Great Speaking Coach

Stop the Slide Madness

I want to stop the slide madness! How many times have you been in an audience and pleaded with the universe to free you from another boring presentation overloaded with slide gimmick after slide gimmick?

Talented and thoughtful experts promote unique ways of creating slide presentations and the use of technology to create interactive presentations. YET--none of them address the real issue which is that no slide deck, interactive technology projected on a giant screen or slick webinar or video conference is really as meaningful as smart, creative people engaging their audience from the depths of their passion and authenticity.

Listen to experts talk informally to a group. You hear their enthusiasm and feel their energy and you're infected with the desire to learn more, have the benefits for yourself, or bring them in to work with you. Then put those same people in front of a slide deck and what happens to them? Way too often, the natural language is lost, the body language becomes stiff and distant, and they sound no different from the hundreds of other business presentations you've listened to.

This happens because we've bought into the idea that the slides are the presentation. Every day I hear people say "I've got a presentation coming up--got to work on the slides." When I ask them how much time they'll allocate between creating the slide deck and practicing/rehearsing they look at me with surprise. If left to their own habits, they'll use 90% of their time on the deck and barely 10% practicing/rehearsing to deliver their content.

Please--stop giving all your power away! No slide deck is better at communicating than YOU are!

Try it and see. Promise yourself that for each of your next 5 presentations, you'll create a schedule for your preparation. Then allocate 25-30% by hours or minutes for slide work and all the rest of your time for crafting your oral content and practicing/rehearsing.

If you make this promise to yourself and actually stick to it, you will be delighted that you've been successful beyond your wildest dreams. And let me know how it goes.

WOW Factors Come from the Speakers Not the Slides

"Practical, down-to-earth, totally convincing that you have the ability to do the work." These are the judgements a team of 4 earned from their customer's evaluation board following a 70 minute Orals presentation to win a huge contract ($890K).

Not one person mentioned the slide deck that was projected behind the speakers duirng their presentation.

These four speakers "wowed" their audience with tried-and-true business speaking elements:

1. their own passion for the work,
2. authenticity about their desire to do the work for this customer,
3. and perfect, relevant stories about how they've succeeded in the past. 

When you're looking for "WOW" factors, look inward and find them in your own stories, your personal commitment, your deep knowledge and your enviable track record. Telling your story about the one similar customer that you personally made happy is more compelling than the corporate statistics so many executives want to tout.

Most notable about this Orals was that the slide deck was severely lacking--no strong themes, hard to understand graphics, and not really compliant with the customer's requirements. Yet we were stuck with it. So we did what everyone needs to do anyway--speak about the topics, not 'present' the slides.

And this approach was a high-scoring one. The selection board listened, was inspired and felt well-informed in spite of the poor slides.

I'm not suggesting that you should deliberately sabotage your slide deck. But this story proves my point that it is the speakers who make the presentation and the great impression on the audience. This group devoted many hours to crafting their oral content and practicing and rehearsing to deliver it well, and that is what caused the audience to evaluate it so favorably.

My advice is to allocate only 25-30% of your schedule to slide development/editing and 70-75% to crafting the oral content and practicing and rehearsing your delivery. You will score high with your audiences every single time.

 

Leadership Critical to Transforming Business Speaking

People will do what they see others doing, no matter how much skilled coaching they receive, until their leadership transforms their own speaking and presenting. Most executives and senior managers can hardly contain their feedback (e.g. criticism) when reviewing a presentation intended for an important customer. "Fix this and change that and articulate our win themes and discriminators" they urge.

Then I see them get up and speak and it turns out they do everything their direct reports were doing! Message to management: model the desired content and delivery that you're so passionate about, or they won't do it!

I've coached thousands of skilled and dedicated people to present thousands of responses to customer requirements in the past dozen years and I see this pattern over and over. The prevailing culture is about safety not risk: write slides that look like everyone else's; craft speaking content that sounds like everyone else's; and deliver just like everyone else.

Number one fix: speak to the needs of your audience. They will respond to presentations that are different from what they have learned, from boring experience, to expect. You can be a breath of fresh air, give them the gift of engagement, challenge their thinking.

