Chapter 3

Add Tremendous Impact to Your Presentations and Become the “Go-To” Expert

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

—George Patton

If you want to be seen as the expert, then you can’t just do what everyone else is doing.

We already know that if we run our businesses just like everyone else, we will quickly be swallowed up by the competition. But when we design our presentations, we often totally disregard our own advice. Be different. Stand out from the crowd. Do something to help your audience better understand your content, but also make your presentation more memorable. When you finish your presentation, you want your audience to be thinking, “Man, that presenter really knows his [or her] stuff.”

Any magician will tell you that the magic tricks themselves are fairly irrelevant to the success of the magician or the show. What’s more important is what they call the patter. The patter is the running commentary of the magician that accompanies the trick. It is the showmanship that temporarily gets the audience’s attention off the trick and focused somewhere else. Magicians like Penn and Teller will use jokes and funny stories as their patter. Magicians like David Copperfield or Siegfried and Roy rarely use verbal patter, but instead rely on stunning visuals like a pretty assistant dressed very seductively or albino tigers. Regardless of what type of patter a magician uses, it’s the patter that creates the show. Most of these magicians are going to perform very similar illusions, but each creates a distinct show with their showmanship.

When you design and deliver your presentations, you are likely to be delivering material that is somewhat, if not exactly, what your competitors are delivering. So you need to add your own “patter” to the presentation to make it really come alive.

Avoid the long lectures filled with pages and pages of PowerPoint slides and endless bullet points. That’s what everyone else is doing, and it’s boring. Instead, use some of these 10 presentation secrets to add impact to your speeches.

IMPACT IDEA #1: STORIES AND EXAMPLES ARE YOUR ACE IN THE HOLE

I know we covered stories and examples in the previous chapter, but it bears repeating. The stories and examples that you use are entirely unique to you. No one can relate your own personal experiences or your expertise better than you can, so when you use personal experiences where you were the eyewitness, you are creating a presentation that is unique and different and that builds your credibility as the expert.

Years ago, I interviewed with a company to do some private presentation coaching for a group of presenters. I met with one of their project managers in a boardroom in downtown Houston to discuss the possibility of doing the project. I asked him a few questions about what kind of challenges the company’s presenters were having, and he explained to me that his company often locked in contracts with school districts and universities by having the actual people who would be working with the clients (the engineers, architects, project managers, and so on) deliver the sales presentation, which they called the interview. The clients didn’t want professional salespeople delivering the presentations. They wanted to meet the people with whom they would actually be working for the next 3 to 5 years. Most of the speakers were really nervous, because these contracts might total hundreds of millions of dollars. If they did well, everyone was busy for years, but if they didn’t do well, they could lose out on a lot of work and a lot of money. No pressure, right?

At the time, I had spent the better part of 12 years coaching presenters, and for the past 3 years, the Associated General Contractors of America had been my largest client. This meant I had worked with most of the top commercial builders and engineering firms in the area. As a result, I was highly qualified for the job. But I knew that although quoting all my expertise and success might have made an impression, it probably wouldn’t seal the deal.

However, one of these engineering firms that I had worked with a couple of years prior had sent all of its top executives to my class. At the time they had a corporate goal that they called Route 66, where they wanted to create $66 million dollars in contracts by the end of the year. When the class started, the company was at only about 80 percent of where they needed to be to hit the goal. During the class, though, these executives worked on a few projects to help them close more big contracts, and they made up ground very quickly. In fact, they ended up hitting the goal by late November. During this interview with the project manager, I relayed some of the stories about what I did to help the other company accomplish their Route 66 goal. By the time I finished the second success story, the project manager left the room and came back with one of the company’s senior vice presidents. By the time I finished the third, the chairman of the board had joined us. The vice president looked at the chairman and said, “I think this is our guy. He really knows our industry.”

