Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition

Metadata

Title: Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition
Author: Jerry Weissman
Book URL: https://amazon.com/dp/B001M60BKK?tag=malvaonlin-20
Open in Kindle: kindle://book/?action=open&asin=B001M60BKK
Last Updated on: Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Highlights & Notes

Therefore, what presenters say and how they say it are of far greater importance than what they show

You are the storyteller, not your slides.

A poor presentation can kill a deal, while a powerful one can make it soar.

Persuasion is the classic challenge of sounding the clarion call to action, of getting your target audience to the experience known as Aha!

The overwhelming majority of business presentations merely serve to convey data, not to persuade.

In business, when the point is not crystal clear, and when the benefit to the audience is not vividly evident, the investment is declined, the sale is not made, the approval is not granted; the presentation fails.

As you read, you’ll come to see the relevance of Aristotle’s concepts to all the types of stories you need to tell in business … storytelling that will persuade your audience to respond to your call to action.

When your story is right, it serves as a foundation for your delivery skills. The reverse is never true.

A clear and concise story can give a presenter the clarity of mind to present with poise.

The good presenter grabs their minds at the beginning of the presentation; navigates them through all the various parts, themes, and ideas, never letting go; and then deposits them at the call to action.

When your story is not clear, when it’s fragmented or overly complex, the audience has to work hard to make sense of it. Eventually, this hard work begins to produce first resistance, then irritation, and then loss of confidence.

The effective presenter makes it easy for the audience to grasp ideas without having to work. The effective presentation story leads the audience to an irrefutable conclusion. The journey gives the audience a psychological comfort level that makes it easy for them to say “yes” to whatever the presenter is proposing. Presenting, therefore, is essentially selling.

The person who is able to tell an effective business story is perceived as being in command, and deserves the confidence of others.

Every communication has as its goal to take the audience from where they are at the start of your presentation, which is Point A, and move them to your objective, which is Point B.

To reach Point B, you need to move the uninformed audience to understand, the dubious audience to believe, and the resistant audience to act in a particular way. In fact, understand, believe, and act are not three separate goals, but three stages in reaching a single, cumulative, ultimate goal. After all, the audience will not act as you want them to if they don’t first understand your story and believe the message it conveys.

The only sure way to create a successful presentation is to begin with the goal in mind.

Aristotle called it teleology: the study of matters with their end or purpose in mind.

Aristotle wrote: “ … persuasion may come through the hearers when the speech stirs their emotions. Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.”[1

A Feature is a fact or quality about you or your company, the products you sell, or the idea you’re advocating. By contrast, a Benefit is how that fact or quality will help your audience.

For people to act on anything, they must have a reason to act, and the reason must be theirs, not yours.

Features are of interest only to the persuader; Benefits are of interest to the audience. Go with Benefits every time.

You can create an effective presentation only if you know your audience: what they’re interested in, what they care about, the problems they face, the biases they hold, the dreams they cherish.

Audience Advocacy: convincing your audience that what you want will serve their interests, too.

Audience Advocacy: to place their needs at the heart of your presentation. The central expression of Audience Advocacy is presenting Benefits rather than Features.

In fact, every element in your persuasive presentation must be clearly linked to a WIIFY.

“This is important to you because … .” (The presenter fills in the blank with a WIIFY.) “What does this mean to you?” (The presenter explains with a WIIFY.) “Why am I telling you this?” (The presenter explains.) “Who cares?” (“You should care, because … .”) “So what?” (“Here’s what … .”) “And … ?” (“Here’s the WIIFY … .”)

Make it easy for your audience to follow, and your audience will follow your lead.

The solution is timing. It’s not a matter of more time; it’s about the proper use of time. Get the sequence right: Let the right brain complete its stream-of-consciousness cycle before applying the left brain’s structure. Focus before Flow.

Developing a presentation by starting with left-brain considerations such as logic, sequence, grammar, and word choice (or, for that matter, the color, style, and design of slides) is ineffective. Crafting a presentation is a creative task, and it must start with the resources that are available only on the right side of your brain. Use the right tool for the right job.

Therefore, begin your story development process by doing what your brain is going to do anyway: follow the stream of consciousness, and capture the results during Brainstorming.

A presentation that is not custom-built will inevitably be less effective and less likely to persuade. Why bother presenting at all if you are not prepared to invest the time needed to make your presentation all that it can be?

Start by unloading a “Splat!” of ideas in whatever order they came out, free-form … a total Data Dump. Organize them later, and later still polish them into words and sentences and paragraphs and, ultimately, into slides. This process is called Splat and Polish

Your job, therefore, is to become the navigator for your audience, to make the relationships among all the parts of your story clear for them. Make it easy for them to follow, to bring them up from the level of the trees and give them a view of the entire forest.

