Great Speaking Coach

Public Speaking: The Speaker Trumps the Slides

I hate it when speakers put together a slide deck and call it "their presentation." The slides don't do any presenting--they simply back up YOUR ideas.

People with knowledge, expertise and experience create slides. A presentation would be complete without slides, yet a slide deck cannot deliver a meaningful message to the audience without the presenter.

Information is widely, easily and cheaply available today. Visuals of great cleverness, ingenuity, and across the whole spectrum of creative endeavors are all around you. Your presentation cannot stand out if that's what you rely on when speaking to your audience.

Only you, the passionate expert with deep inner knowledge, can make the message stick. Sticky messages mean people remember specifics and they act upon them--they are motivated to do something after listening to you that they wouldn't have done before your speech. The greatest movie in history doesn't motivate you or make you act. You remember it as a wonderful experience outside of yourself.

Strike the thought that your slides equal your presentation-today!. Put your thoughts down first, be clear about your call-to-action and your attention-getting opening. Know your message and craft it as if you were going to deliver it without any media behind you. Only then is it time to put a few slides together that will serve to support your message.

Share your thoughts about how changing your thinking has made a difference in the results of your presentations.

Sales: Wear the Buyers Shoes

Your prospect, your team and your laptop are gathered around the table. Where's the focus and what does it sound like?

There's a part of your brain telling you the focus must be on the prospect, but there's the boss and the company practices telling you it's on the laptop and your product or service. Give that voice in your brain a big boost and boot the other advice out the door. Sales presentations must be about the prospective buyer.

I've taken to coaching my sales teams to think they are delivering a "buyer's presentation" rather than a sales presentation.

How do you do this?

1. Deeply and completely know the buyer's pain points. These are the only things the buyer wants to  listen to you talk about.
2. Put all the features and benefits of your offering into language that speaks to their pain points. "Your goal is to address/fix/relieve pain X. Our product Y will get you there faster, cheaper, better."
3. Tell springboard stories that prove how your product or service achieved this result for others. Stories stick and activate better than lists of facts and figures. Stories take your offering out of the cellar filled with commodities and into the realm of something unique and rare.

How do you activate your buyers in your presentations? Share your expertise in our comment link.

Public Speaking: Humor Sticks

World-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking made news when he made the audience chuckle during his recent speech honoring NASA's 50th anniversary. As the Washington Post reporter phrased it "he does funny!"If an astrophysicist can make people laugh and it gets reported in the major news media, you can be sure, humor will make a positive difference for your reputation too.

Humor is about taking a wry or ironic view of everyday life and delivering it straight-faced. Here's Hawking's response to the question of whether there is life on other planets:

"Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare," he then quickly added: "Some would say it has yet to occur on earth."

When he compared the resistance to space exploration to the resistance to Columbus's voyages in 1492, he said: "The discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the old. Just think we wouldn't have had a Big Mac or KFC."

How do you take a humorous look at everyday life and make your audiences chuckle? Post your ideas on our comment link.

Business Storytelling: Dramatic Future Story from Ford Leader

Your company has been losing market share to the competition and employees are frustrated by a leadership that is stuck in a rut. How do you connect with your audience of employees and get them to act?

Jim Farley, Ford's chief marketing officer uses stories. Recalling the early plant workers and their dedication in a springboard story, he dramatized his message that "we've done this before and achieved success, and you here's what you look like doing it yourself now."

Then he tells a future story that is brilliant. A future story paints a vivid picture of the audience members acting in the years ahead. A brilliant future story is evocative and dramatic, not burdened with details. Jim Farley's future story can be summed up in one memorable line: "I hope you are ready to save this company because that's what I'm going to be doing every minute of every day."

Take 10 minutes right now and imagine your audience getting out of their seats and rushing forward to respond to a vision of the future that you have expressed so memorably that they adopt it as their own vision.

Share your future stories with us by posting them on our comment link.

Business Storytelling: Ford Leader Impacts Dealers

"As the lights dimmed, Mr. Farley didn't lead cheers or shout slogans. Instead he spoke from the heart, revealing a depth of passion for Ford that turned the room dead silent.

...Like a shy actor blossoming on stage, Mr.Farley became swept up in the emotional power of the moment. "I believe, in many ways, the future of Ford is the future of our country," he said."

These quotes from the New York Times (4/20/08) about a recent gathering of 1400 Ford dealers and their newly appointed chief marketing officer James D. Farley demonstrate the power of business leaders telling stories.

Notice the language: passion, from the heart, emotional power of the moment. No facts, stats, logic or processes. Mr. Farley's speech was a combination of a future story and one that transmits who he is (his personal brand). He knew that for dealers of a struggling auto maker, connecting with the audience in their hearts was the best way to their heads and their subsequent actions. The dealers will feel the power of the moment each day as they in turn tell the Ford story to customers.

Executive officers should embrace emotion, passion and feelings at appropriate moments in their speeches. The well-known notion that people buy with emotion and justify with fact applies to executives as much as anyone. You're a leader. Connect with your audiences, whether internal or external, on a emotional level and then you've opened their receptiveness to your facts, stats and processes.

Share your experiences using business stories in your public speaking. Post your thoughts through our comment link.

Sales Presentations: Best Question-Asking Practices

Your prospect is asking you questions during or after your sales presentation. You listen attentively and actively to the question and the first thing you identify is the topic or key point. Before you answer, be sure to evaluate the question for what it reveals about the questioner's learning type. Then you will know how to frame your answer.

Did the prospect ask :"Why is this important to me? I want to be sure I'll really want to use it."

Perhaps the question was "I don't see your point. What if it doesn't work that way?"

Another person may ask for the facts: "You've given me several examples of how the product works. Tell me more about its size, weight, technology involved--you know, the facts."