Keep in mind that I had never in my life built or managed the building of a big skyscraper, and I knew very little about the day-to-day operations of a big engineering firm or construction firm. However, my experience working with people in the industry and helping them succeed made me the expert.

My story—that is, my experience—about just one of the many successes that I had accomplished proved that I was the expert.

IMPACT IDEA #2: AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION GAINS CONSENSUS

Many presenters are deathly afraid of asking for audience participation, and others actually misuse questions in a way that alienates the audience. But audience participation questions are a fantastic way to both gain a consensus from your audience and use the expertise in your audience to prove your point. So if you avoid using them, you are missing out on a tremendous tool in your tool belt. Since questions to the audience can be tricky, though, let’s first cover some of the big mistakes that presenters make when trying to get the audience to participate and discuss how to avoid them.

• Rhetorical Audience Participation: Rhetorical questions can be strange for the audience. They serve almost no purpose in a presentation, so you want to avoid rhetorical questions in most cases. An example is a question that almost everyone will answer the same way, such as, “We’ve all learned to drive a car, right?” or “How many of you have ever had a bad experience at a restaurant?” The questions will seem so elementary that people in the audience will be thinking, “Does he really want me to answer that?” There is also the potential to sound like you are trying to manipulate the audience. For instance, a question like, “You do want your family to be secure if something ever happens to you, right?” can push people’s buttons. The best course of action is to avoid rhetorical questions. One of my early mentors in presentation training once told me, “Never ask a question unless you really want people to answer it”; it is has always been a pretty good rule.
  
• Yes/No Questions: Remember that the purpose of a good audience participation question is to get them involved and to gain a consensus. Yes/no questions have the opposite effect. Some people will answer yes and some will answer no, so by definition, if you ask one of these questions, you will end up dividing the audience. (Plus, there’s not really a lot of interaction.) Although there are a few situations in which these types of questions will be beneficial, it’s best to avoid them.
• Open-Ended Questions with Multiple Correct Answers: The best type of audience participation questions are those that (1) are open ended so that the audience really gets to provide input, (2) are opinion-based so that they have multiple correct answers, and (3) are helpful in proving your bullet point. If the question has only one answer, then you have only two possible outcomes. Either one single person will get the answer so you won’t really gain much of a consensus, or no one will get the correct answer and you will make the audience feel stupid. Neither of these outcomes is great. However, if the answers are opinion-based, then any answer that the audience gives you will serve you well.

I have to admit that designing really good questions to ask your audience was very challenging when I first started coaching presentation classes, but after I had taught about 50 different classes, I noticed a pattern. Once I noticed it, I began to relay this secret to future classes and coming up with great questions has been a snap. I’ve taught a lot of public speaking classes, I’ve read a ton of presentation skill books, and I communicate with some of the top trainers in the world, but I’ve never come across this secret that I’m about to share with you anywhere else. In fact, it was purely by accident that I uncovered it, but it works every time.

If you design a really good key point (bullet point) like we covered in the previous chapter and it passes both the “Do I give a flip?” test and the “Can I prove this?” test, then you can pretty much just put a question mark at the end of the statement and ask it of the audience versus telling them.

For instance, the statement that we created in the last chapter was, “Our New Salespeople Are Closing Only about Half as Many New Sales as Our More Seasoned Salespeople.” And our conclusion was that we needed more training for the new salespeople. Instead of telling the story up front with all of the statistics, you might start with a question like, “Why do you suppose that our new salespeople are having a tougher time closing new leads than our more seasoned salespeople?” Your audience will likely give you a number of different possible answers, ranging from “They need better training” to “The seasoned salespeople are more confident” to “The seasoned salespeople have more knowledge about their products”—and probably many, many more. Regardless of what the audience tells you in response to your question, they are telling you why we need to train the new salespeople better. The new salespeople need more training, they need to be more confident, and they need to know their products better. All three of these led them to the conclusion that you wanted them to draw in the first place.

