By Rye D’Orazio        rdorazio@rayandbarney.com

Are you conveying the emotion and feeling you want your prospects and clients to understand when you promote your company, products and services?   Are you sure they are hearing your message?  Brochures and even websites only go so far.  Media advertising and promotion is expensive and may not reach the audience you are after.

Wait, this is a blog about sales performance and sales talent, why are we talking marketing and media?

While I was doing research for a presentation to Non-profits Leaders on how to better leverage technology to communicate to donors, sponsors, volunteers and staff, Brad Ristas, a partner at Ray & Barney Group and fellow blogger on this site, sent me information on Pecha Kucha.  Now that is a name to catch your attention no matter what it means.

Check this out as you can use this technique for just about anything you want to convey. We have all done presentations, used PowerPoint and talked a lot, but think of 6 minutes and 20 slides and you nailed what you want to say and how you want to say it.

Here are comments and a great example of how to use this technique from well know author Daniel H. Pink contributing editor at wired.

Let us now bullet-point our praise for Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects who have turned PowerPoint, that fixture of cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed pecha-kucha (Japanese for “chatter”), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That’s it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the down. The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.

The duo — Dytham is British, Klein Italian — invented pecha-kucha four years ago to help revive a struggling performance space they owned. The first presentations were such a hit that they began hosting monthly pecha-kucha events, boozy affairs at which Tokyo architects and designers showcased their streamlined offerings to crowds of hundreds. Now there are pecha-nights in 80 cities, from Amsterdam and Atlanta to San Francisco and Shanghai. Why? Dytham believes that the rules have a liberating effect. “Suddenly,” he says, “there’s no preciousness in people’s presentations.” Just poetry.

We are pursuing this to launch a campaign about a new service offering around our Talent Services for Sales Performance and Professional Part Time work force. We will send this directly to our target prospects and current clients to educate them on the topics and the value they could gain. We are also looking to use it to promote and recap workshops.events.

Being able to convey emotion and feeling along with the value a product or service provides and to do it in 6 minutes, people will watch, people will listen.

What do you think?  Do you have an emotion and feeling you want to convey along with the traditional value, return, etc.? Can you communicate in 6 minutes? Could pecha-kucha help you sell?