Number two fix:The slides are usually just a road map that tells everyone what topic you're on at any given point. The slides are NOT your presentation--YOU are the presentation, the presenter, the source of creative content. Unless you are teaching a lot of steps (which is training, not presenting) keep your slides simple. That's a backdrop to the real content which is what you speak.

Number three fix: Information is everywhere, so don't pack your presentation with information--facts, statistics, vision and mission statements, locations, workforce size, revenue, and all the other data that is easily found with a quick online search. Your audience wants meaning, unusual perspectives, creative thinking about the information. "What does all this information mean for me? How will you lead me to success?" The sooner you get into speaking about the audience's success, the more quickly you grab their attention and the more securely you keep it.

Executives and senior managers who seek executive speaking coaching and transform their own presentations and speeches will see the speaking culture in their companies change dramatically. What are you waiting for?

 

Focus Your Business Presentation 5 Years Out

How do envision your company or department 5 years from now? What would you have done? What would you have accomplished? What would that feel like and how would various people express their feelings? What would be different about your environment?

The future has always been captivating because it's liberated from the facts of today or yesterday. Anything is possible! Business speakers would be much more effective engaging their audiences and inspiring them to think about new directions and to take fresh approaches if they plant the seeds of what the future could look and feel like.

Caryl M. Stern, president and chief executive of the U.S. Fund for Unicef told the NY Times' Adam Bryant that she helped her staff begin their discussion of the future by creating a mock-up of a magazine cover with the headline "U.S. Fund for Unicef Named Charity of the Year Five Years Out." This sparked their discussion of these various questions and helped the management team articulate what it will take to achieve this goal.

I can visualize many business speakers using this technique: instead of slide after slide of historical and current facts and figures, just one magazine cover mock-up with a headline declaring future success. Then pose the questions and get the audience thinking, talking, and involved. When they feel the excitement from within they will take those feelings back to their offices and teams and transform their work from slogging through everyday to successfully achieving great results.

Successful business people to often leave their creativity and energy at the door when they prepare and deliver speeches or presentations. Creatively imagining the future is the one thing that is guarnateed to set you apart from all other speakers. How will you describe what you see as you look 5 years out?

Improv Techniques Help Business Speakers

Ever do improv or even watch others doing it? The key to successful improv is impeccable listening. Since you have no idea what your improv partner is going to say, you have to really listen in order to respond effectively.

How could this technique help you craft the content for your business speech or presentation. Listening, really listening, to your audience. Of course you won't be in the same room with them trading lines back and forth when you're crafting your content. However, if you take the time before you write to study your audience--what is on their minds, what questions they have, what they wish they could do that they're not doing now, what would make their day--you are really listening, and then you'll know what your speech or presentation must include.

You want them to think "Wow! How did she know I needed that very idea to reach my next goal?" Or, "I am so glad I came today. His story triggered a way to approach my problem that I hadn't thought of before." That's what I mean by listening to your audience.

Many dedicated speakers take improve classes a least for a little while. You'll learn to think on your feet, respond quickly to your partner, and articulate your own ideas with impact. The next best alternative is to listen, really listen, to your audience before you craft your speech or presentation so you deliver exactly the message they wanted to hear.

 

Executive Support Needed for Presenters Speaking to Win $890 Million

If your company had the opportunity to win $890 million worth of new business, business that would triple the size of your company practically overnight, how serious would you be about supporting the team that will be presenting your solution to the customer?

Imagine two new hires, one long-time guy that does important but boring work, and one guy who's busy, busy, busy. These four people will be delivering a presentation to their customer as part of their company's efforts to win up to $890 million for an IT services contract over the next 4 years. Winning this work will triple the size of the company practically overnight.

As I see it, these four people should be given as much support as they need to prepare fully for the oral presentation. At the very least they should be relieved of the responsibility to carry on with their regular work when that conflicts with the need to prepare for the oral presentation. And when five senior executives are invited to a rehearsal for the purpose of listening and giving their feedback, they should attend or ask for a postponement--instead of not showing up and leaving the team waiting.