This process works so well that I have given entire speeches using only this technique—and achieved phenomenal results. Back when I was first starting out, I got a call from an event organizer for the Fort Worth Petroleum Accountants Association wondering if I could fill in for a guest speaker who bailed on them less than 24 hours before the presentation. I was happy to and honored that they would think of me, so I accepted the invitation. When I brought up a few possible topics that I could cover, she paused and sucked in a deep breath and said, “Well, that’s the big problem. The agenda is already set, and all of the brochures have already been printed. Would it be possible for you to deliver your presentation on the topic that we already have on the agenda?” I had to think quickly, because I knew that if I didn’t, she would likely find someone else to speak, and at the time, I really needed the honorarium. I reluctantly agreed to deliver the presentation.

I did some quick research on the topic, which was a highly technical accounting talk specific to oil and gas law. I made up a slide with three bullet points on it. Now, I took accounting in college, and I actually enjoyed the class, but I couldn’t tell you today the difference between a debit and a credit. And I actually began the speech by relaying that fact. But I followed up with, “However, we have a vast expertise in this room that I’d like to pull from, so this will be fairly interactive.” I made the first statement in the form of a question, and I just held my arms out, with open palms facing the audience. Very quickly, a young man about five tables back to my right chimed in with an answer. I summarized what the man said so that the audience could hear the whole response, and very quickly, I had a few people raise their hands on the left side of the room. After six or seven people responded, I quickly summarized all of the responses and then moved on to point number two and did the same thing.

Keep in mind that during most of these responses, I had no clue what they were talking about, but the more the audience answered my questions, the more I saw heads nodding and people sitting on the edge of their seats. By the time I asked the third question, there were dozens of people participating and a deep discussion was occurring.

Just like with the prior questions, I concluded by summarizing what the audience told me about each point. I received a very loud and enthusiastic applause when I finished, and after the presentation, I had no fewer than six people come tell me that this was the best presentation they had watched in this meeting for the past few years. One of them even came up to me and said, “Thank you so much for explaining this to us. I was really confused about this topic before you started speaking.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was really confused about the topic after I stopped speaking.

A good open-ended audience participation question with lots of possible correct answers can work wonders for you if the topic you are delivering is controversial and you need the audience to agree on your conclusion or if the audience that you are speaking to is full of people who have as much or more expertise than you do.

Before we move on to the next impact idea, though, let’s get some more practice designing good questions.

Let’s say that you sell computer equipment or software, and one of the main benefits you offer customers is data storage at a secure “virtual” location. If your bullet point is

• Data Stored Off-Site

then it doesn’t pass the “Do I give a flip?” test and will be difficult to turn into a question. So let’s add a little to the bullet. The bullet point has to give the audience the result or the benefit, so let’s alter it a little.

• Off-Site Data Storage Offers Instant Access from Any Location with Internet Access

Now it passes the test, and it’s very easy to turn into a question, for example, “What kind of advantages would your employees have if they had instant access to your company data as long as they had Internet access?” If you are the software salesperson, would it really matter what answers the audience gives you? Not really, because any answer that they reply with will reinforce your conclusion—that they need their data stored at a secure virtual location.

Let’s do one more. This time you are a financial planner, and you are trying to explain to your audience how it is even more important to diversify their portfolios in a recession.

• Diversification Is Important

Really? How? Why? Let’s add to it again.

• Diversification Is Even More Important in a Recession to Minimize Risk

Your question might be, “In what ways might diversification be even more important in a recession?” or “In what ways could diversification help you minimize your risk of loss in a recession?”

Regardless of what question you end up with, be sure to practice the question with a friend or a group of people from your office. Attorneys always say, “Never ask a question that you don’t already know the answer to”; this applies to presentation questions as well. If the answers that your friends or colleagues give you are not the answers that you were looking for, then change the question until you get the answers that you need.

The reason that I have spent so much time on this impact idea is that audience participation is something that most presenters have no clue how to do well, so many of them never even try. In doing so, they miss fantastic opportunities to persuade their audiences and win people over to their way of thinking. So when you master this impact idea, you will be inserting yourself into a very elite group of speakers.