This option, reflecting events in the order in which they occurred or might occur, is ideally suited for any presentation where telling a story that deals with change is the most important objective.

If you consider using Problem/Solution for your presentation, be careful about getting the emphasis right. Many people in business spend too much time on the problem and not enough time on the solution, leaving their audiences feeling as if they have slogged through a tragic Russian novel.

Businesspeople don’t like to be reminded of their problems. Every business today, from the smallest home office to the largest global enterprise, is under security attacks from hackers, spammers, viruses, and identity theft. These organizations are painfully aware of the negative impact on their costs, time, productivity, and confidentiality; they don’t need salt rubbed in their wounds. So rather than remind your audience about their problems, describe their issues and tell them what actions you and your company propose to address them.

The Form/Function Flow Structure is distinctly different. It moves your company’s business offering (its solution, action, or leverage) into the starring role, front and center. Use it when you’re presenting a single central business concept, method, or technology that has many applications or functions emanating from that central core. Think: one core technology and multiple applications; a main theme and several variations; a hub and its radiating spokes; a foundation idea and its dissemination by way of multiple franchises.

We humans find stories, especially stories about people with whom we can identify, inherently interesting. Thus, a case study is an excellent way of capturing and keeping an audience’s attention. It’s an easy and practical way to make a product or service that is technically complex or apparently uninteresting become more vivid, personal, and understandable.

In fact, the 16 Flow Structures overlap to some degree. The key is: Choose one or two Flow Structures for the entire presentation.

Let’s review everything you’ve learned so far: Start with the Framework Form, do your Brainstorming and Clustering, and sequence them into a logical path with a specific Flow Structure. All of these steps can be further distilled into the Four Critical Questions: 1. What is your Point B? 2. Who is your audience, and what is their WIIFY? 3. What are your Roman Columns? 4. Why have you put the Roman Columns in a particular order? In other words, which Flow Structure have you chosen?

Think of your Opening Gambit, your USP, your Proof of Concept, and your Point B as a string of connected dynamic inflection points. Once you’ve segued smoothly through each of them at the start of your presentation, the heart of your argument will be primed for your discussion. You will have grabbed your audience’s attention, and they will be very clear about what you want them to do.

After all, since the Overview slide is a miniature view of your entire presentation, you can use it to support an ultra-brief condensation of all your ideas.

The last words your audience should hear is your call to action.

But if you capture your audience’s attention, define your Point B, and establish your credibility in those same 90 seconds, the audience is yours, and they will follow you wherever you want them to go.

A presentation is a presentation and only a presentation … never a document. After all, Microsoft provides Word for documents and PowerPoint for presentations. And never the twain shall meet.

Be sure to distribute the handouts only after the presentation. If you distribute them before or during the presentation, your audience members will flip through them as you speak, and they won’t listen to what you have to say.

An extension of the Presentation-as-Document Syndrome is what happens to the audience when the screen lights up with a slide filled with dense text and highly detailed tables, charts, and graphs. The focus of the audience immediately, and involuntarily, goes to the graphics, and they start to read. When they start reading, they stop listening. The graphics then become the center of attention, and the presenter becomes subordinate to the slide show, serving, at best, as a voice-over narrator and, at worst, as a ventriloquist.

The slides or other graphics are there to support the presenter, not the other way around.

Instead, when the presenter interprets for the audience and the graphics provide support, the presenter can lead the audience to a conclusion. When this happens, the presenter manages the audience’s minds, creating the subliminal takeaway: Effective Management

when designing graphics, I rely on the wisdom of Less Is More, and its corollary, When in doubt, leave it out

In addition to Presenter Focus and Less Is More, the two essential concepts for powerful graphics design, there is a third vital element in the equation: the audience and how they take in what they see. This is Perception Psychology

By understanding Perception Psychology and applying it properly, you can control the effect of your graphics on your audience. And in presentations, you want that effect to be positive.

This again leads us to one of the most important practical applications of the Less Is More dictum: Don’t make me think! That refrain asks you not to make your audience work to understand your ideas. The same refrain applies to the work your audience must do to absorb your graphics. Therefore, design all your slides to Minimize the Eye Sweeps of your audience. For every graphic, keep the number of times their eyes must go back and forth across the screen to an absolute minimum. Make it easy for your audience, and they will make it easy for you. Think of the alternative!

A presentation is a presentation and only a presentation. The primary role of graphics is to support the presenter and to give the presenter the opportunity to add value above and beyond what is projected on the screen.

A bullet is meant to express a core idea, so craft it in the form of a headline.