My guess is that three of these speakers have low profiles in the company so the executive team didn't think twice about abandoning them. But if they don't care about their own people, they should at least care about impressing the customer with the right message because $890 million is at stake. This is just another example of forgetting, or ignoring, the audience. If you, or a team from your company, is going to be speaking to a customer audience, you/they must care more about the audience than you/they care about themselves. You must Put the Audience First. That's how you win--in fact it's the only way to win.

 

 

 

Easy Ways to Waste Time Preparing Your Presentations

If you're not really busy you don't need to read this post. For the rest of you, I'm offering some observations about what people do that wastes time and causes it to take much longer than necessary to go from blank screen to polished presentation.

1) Many interruptions. As soon as you put an extended period of time on your calendar to work on your presentation, someone comes along and says "hey, you've got this time open, come to a meeting." Unless it's your best customer or the CEO, you need to preserve that time for the work on your presentation. If you don't communicate that the preparing the presentation is important, no one else will think it is.

Every time you stop working on your presentation, go do something else, and then go back, you lose momentum and have to retrace steps backwards. It's not just time lost. It's the power of cumulative thinking that gets interrupted. You have an idea, you tinker with ways to develop that idea, maybe you've scribbled some notes or drafted out a slide, and then you have to leave. You may never be able to return to that moment in your mind. So you lose twice--the time and the thinking.

2) Getting too much input from others. If you must collaborate on a presentation, you'll all save time by taking these steps: i) meet once to discuss and agree on the purpose of the presentation, the call-to-action and your key points. Identify people the group or individuals you need to talk to in advance of the first draft. Share specific recommendations for supportive reading, if appropriate. ii) Commit to a schedule that leaves time for the reading and creating a first draft of your part of the deck. iii) meet again to assess the first draft of the deck. Everyone must be there with their portion completed. Do not throw out suggestions of who else to talk to at this point. This always bogs the process down and causes momentum to stop.

3) Too many slide revisions. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that "no sale was ever won by the slide deck. No promotion was ever attained by the slide deck. No accolades were ever earned by the slide deck." Put the slides into their proper place, which is that they support you and serve as a road map or organizing tool.

So when you have a reasonable deck--consistently formatted, easy to 'get' in a quick glance, nothing factually incorrect in it, no typos or other man-made mistakes, call it DONE. Then use the remaining time to practice and rehearse the actual presentation. It is you, the speaker or group of speakers, who will make the most memorable impression. Memorability can be good or bad. The surest way to be remembered for being bad is not to spend enough time practicing and rehearsing. The opposite is also true: the surest way to be memorable in a good way is to deliver your content with passion and authenticity from your inner knowledge. This happens when you spend a hour on your delivery for each ten minutes of the duration of the presentation. One hour presentation=6 hours of practice. Try it once and you'll see the results and never waste time revising again.

What other ways have you found to waste time preparing your presentations and what have you done about them? Post your ideas in the comment box.

Can You Present Your Way to a Job?

Your resume led to an interview which led to a second interview. You’re now sooooo close to the job of your dreams and there’s one more hurdle…deliver a presentation to 5-7 people who will be your co-workers. Ace this and you’re in, but if you bomb, well, thanks but there’s the door.

Chris Cunningham, co-founder and C.E.O. of Appssavvy, a social media-focused marketing firm, told Adam Bryant of the New York Times that job candidates are given a real-life example from their company and required to give a presentation as the final step in the hiring process.

As Cunningham says “If someone can come up with a great idea for the proposal and present it without becoming nervous or uncomfortable, and hold their own in the Q.& A., you have a slam dunk.”

Cunningham is looking for new hires who already understand the market. Notice that he doesn’t look for people who only know the company itself, but rather for those who understand the environment the company lives in—their market. You can easily learn more about the company’s products and services, however to make an impression on your customers and prospects you must clearly and powerfully understand them.

So many business speakers I’ve worked with stuff their presentations with content about the company-who we are, what we do, how big we are, who are customers are. They rattle off their products and services in typical biz-language. The audience glazes over while thinking “Excuse me, what about us? What can you do for us?”

If you want to get the next job, or you and your team need to win the next big contract, be sure you put the audience first. Your presentation must be largely focused on “here’s what’s important to you” with a brief description of “here’s how we can help” and a smattering of proof that you’ve done it before.