IMPACT IDEA #3: ANALOGIES MAKE COMPLEX IDEAS EASY TO UNDERSTAND

When I was a kid, my parents took me to a store that had these posters that, at first glance, had a confusing array of strange icons and symbols. But when I put on a pair of red goggles, I could clearly see text that was hidden within the poster. Without the goggles, the poster was confusing, but with the goggles, the text was very clear—and it was so fun, that I quickly grabbed my little brother and brought him over to see my discovery. Analogies are similar to the poster goggles in that they make complex and confusing items within your speech more easily understood, and they often do it while adding energy and fun to your presentation.

An analogy is a comparison between two different things that highlights some point of similarity. The more different the things are that are being compared, the more fun the similarities are. Motivational speakers use analogies quite often, because the comparisons often elicit what I call a lightbulb effect from the audience—where the audience member has an instance of clarity and lights up. Here are a few examples of some famous analogies from history.

• Paley’s Watchmaker’s Analogy: In a book he wrote in 1802, William Paley compared creation and the existence of God with a watch. (Obviously no similarities, right?) His argument was that if you are walking through the forest and you come across a fine Swiss watch on the ground, the existence of the watch itself is proof of intelligent design, because there is no way that the watch could have come into existence naturally. His argument was that the solar system, life itself, gravity, and the forces at play here on Earth are all much more complex than a simple watch, so therefore, they couldn’t have happened by accident.
• Plato’s Cave Analogy: We are often told how the Socratic method is a great technique to use to persuade people, and Socrates’s method of questioning opponents to get them to come to their own conclusions was effective. However, that same method that he used to win people over to his way of thinking also got him executed. Socrates was very temperate as he got older, and he used questions as a way to prove that people who were arguing with him were wrong. He’d basically keep asking the opponent questions until the opponent backed himself into a corner and had to admit that he was wrong. Apparently, Socrates did this one too many times, because he was ultimately sentenced to death for expressing his ideas against those of Athens. Plato’s cave analogy was his attempt to explain why the people of Athens turned against his teacher. Plato explains that a man who is a slave is born in a cave and spends his entire life chained inside the cave. He has never had any experience in the open and has never even seen the sun except through a small opening that comes into the cave just a few hours every day. During these brief encounters with the outside world, he and his fellow slaves see shadows of birds flying on the cave wall, and the slave gets curious. One day, he breaks his chains and runs to the opening of the cave to see the outside world for the very first time. He sees real birds with feathers flying through the air and is amazed. So excited, he returns to his fellow slaves to explain what he has seen. Of course to the slaves, a bird is not a feathered, flying animal. It is a black spot that hovers on the rocks a few times a day. To them the shadow is their reality of what the bird is, and they think that the returning slave has gone mad. He is so uprooting their reality of what truth is that they have to stop him, and the mob kills him. Plato uses this story as an analogy to explain why his mentor was sentenced to death. To Plato, Socrates was enlightened but the people of Athens were too stuck in their reality to see it.
• Forrest Gump’s Mother: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.” (Okay, I think that technically, it is a simile, but it’s still pretty funny.)
• Freud: The Unconscious Is Like the City of Rome: Sigmund Freud was trying to explain how the unconscious mind never “loses” anything. He said that the unconscious is like the city of Rome, “a psychical entity with a similarly long, rich past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent.” What he was saying is that if you go to Rome today, you will see ancient buildings right alongside modern architecture. When a new building is planned, Romans don’t just demolish the entire ancient city and start over. They insert the new with the old. Freud was saying that the unconscious mind works in a similar way. Once we establish our values and our belief systems, as new realizations come to us, they don’t eliminate our older belief system all together. Thus our unconscious mind is like Rome.

As you can see, analogies can make some very technical and complex ideas much more relatable and easier to understand. (And they are fun as well.)