Legibility and speed are equally important in presentation slides. When you create a text slide containing bullets, you are, in effect, presenting headlines only. Where does the body text appear? Not on any slide. As the presenter, it is your job to put flesh on the bones of the headline bullets. The presenter provides the body text. The presenter is the focus of the presentation.

Therefore, the optimal presentation is composed of a presenter providing spoken body text for headline-style bullets on the slides.

To make your bullet slide clean and crisp, try to follow the four-by-four formula: four lines down, four words across. Or, if the subject warrants, you can go up to six-by-four: six lines down, but still only four words across.

Build your bullets by bringing them in from left to right.

If you do use an acronym, the correct way to turn it into a plural form is with a lowercase “s” and no apostrophe.

Use two or, at most, three different type styles for a single presentation.

Grouping related items visually reduces the interpretive work your audience must do to follow the flow of your ideas.

Choose one or two graphics effects that will enhance the clarity and attractiveness of your slide design, and use only these throughout your presentation.

Any numeric slide can be dramatically improved by eliminating unnecessary words, numbers, scales, and legends.

In a pie chart, the relative size of each wedge is the most important information.

Persuading your audience to respond to your call to action is almost always an uphill battle. Why make it harder, even 10 percent harder, by designing graphics that work against your message? Make your graphics work for you.

The ultimate technique for checking your flow is to read only the titles of your slides, as shown in Figure 9.3. If you can trace the logic of your entire presentation by reading these few words, bypassing the bullets, graphs, or other content, you’ve created clarity. A presentation that achieves this inner logic makes it easy for your audience to follow and easy for you to deliver. In Microsoft PowerPoint, you can use either the Slide Sorter or the Outline view to read only the titles.

To recap, the five Graphic Continuity techniques are: Bumper slides are the graphic dividers inserted between major sections of this presentation to serve as clean, quick, and simple transitions. Indexing/Color Coding uses a recurring object as an index, highlighted in different colors to map the different sections of a longer presentation. Icons express relationships among ideas with recognizable symbolic representations. Anchor Objects create continuity with a recurring image that is an integral part of the illustration. Anticipation Space uses empty areas that are subsequently filled, setting up and then fulfilling subliminal expectations.

The answer is nowhere. Point B and the WIIFY don’t appear on any slide. They are stated by you, the presenter. You tell your story; your slides do not.

By combining a well-constructed story that has a clear beginning, middle, and end with the slide layout, you can see how to express your entire presentation.

When you feel in command of your material, you communicate a sense of confidence to your audience and heighten the power of your presentation.

Verbalization means turning your outline into a full-fledged presentation by practicing it beforehand. Speak the actual words you will use in your presentation aloud, accompanied by your slides. Do it just the way you will do it when you are in front of your intended audience. A truly effective presentation is practically impossible without this special technique.

The only way to prepare a Power Presentation is to speak it aloud, just as you will on the day of your actual presentation.

Limit your use of the Rhetorical Question; too many of them can sound contrived.

Most important, be sure that your Mantra supports your key persuasive theme: your Point B.

Experience shows that the two parts of any presentation that audiences remember best are the beginning and the end. Therefore, be sure to highlight your Point B, your call to action, in those key places.

Plan the linkages as you develop your presentation, practice them every time you Verbalize, and then deliver them when you present.

Never apologize, and always prepare properly. Omit any topic that does not deserve your audience’s time and attention. Present with pride any topic that is important enough to include in your presentation.

The way to get from doubt to certainty is to switch from the conditional to the declarative mood.

This is not at all acceptable in business, where accountability is paramount. Passive-voice sentences remove the doer of the action, and with it, remove management … and the presenter … from any responsibility or culpability for the action, whether bad or good.

When you go into autopilot, however, your presentation comes across as “canned,” and the result is an audience that is uninvolved, unmoved, and unconvinced.

A reporter once said to the Yankee Clipper, “Joe, you always seem to play ball with the same intensity. You run out every grounder and race after every fly ball, even in the dog days of August when the Yankees have a big lead in the pennant race and there’s nothing on the line. How do you do it?” DiMaggio replied, “I always remind myself that there might be someone in the stands who never saw me play before.”

You can achieve that with External Linkages: words, phrases, stories, and other materials that you insert throughout your presentation to make it fresh.

Be careful to make all Direct References positive and noncontroversial. Only quote statements or tell stories that reveal the audience member in a positive light. And, of course, never violate a confidence.

Getting people to think about issues and discuss them turns your presentation from a one-way transmission into a two-way interaction.

Speaking engagements are great branding opportunities, but only if you do a good job. You can do enormous harm to yourself by not understanding the opportunity. It’s a crime to give the “windup doll” speech, one that should be punishable by more than just not being invited back.