I love this extra precaution in the hiring process. Hiring is a major investment and companies want to increase their likelihood of getting a strong return, so they pose one of the hardest challenges to prospective hires. Given the many pitfalls you face in the crafting and delivery of presentations, you’ll know that you’ve made it when you get a job based on the quality of your presentation.

If you had to make a presentation in order to get the job, would you get it?

Have a Vision of Your Story to Maximize Impact

You've had the experience, you've got the words, you're ready to tell it to your audiences, right? Please, not so fast!

Stories in speeches, like great movies or novels, need to be crafted. It's not enough to relate the sequence of events and your thoughts and dialogue. You need to tap into your audience's responsiveness to drama, excitement, suspense, fear, joy, puzzlement, worry, sadness, euphoria--in short, all the emotions that human beings have in abundance. Memorable stories that take listeners on a journey to their own epiphanies need to be works of art, not just reports of the facts.

The vision of your story is how you will craft it. What piece of it will you begin with? Maybe you'll hint at the end first. Maybe you'll eliminate all the extraneous characters to focus on the one or two most compelling ones. Maybe you'll ignore the environment, or maybe you'll build up the environment. You might tell it from the point of view of yourself when you didn't know what was going to happen, so the audience finds out in a surprising way, just as you did. There are so many ways to craft a story to make it extraordinary and inspiring.

I watched a woman telling her brave and courageous life story. She had poise and strong presence on the platform. Yet she simply reported the story, starting with when she was a little girl, through her teens and on into young adulthood. It is clear that she has been brave and courageous in living a powerful life in spite of an equally powerful disability.  I kept wishing she would really reach into my heart and soul and make me feel her highs and lows. It doesn't take long to do this--just careful planning and remembering that story telling is an art.

When you have a important story to tell, take tips about telling it from your favorite movies or novels, not from wikis or aggregated news reports. Transport the audience to the time and place and they will always remember the journey.

 

The Most Compelling Moment Isn't when You Think It Is-Great Speaking Coach Answers the Mail

Dear Great Speaking Coach,

I work really hard to create one powerful message for each slide. In fact, I usually write this as a tag line or 'bumper sticker' across the bottom of each slide. As I conclude my remarks on each slide I emphasize the message with my voice and sometimes even a gesture. But very often my audience seems to miss these because they'll ask me questions later that show they weren't listening. What can I do to ensure that they hear the most important message for each slide?

Bonnie V., IT Solutions Architect

Bonnie,

You'll learn to address this problem if you spend some time yourself as part of various audiences. From your seat, observe the audience watching and listening to a presenter using slides. You will this clearly observe this pattern, time after time.

• A new slide appears and audience members sit up a bit straighter, refocus their eyes to the front, stop note taking
• The speaker mildly introduces the topic with the intention of leading up to the most powerful point. These are what you refer to as tag lines or takeaways or bumper stickers.
• After 10-15 seconds audience members slump or slouch, look around, resume note taking (or browsing, texting, etc.)
• The speaker eventually gets to the key point, then quickly moves on to the next slide.
• The audience did not hear the key point because they'd already drifted away.

Why does this happen day after day across all businesses and topics?

Because the introduction of a new slide is the most compelling moment--there's a new visual, there's movement and we're curious. So we pay attention. And we'll pay attention over and over again as each new slide is projected.

This is the perfect moment for the speaker to make the most compelling point for that particular slide. Never again will you have the vast majority of the audience paying as close attention as during that first 10-15 seconds. The longer you speak on a slide, the less attention is being paid, so if you make your most compelling point just as you prepare to turn to the next slide, you reach only a tiny fraction of the audience.

Once you've seen this from your seat in the audience, you'll change your own presentation practices. Deliver the strongest, most memorable idea first. Making this simple adjustment will change the dynamic and the impact of your presentations. This is 'attention-getting opening' at its best and most audience-friendly.

You will have to practice and rehearse this new technique a few times to ensure that you master it and maximize the benefits. We've been so socialized to do the opposite that it will take commitment to master. It's not about changing the content, though; it's only about changing the order in which you deliver the content to maximize impact. Then your hard work on the taglines will pay off.