons learned. Often, we do not take the fonts, commas, full-stops, colons, semicolons seriously. When it comes directly from the client, you pay more attention to it. Little things matter and this is something all of us need to practice in our day-to-day work (writing emails, preparing presentations, proposals, and more). The call was a great learning for me. 

You can call this “Paying Attention to Detail.” 

“Small things make perfection, but perfection is no small thing.” – Henry Royce