Earlier, I mentioned a point that a financial planner might make is that diversification is even more important in a recession because the market itself is risky but the potential for big rewards is also there. So if we wanted to create an analogy for this point, we might compare diversification in a recession to planting a garden in a harsh climate. You have a much better chance of success if you plant different crops than if you simply plant a single crop over and over.

One of the best (and most effective) analogies that I’ve ever heard in class was when another instructor and I were teaching a private class to Hewlett-Packard engineers. These folks were so smart and so technical that most of their presentations were very difficult for me and the other instructor to understand. They were apparently using English words, but when they put them together for us, it sounded like a foreign language. Then we got to the session on analogies; the clouds parted, and everything made sense.

(Keep in mind that this was almost a decade ago, so the technology involved seems ancient, although it was revolutionary at the time.) One of the engineers was involved in a project where the sales team had promised superfast server speeds, but when the team installed the new servers, the speeds were much slower than what the customer was promised. The engineer was trying to explain to the client who had just invested untold tens of thousands of dollars for the new equipment that in order to get to the speeds promised, he was going to have to invest an additional $30,000 to update the infrastructure associated with the new servers. When he originally gave this presentation before he attended our class, the client got incredibly irate and felt like he had just been conned, because the engineer had explained the problem to the client by saying, “The servers are working fine. You have an infrastructure problem, and if you want us to fix it, you’ll need to pay us another $30,000.” The client felt like the group had promised a result with a lower price point in order to increase the price later once they had committed the prior dollars.

Of course, when this engineer gave his presentation to us, the other instructor and I had the same perception. Then he explained it to us with an analogy. He said, “Picture yourself in a big city like Los Angeles, and you are on a superhighway with 32 lanes of traffic all going in the same direction with no on-ramps or off-ramps. All of the cars on the highway are flowing very smoothly. Then you hit the city limits, and this 32-lane highway changes to a two-lane gravel road. At that point, there is going to be a bottleneck, and the faster the flow of traffic prior to the bottleneck, the more severe the bottleneck will be.” He said, “That is what is happening in your company data transfers. Our servers are the superhighway, but the moment that our servers get connected to your copper wires in the wall, it creates a bottleneck. The only way to fix it is to upgrade your old copper wires in the wall.” (I know what some of you are thinking. What the heck is a copper wire?)

Once he used the analogy, the complicated issue became easier to understand. Analogies are a fun way to add energy to technical presentations, but they can also add those lightbulb moments to any presentation. Often they can add some much needed humor as well.

One final piece of caution, though. Analogies by themselves make terrible proof. They work incredibly well to add flavor to a point that you have already proved, but if you use only analogies as your evidence, then people will like your presentation, but after it’s over and they think about what you said, they will question your veracity. Case in point, years ago, Stephen Hawking was being interviewed on a British morning show, and one of the reporters asked him, “What came before the big bang?” Now this is an excellent question because according to the theory, time was created at the moment that the big bang occurred, so what happened prior to it? Where did the matter that caused the explosion come from? These are questions that have plagued proponents of this theory since it was created. The logical answer is, “I don’t really know,” but apparently Hawking didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know, so he used a weak analogy to dismiss the question itself. He said that the question was meaningless, and it was like asking, “What is north of the North Pole?” He never answered the question. He just used an analogy to prove to the TV personality that the question was wrong, not him.

Analogies alone don’t work very well as proof, but an analogy along with some substantive evidence, such as a personal experience, some research or data, an audience participation question, or some other type of proof, will win the audience over every time.

IMPACT IDEA #4: ANECDOTES—A FUN WAY TO ADD HUMOR AND RAPPORT

When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, one of the news agencies was interviewing a former speechwriter for him and the reporter asked, “They called Reagan ‘The Great Communicator.’ What was it about President Reagan that made him so relatable to so many people?” Without batting an eye, the speechwriter said, “President Reagan had an anecdote for everything.”