One more person may ask:"How will I apply this in my everyday routine? I like things that are really practical."

Each of these questions reflects a different learning type and requires your answer to be couched the same way. The person who asks for the facts doesn't want any more examples or 'for instances' or 'imagine if's.' You need to have some facts.

The person who wants to know why it's important to him needs time to discover the value or importance himself. Your answer should be "why don't you make a list of pros and cons according to what's important to you. Then you'll be really clear about how you'll want to use it."

How committed are you to developing the art of asking questions? Artful questioning should be high on your list of business skills because so much of the information you get is the result of questions you ask. Make them great ones and the information you get will be of much higher value.

Share your thoughts on our comment link.

Sales Presentations that WOW 'em

Your prospect has agreed to give you one hour to talk to them about why they should buy your product or service. You've got to make your sales presentation sing. How do you do that?

Since you're already a savvy sales person, you know you've got to talk about the customer--their pain, their needs, their goals. Only after that will you talk about your own product or service, and only in the context of their needs.

How do you flesh out your content so that it really penetrates the customer audience? Every audience includes about an even distribution of people fitting the 4 learning types even if the people are all subject matter experts in the same topic.

You sales presentation must include:

• "Why is this important to me?"
• "What are the facts?"
• "How is this practical? And, BTW, can we get going already?"
• "Consider the possibilities..."

Remember to include these 4 different approaches throughout your sales presentations--even when you're answering questions. People will ask questions in a way that reflects their learning type, so listen for the clues and respond in kind. I'll talk more about this in the next post.

How do you incorporate learning types into your presentations? Share your thoughts through our comment link.

Team Leaders: Collaboration Tips

• Let's say that Benjamin is always practical--tell me what you have to say, then let's get to work!
• Marguerite loves brainstorming sessions, the longer and more circuitous the better.
• Malcolm zeroes in on the facts that he can analyze and debate.
• Betsy likes nothing more than discovering things herself. Give her a bunch of stuff and she'll dive into it and learn by trial and error.

How do these four people collaborate on a team? The challenge is creating an environment that recognizes the four different learning types and enables each person to learn in their way.

As the leader of such a team, you must also know your learning type. You'll teach or lead in the way that is most comfortable for you, and yet as a teacher or leader you will only get buy-in and true collaboration by helping everyone reach the goals through their own learning styles. Educational research has proved time and again that about 25% of any given population falls into each of the 4 learning types, so you'll need to be prepared for all of them in every collaborative effort.

How do you collaborate with all 4 learning types on your team?

Let's say your team is assembled to design a new process for managing customer complaints. To appeal to all 4 types of learners you might state it this way:

It's a fact that 60% of customer complaints are not resolved to the customer's satisfaction.(Malcolm) This means that your daily work is more difficult than it should be.(Marguerite) What if we design a faster and more customer friendly approach to handling complaints? (Betsy)The bottom line is you'll have better working conditions and be responsible for higher company profit margins.(Benjamin)

This introduction appeals to each of the learning types and galvanizes them all to work together.

How do you help your teams collaborate? Share your ideas through our comment link.

Public Speaking: Analysis, Action, Achievement

Information is readily available for little or no money. That's the beauty of the Internet and all it's many forms and outlets.

So what's a business public speaker to talk about, if not information? Think beyond information to these three "A"s: analysis, action and achievement.

Analysis: Using your expertise and experience, think analytically about the information you have. Ask the audience to consider what does it mean that we have or know this information. How can they use the information for their own benefit? To facilitate change or innovation in their organizations? You do the analysis, present that to the audience and leave even them with some questions they should answer that will further the analysis of the information.

Action: What actions can a person or organization take based upon the information? Let's say you have information about the ratio of closed sales to the prospects coming into your sales funnel. Now you want to increase that percentage. You as the expert in closing sales gives the audience three actions they can add to their process today to move towards a higher percentage of closed sales. Be specific and use stories and other leading materials to help the audience envision themselves taking these actions.

Achievement: What achievements can the information lead to? This is a great time to tell a business story. A springboard story about a relevant past experience or event ends on a happy note of achieving the goal. A future story tells the audience your vision of achievement based on the information at hand and the audience puts themselves into the future story. Or tell a story that emphasizes your brand identify if your brand is commonly associated with achievement.

How do you make a powerful call-to-action out of the information you possess? Post your suggestions on our comment link.

Score! Hockey Wisdom for Public Speakers

Business public speakers can take a lesson from the Washington Capitals hockey team as they wrapped up a dramatic finish to a season that began dismally.

"Keep simple things simple and go from there," said Fedorov, who was the best player on the ice in this clinching game. "We took one game at a time, otherwise, we would have been thinking about everything that all the other teams might be doing. Then you don't have any energy left. Bruce kept us focused. When a team gets into good habits everybody wants to keep playing exactly that way. It becomes addictive."

Keep simple things simple: Slides are meant to be simple things--a few talking points or a great graphic. Don't cram everything you know into any one slide or into a deck full of slides. No jargon, no complex slides, no long list of bullets.

One game at a time (and don't think about what everyone else is doing): perfect advice for the speaker who worries about "what they expect" or "the way we always do it." Just tell the audience they can do differently after listening to you. And create your own way to speak to your business audiences rather than being stuck in a "that's the way we always do it" mindset.

When a team gets into good habits...It becomes addictive: great speaking habits lead to great audience enthusiasm, and that's something every speaker loves. If you've never experienced  total attention and wild applause from an audience, you don't know what you're missing. Enhance your public speaking habits, get that audience response and you'll never go back to your old ways.

What have you learned from sports teams that you apply to your public speaking habits? Post your thoughts on our comment link.