Views Not News

Foreign Office diplomats are to be retrained as salesmen. With immediate effect. Or if they can’t do the job, business leaders are to be appointed as ambassadors in their place.

David Cameron has said that’s it, end of, full-stop. No more Foreign and Colonial Office johnnies swanning around all over the place on exes. No more pool parties. The black ties, the white panama hats…they all have to go. Along with the unlimited supplies of Fererro Rocher.

Britain means business, says our PM. As a nation, we sell more to Ireland than we do to Brazil, Russia, India and China combined. That has to change. Carry on thinking that Britain might rule the waves if you must, but austerity rules the economy. We have to pay our way in the world. Being abroad means being a salesman for UK plc. Promoting Britain’s best. Unless you don’t want promotion, that is.

And you thought our second unelected leader of the Noughties was just posh!

So what’s a diplomat to do? How do you change the mindset of Uber Brit overseas and start to get down and dirty and sell UK plc abroad when most of your life has been spent carefully choosing charmingly inoffensive words and phrases over lunch and cocktail parties while consuming the finest of whatever it is that New York, Sydney, Paris or Rome has to offer, generally? Suddenly our ambassadors are faced with having to learn a whole other language: PowerPoint.

I’m guessing this may be somewhat, er…foreign to the Foreign Office?

Now, forgive the palpable immodesty, but we agency folk know a little about business and presentations and selling. And boy oh boy do we know about PowerPoint. Oh yes. You want charts and diagrams? You want flash animations and bullet points like you wouldn’t believe? Well, we are your men. And women.

So let me reassure any of those FCO ppt newbies out there to stop worrying. Help is at hand. And it’s available right now in not so foreign Fulham.

In the spirit of helping our great nation become Great Britain once again, instead of being the USA’s and India’s ‘junior partner’, we’re happy to knock up a scintillating creds for our lads who may be located anywhere from Hyderabad to Hong Kong as soon as they’ve got their contact’s agreement for a short, informal creds on why working and investing in and buying UK plc’s products and services is absolutely vital for the success of their own country’s future.

And in the best tradition of dishing out free samples, please let me give all those diplomats-cum-business-professionals out there just two quick tips to bear in mind if they insist on making their ppt creds look absolutely irresistible. Here we go:

Tip 1: Unless you can’t absolutely and completely avoid it, don’t go anywhere near PowerPoint when you visit your foreign royals, heads of state, captains of industry, rich developing-world dictators and billionaire, Russian, yacht-owning classes looking to invest in UK plc. Or anyone else, come to that.

Most folks’ brains freeze faster than a British staycationer on a Blackpool beach in summer when they realise ‘the dreaded PowerPoint presentation’ is coming their way. They only sit there and feign interest because they are too embarrassed or too polite to say that they’d rather you just tried to have an intelligent, two-way conversation with them rather than ask them to read a 76-slide presentation full of wall-to-wall text, bullet points, charts and animations.

“You want me to buy Breeteesh jet fighters? Tanks? Why you not bring some round for me to play with?” Good old experiential marketing. Works every time.

Tip 2: Carry on doing what you’ve always been doing. Keep going with the carefully-chosen charming words and phrases over get-to-know-each-other lunches and parties. Most people seem to like that. Indeed, our CEO is expert at it. In fact, if there is a vacancy for a business leader to replace an underperforming ambassador selling UK plc…I might just know someone who’s perfect for the job.