Anecdotes are short stories that may be true or fictitious but that often have a funny ending or moral. One of my favorite professional speakers is Brian Tracy, and he is a master of the anecdote. In fact, he has a way of inserting anecdotes strategically between each of his teaching points. He was the keynote speaker at a speaking conference that I attended a couple of years ago, and he started his presentation by talking about how the people who adapt to change fastest have a strategic advantage over those who don’t. During the explanation, he relayed a story about Albert Einstein in which Einstein and his teaching assistant were walking across campus after a final exam, and the teaching assistant questioned Einstein about why he had chosen to give the exact same questions on this test in the exact same order as he had given the previous class. The teaching assistant was concerned, because he knew that if word got out that the professor gave the same tests over and over, it might encourage cheating. After thinking for a couple of seconds, Einstein turned to the assistant and replied, “Yes, the questions might be the same, but since the last exam, the answers have changed.”

Now, I’m not sure if that discussion ever took place, but it doesn’t really matter. Einstein was on the forefront of breakthroughs in science, so the anecdote might have happened just the way that Tracy relayed it. Regardless, though, it helped Tracy add some humor into his speech and it also helped make the audience think a little differently about something that they probably took for granted.

The most important thing about anecdotes is the fact that when you get really good at delivering them, they help you build rapport with your audience, because they are fun and interesting.

One of the best places I’ve found anecdotes is in Reader’s Digest magazines. This magazine often uses short humorous stories as separators and fillers after each of their stories. One of the teaching techniques that I use with new instructors when I train them is to have them choose a random anecdote from Reader’s Digest, and then I find some way to insert it into a two-day class as a teaching point.

In one such instance, a new instructor was thumbing through a Reader’s Digest and found a funny story that she wondered if we could fit into the class in some way. The story was about a teenage girl who was babysitting a four-year-old boy and went into the kitchen to make him a sandwich. As she was making the sandwich, she looked down by the trash can and saw the cat’s litter box. It was really full (and quite smelly). With every stroke of the knife spreading the peanut butter, her stomach turned, until she finally couldn’t take it anymore and knelt down to the floor and began scooping the waste into the trash can. Of course, since she was a teenager, she kind of grunted after every scoop. The little boy, hearing the commotion, walked in and looked over her shoulder as she continued. After the third or fourth scoop, she turned to the boy and said, “Does your mom ever do this?” The little boy looked back at her very confused and said, “No, the cat does.”

I read the story and smiled. Now I just needed to find a way to insert it into the class. Since it happened to be a leadership class, we had a session in the third hour that covered listening skills. I added the story here as an example of how sometimes the words that people hear us say are often quite different from the words that we were trying to say. When I relayed the story, the audience all laughed. It worked pretty well.

Second-Person Story Anecdotes

Just as those eyewitness testimony stories that we covered early are great evidence for our bullet points, sometimes we need to rely on stories that other witnesses have experienced. For instance, if you are a manager or owner of a company and one of your associates relays a story to you about a success with a client, the story will likely have more validity if you quote the associate. Or if you are a salesperson and one of your engineers who installs the products or services that you sell relays a success story to you, then you’ll have more credibility if you quote the engineer.

Whether you quote others or tell funny stories to make your points better, the main thing to remember about anecdotes and second-person stories is that unlike our own personal stories that are extremely easy to tell because we are relying on our own experience, anecdotes are much tougher. You really have to memorize them to have a good delivery. So be sure to practice these types of stories a few times before you deliver them to a real audience.

IMPACT IDEA #5: DEMONSTRATIONS

Demonstrations help audience members better understand processes or products, because they get to see the process or product in action. If you have ever gone to a state fair or trade show and walked around the vendor tables, they will often use demonstrations as a way to prove that their products work better than the competitors’. And although many infomercials are pretty annoying, they sell products well, primarily because of a demonstration. I was watching cable TV awhile back, and a commercial promoting a waterproof spray sealant came on. To prove how well the product worked, the spokesman replaced the bottom of a boat with a screen door that he sprayed with the sealant. Then he filmed himself sitting in the boat out on a lake. Now, I’m not sure that I’d ever buy this product, but it was certainly a memorable demonstration.

