Great Speaking Coach

Sales Presentations: Show and Tell Your Services

You sell a service--perhaps consulting and coaching or professional services such as accounting and legal services. How do you show and tell something that seems intangible?

Make these 3 tips the meat of your sales presentation:

1. Stories, stories, stories: Well-crafted stories that make specific and well-targeted points are your best tool for showing and telling about intangibles. Select two or three from the 7 business story types and use them to make points about your services. Do your services result in lower taxes paid? Tell a springboard story. Is the prospect wondering if you're reliable and trustworthy? Tell a story about who you are as an individual.
2. Testimonials: Ask clients and customers to write down how they have benefited from your services. Guide them to be specific and results-oriented. Instead of "we enjoyed working with Tom" ask them to say something such as: "Tom's work helped us save 25%." Get their permission to quote them by name and company.
3. Paint a picture of the future: Instead of focusing exclusively on today--a stressful time when the prospect is weighing their options--get them to imagine a time 2, 3, or 5 years from now when they have been enjoying the results of your services.

What methods of Show and Tell do you use in your sales presentations? Post your thoughts through our comment link.

Public Speaking: How HIgh is Your Grade?

I was just reading Jeffrey Gitomer's weekly sales newsletter. Today he wrote about grading yourself as a sales person. What does it take to earn an A or an O for Outstanding? How do you go on to earn one Excellent after another?

There's tremendous value in thinking like this about your efforts and success in public speaking. As Jeffrey always says, in sales it's not about you, it's about the customer. And in public speaking it's always about the audience. No matter who you are, how much you love what you have to say and how proud you are of your accomplishments, the audience only cares about you when you unmistakably show them that you care about them.

Three quick tips will help you earn the A grade as a public speaker:

1. Use the word 'you' in the first 7 words of your first sentence? Examples: "Have you ever...?: "Imagine you are..." "What would it be like if you could...?"
2. Be sure your call-to-action asks the audience to do something that's good for them (as opposed to good for yourself)
3. Use leading materials (the colorful content that leads to your key points) that the audience will love (as opposed to the stuff you love).

Share the tips that earn you an A grade as a public speaker. It's easy through our comment link.

Public Speaking: How Coaching Helps You

Great professional sports figures work with coaches regularly. The coach helps the player maximize the effectiveness of the player's natural talent and learned skills. Executives and sales teams benefit from coaching to maximize their public speaking effectiveness

Chief executives and high performance sales teams bring their passion, expertise and knowledge to the presentations table. Coaching helps them pull it all together at the highest level. Here's a succinct and you-focused definition of coaching from Coaching Creatives:

"Coaching is forward focused. It’s about helping you get to where you want to be."

"It concentrates on your mindset. In discovering what lies beneath the problems that are slowing you down, we can explore different ways of thinking that’ll move you forward. Coaching is about how you help yourself. It isn’t about me teaching you how to be a better photographer, film maker or artist.

• Coaching is an opportunity to learn about yourself.

• Through applying the learning, you become more effective.

• Greater effectiveness breeds success.

It’s fascinating. And it’s all about you."

Your favorite sports figure in any sport works with a coach. What are you waiting for?

Public Speaking Mistakes

Here's another "expert"passing on one of the biggest and most counter-productive myths circulating among public speaking trainers: that body language and tone of voice are 93% of your message with only 7% of meaning derived from the words.



Rubbish, rubbish and more rubbish! Dr. Mehrabian concluded that the meaning of the words or content is overpowered onlywhen the body language and voice are incongruentwith the words.

If you're greeting another person and you say these words, "Hi, it's great to meet you" and your tone of voice and body language are positive or neutral, the words will be believed. Only if you sound grudging or avoid eye contact will the person question your meaning.

On stage in front of audiences it's even more important to focus on the quality of the content. Keep people engaged with varied content and leading materials. Minimize your body language if it distracts, and speak in your normal voice with the occasional emphasis by volume, speed, pauses and pitch.

Have you found other examples of public speaking myths? Share your discoveries through our comment link.

Public Speaking: The Words You Say Are Extremely Important

Here's another "expert"passing on one of the biggest and most counter-productive myths circulating among public speaking trainers: that body language and tone of voice are 93% of your message with only 7% of meaning derived from the words.

Rubbish, rubbish and more rubbish! Dr. Mehrabian concluded that the meaning of the words or content is overpowered onlywhen the body language and voice are incongruentwith the words. If you're greeting another person and you say these words, "Hi, it's great to meet you" and your tone of voice and body language are positive or neutral, the words will be believed. Only if you sound grudging or avoid eye contact will the person question your meaning.

On stage in front of audiences it's even more important to focus on the quality of the content. Keep people engaged with varied content and leading materials. Minimize your body language if it distracts, and speak in your normal voice with the occasional emphasis by volume, speed, pauses and pitch.

Have you found other examples of public speaking myths? Share your discoveries through our comment link.

Public Speaking: The Audience isn't Single-Minded

Your business audience may work at the same company, or in the same industry or be universally attracted to the topic. You must remember that they are far from monolithic in what attracts their brains while they are seated in front of you.

Presenters are single minded and make the mistake assuming that the audience is the same. Take three definitive steps to penetrate the varied brain activity going on in brains of the people throughout the room.

1) Deliver a blockbuster. Don't lecture or teach. This is the ultimate expression of single-mindedness and most audiences who really want to learn HOW will do so on their own time and from other sources. Your job is to motivate, inspire and activate them do something different.

