Adobe Systems

Bezier Games is a board game development and publishing company that might not be familiar to non-gamers, but among those who love the board game hobby, they are known for producing many wildly popular and best-selling board games, card games, and social/party games. Steve has been friends with the owners for years and was always happy to help them with their marketing messaging, product documentation and user experience design. One day quite unexpectedly the owners of Bezier Games asked if they could hire Steve to occasionally represent their company and products at various retail trade shows throughout the U.S. and Europe. They felt that Steve’s presentation background combined with his familiarity with their product line was a perfect match. While it wasn’t the kind of work that Steve normally did, the chance to attend a bunch of board game trade shows and talk to people about cool games was an opportunity not to be missed.

It didn’t take long for Steve to notice a disturbing trend among the reps from other board game publishers. Most of their product demonstrations, sales pitches and larger presentations were focused almost exclusively on their products and not on their audience. Before Steve got into training and coaching, he worked a number of sales jobs and he knew that what he was seeing was bad from both a presentation standpoint and also from a sales standpoint. At their core, all presentations must be about your audience, not about your subject matter. This is true whether you are presenting at a medical conference, teaching a room full of high-schoolers, explaining to your parents how to reset their internet router, or trying to sell a product or service. Instead of going on and on about all the different features of their game, these reps should have taken the time to get to know their audience a bit and then talked about how these game store owners could effectively leverage the game features to serve (and sell to) their customers.

Any good presentation starts with two simple questions: What do they need, and how can I help? Sales presentations are no different. Serving the needs of your audience is how you make a point, and also how you make a sale. 

Before focusing on presentation and communication coaching, Steve spent many years doing contract work as a technical trainer for various corporate clients and training agencies. For many of these projects Steve worked with a team of other trainers and often conducted or assisted with the train-the-trainer component, in which the trainers learned the content that they’d be teaching. Because so many training projects included content that was less than ideal (to be diplomatic about it), Steve got good at figuring out how to create good training experiences out of not-so-good training materials. On one of these projects, Steve met Tony Onorad, who would go on to found and run Onorad Training Solutions, a training project management company specializing in healthcare computer systems training and support.

Steve has worked often with Onorad Solutions to help them create better training solutions for their clients. Sometimes the work is strategic in nature, consulting on the overall training process and best path to reach a desired outcome. Other times the work is more tactical, helping to design specific components of training content, training workbooks, or post-training support materials. And often Steve’s role is just reorganizing and polishing training materials or eLearning modules to help them to be as clear, engaging and helpful as possible.

Steve’s expertise isn’t in healthcare systems, it's in how we pay attention to new information, how we organize and retain that information, and how to motivate people to take action and apply new information in a constructive way.