On a broader scale, a website (www.scopesys.com/today/) lists significant events on any given date in history. On the day you present, find an event that parallels your story, and incorporate it to add dimension to your presentation.

Concentrate on your audience during the presentation. Be in the moment.

Presenters have learned the how-to of animation, but not the why and wherefore of its application.

The word “animation” comes from the Latin root anima, which means “spirit” or “life,” just as the word “animated” describes a lively or energetic person. Animating the graphics in your presentation can add a sense of spirit and life to what might otherwise be a flat visual display.

The right animation can make your presentation more visually appealing, transforming it from the merely good to the truly captivating … and therefore persuasive.

For these reasons, if you want your presentation audience to feel positive about your ideas, your animation should follow the natural, reflexive eye movement: left to right. Of course, if you want to send a negative message … say, about your competition … you should reverse direction, and move your objects right to left.

Send positive messages; make the default direction of your animation left to right.

Use motion to help tell your story by expressing the action in your message; use motion to mirror or evoke the feeling you want to create in your audience. To reprise Shakespeare: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.”

Use motion to help tell your story by expressing the action in your message. Use motion to mirror or evoke the feeling you want to create in your audience.

Use motion to help tell your story by expressing the action in your message.

Select Wipe From Left. This is the ideal animation choice, because it flows with the natural, reflexive, left-to-right movement that our eyes find so pleasing. Consider this choice your default for all text.

Unless you want to send a different visual message, as described in the following section, make Wipe Right your default choice for every click in every presentation.

This Wipe Right option can be further reinforced by always using the title of the Slide Master as an Anchor Object. To display the Slide Master (see Figure 12.3), which controls the default formatting of all new slides in a presentation, select View, Master, Slide Master (PowerPoint 2003), or select the View ribbon and click Slide Master (PowerPoint 2007). With the Slide Master displayed, left-justify the Master Title text, and then create the title of every slide using this default. Be sure to always use the same size of font for each title, and, of course, keep each title to a single line (Minimize Eye Sweeps). With this configuration, when you run your slide show, the title of each new slide will replace the title of the outgoing slide in precisely the same place. The Anchor Object animated.

Remember the Conditioned Carriage Return from Chapter 6? Your audience is culturally accustomed to start each new slide at the upper-left corner just as they do in a book. The Wipe Right animation of the title will create the familiar … and positive … impression of turning pages in a book.

I use the Wipe Left in the slides in my programs to indicate what not to do. The subtle sense of discomfort my clients feel in watching the counter movement of images reinforces the point of my message. You can use the Wipe Left in your presentations to indicate the negative factors in your story: the shortcomings of competing products, past problems your company has conquered, or market forces that pose major obstacles for your industry.

. . a good rule to follow for all slides. If you want your audience to take in your images comfortably or read your text easily, stay with the Wipe.

Use the No Transition or Cut option in your presentation if you want to express sharp contrast between two slides, such as the difference between the sleek new design of your logo and the busy and cluttered logo of your chief competitor.

Therefore, whenever you introduce animation on your screen, stop talking, stop moving, and allow the animation to complete its full course of action.

Define your Point B and your audience’s WIIFY. Distill your ideas into a few central themes or Roman Columns. Organize the Roman Columns into a logical flow. Illustrate your concepts with graphics that follow basic design and continuity principles you read about in Chapters 6–9. Practice your presentation using Verbalization. Deliver your presentation using Customization to make it fresh, specific, and alive.

By checking the pulse of your audience periodically, you sustain the vital lifeline of persuasion … the “co” in communication.

Being “live and in person” is the ultimate form of Audience Advocacy.

A well-prepared story enhances a presenter’s delivery skills.

Here’s a checklist for your practice: Verbalize your presentation repeatedly. You can do this alone or into an audio … not video … tape recorder. Video recorders make you self-conscious about your appearance; audio-only recordings allow you to concentrate on your narrative. You can also Verbalize in front of a trial audience of colleagues or friends. In all cases, Verbalize with your slides. Time your presentation to be certain that it works effectively within the allotted time period. Each time you Verbalize, use Internal Linkages to connect your ideas and External Linkages to connect with your audience. Pay careful attention to your Verbiage. Speak positively and always as an Audience Advocate.

If a presentation is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well. Be all that you can be. Invest the time and energy to make every presentation a Power Presentation.

Projection screen. Present with the screen to your left as you face the audience. In the discussion of Perception Psychology in Chapter 6, “Communicating Visually,” you learned that audiences in Western culture find it natural to move from left to right. With this arrangement, every time you click to a new slide, the audience travels from you to the screen and across the image easily and comfortably.

LLM Book Knowledgebase

Explorer

Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition

Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition

Metadata

Highlights & Notes

Table of Contents

Backlinks