2) Use varied content: stories, quotations, studies (high level only), references to popular culture (use a song or movie title as an analogy or metaphor), graphs (one or two that are large and easy to read); images that communicate a specific point immediately; interactive exercises (may be as simple as asking them to raise their hands); a game on a handout sheet; statistics (make an astounding point with these).

3) Change directions frequently. In Brain Rules, John Medina says that the human brain gets bored every ten minutes.Introduce something new every ten minutes. Do it with a bang so it's unmistakable.

How do you supply variety in your presentations so the brains in your audiences remain attracted and tuned in to you? Share your ideas in our comment link.

Sales Presentations: 3 Steps to Put the Customer First

You've been invited to deliver a presentation to a desirable customer. You and your team immediately go to your slide software and begin writing the presentation. You start with your corporate overview, continue with a lengthy description of your products or services and conclude with a summary of features and benefits.

What's wrong with this picture? For the customer, it's boring. There's nothing in it that is about them. Think about the presentation from the customer's perspective and do this instead:

1) Your opening tells a story about how your product or service solved a problem very similar to the one they are facing. Don't know their problem? Then find out before you write the first word on a slide.

• They don't care about your corporation until they know you care about them.

2) Everything you say about your products and services is in the context of their needs--often called their 'pain' or 'hot buttons.'

• It's better to delve deeply into your solution to one specific pain than to be broad and general. 

3) When you've reached the end of your presentation, paint a picture of their future that includes the successful use of your product or service. As soon as you say 'summary' or "in closing" they stop listening.

• Helping them imagine their life after buying from makes them think "yes, I want that."

What sales presentation techniques work for you? Share your thoughts in our comment link.

Motivate the Audience with a Powerful Roadmap

The speaker had poise, a great physical appearance and a warm, welcoming voice. But during the first 8 minutes of her speech I was wondering why she was telling me her stories. Where was this going? Why should I pay attention? What do her stories have to do with me?

If you've been using stories in your business presentations, and especially as an attention-getting opening, good for you! Now be sure that your audiences aren't distracted by the same questions--where is this going and why is the speaker telling me this?

There's a very simple fix: ask a question or make a statement that sets the scene. This speaker wanted to make a point about how different the media is today from years ago. But she just dove in, talking about the years gone by. If she had opened with a question such as "Isn't it amazing how things that seem the same on the surface are really so different today from the way they were years ago?

This is what I call a roadmap.  A question like this sets the scene or puts the audience in a specific place. Then they can sit back and enjoy the trip. Don't think I'm directing you to fall into the trap of the boring "tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em"--I am not! I am directing you to engage the audience and give them a glimpse or a taste of a preview of your point. Do it well and they stay with you for the whole trip.

What audience reactions do you get when you grab them with an attention-getting question? Post your thoughts on our comment link.

Stories: Hot Fudge for the Brain

Why do stories in business presentations make such a big difference to both the audience and the speaker?

For the audience stories are like hot fudge sundaes--they make your eyes grow large, your taste buds salivate and your energy jump. Stories provide 'gist' or rich flavor. And the human brain is hard-wired to find rich flavor or the essence of information really appealing.

In Brain Rules, John Medina explains the science behind this. For your purposes as a business speaker what you need to remember is that stories that convey the substance of an idea (that is, your key point, data or process) will be slurped up by the brains of the audience members. After they have the gist, then they can pay attention to some details. It's the gist, however, that makes the details stick, not vice versa.

Stop leading with your data, your processes and your logic and start leading with your stories. Once they're hooked by the gist, you can feed your audience something more solid and they'll willingly and effectively absorb it all.

My Speech Development System is a visual of the structure or blueprint of a presentation. It shows the attention-getting opening, the key points and the call-to-action close. Most important is the placement of the content you would use around your key points. This content is typically called supporting materials. Change your paradigm to think in terms of leading materials--stories, props, one impactful visual, quotations, stats embedded in a story--and you'll be providing hot fudge for the brain.

What's your experience using leading rather than supporting materials? Share your ideas on our comment link.

Do Stories Motivate and Inspire?

Two CEOs recently challenged me with this question: do stories in business speechesreally motivate and inspire listeners? What makes you, Susan Trivers, so sure that they do?

When I ask you: what great speeches come to mind, your answer probably includes at least one of these: the Gettysburg address; "I have a dream"; and "It's morning in America." Why? Because those speakers used stories to transmit their message.

Lincoln could have stood at Gettysburg and recounted the numbers of war dead, the dollars the civil war was costing, his strategic and tactical plans for the future and even some slogan justifying the war. Who would remember that? Instead, in a few sentences he captured the minds and hearts of people through the ages because he crafted a story about Gettysburg.

"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth. "

In his "I have a dream" speech Martin Luther King, Jr. created a vision that everyone in the audience and beyond could take as their own. 

"I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream." In other words, in the dream that everyone has.

When Dr. King said: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." everyone who has ever been judged by any difference would feel inspired and motivated.

Ronald Reagan tapped into the well of angst and fear of the nation and the country's desire to avoid them with his phrase "it's morning in America." 

"It's morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It's morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago? "

Can you imagine the lack of impact and staying power these messages would have had if they had been presented in typical "business speak?"

What's your experience with business storytelling? Post your ideas on the comment link.