A couple of years ago, I had a salesman from the Riddell company go through the Fearless Presentations class, and he was pretty excited about a new technology that the company had created to make face masks on football helmets much easier to remove if a player received a head injury. The National Football League (NFL) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) typically don’t have a lot of problems with this type of thing, because their players are often wearing fairly new and well-maintained equipment. However, on the high school level, helmets often get reused year after year, and water from sweat, rain, or sprinklers rusts the screws that hold on the face mask. If a player is injured, the rust makes it difficult to remove the helmet without cutting it off with a power tool. So Riddell created a new face mask that was held fast to the helmet without metal screws. It took a special tool shaped like a pencil to remove the face mask, but with the tool, the mask instantly pops off. To demonstrate the new technology, this salesperson had two of the biggest guys in the room come to the front of the class. One of them held the helmet while the other grabbed the attached face mask. The salesman asked the two men to try as hard as they could to remove the face mask; they pulled, tugged, twisted, pushed, and jerked the helmet and face mask without any success. He then pushed this pencil tool into a little slot and twisted it; the face mask instantly separated from the helmet.

It was a pretty effective demonstration, and the audience got a kick out of seeing their friends helping out with it.

If you are selling technical products like software, websites, applications, or machines (or if you are teaching people how to use any of these things), then a demonstration can be a very helpful way to add some clarity. Keep in mind, though, that if they just see you do it, they won’t necessarily be comfortable doing it themselves. You’ll have much better success if you have them walk through the demonstration on their own tablets or laptops. It’s kind of like being a passenger in a car traveling to a new location and trying to return to that location at a later date. When you are the passenger, you don’t pay much attention to all of the landmarks and surroundings. But when you are the driver, you do. So let your audience drive a little.

Although demonstrations are an effective way to teach a process or promote a product, there are other uses as well. One of the best demonstrations that I’ve ever had in class was from a line manager at a pharmaceutical company in Rhode Island, who added a little showmanship to his delivery. Before the presentation started, he secretly went to the coffee bar at the back of the room and palmed an open sugar packet. He hid the packet from us throughout his presentation, and about midway through, he asked the audience, “Do you know what a million dollars looks like in my industry?” Once he had our attention, he moved his hand toward the audience and let a sprinkling of sugar fall to the floor. He said, “If that much contaminant gets into one of our drug lines, we’ll have to throw out a million dollars’ worth of product.” It was so dramatic that I got chills when he did it. It was a pretty cool way to make his point.

So if demonstrations are appropriate to your presentation, by all means use them.

IMPACT IDEA #6: QUOTE ANOTHER EXPERT TO INCREASE YOUR CREDIBILITY

If you can find another expert who agrees with your conclusion, then feel free to quote that expert. The more you can prove to your audience that your conclusion isn’t an opinion but a fact that is agreed to by other experts, or even better, by other people in the audience, the more credibility your conclusion has.

Allan Pease is an author of 13 different books on presentation skills and body language, and one of the tips he gives to audiences to customize a presentation to each group is to “phone members of the audience in advance and ask them what they expect from your session and why they expect it. Then use their quotes throughout your presentation.”

I often quote Jerry Seinfeld when I begin a seminar or class on presentation fear, because in one of his stand-up routines, he points out that the fear of public speaking is the number-one fear in America, and the fear of death is number five. “So, you are five times as likely to want to be in the casket rather than up giving the eulogy.”

Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, often creates slides that have one quote per slide and uses the slide as a visual aid in the background as he tells a story or gives information. This is a great technique because he never actually refers to the quote, or if he does, it is a very quick reference. A big mistake I have seen far too often in a presentation is when a presenter puts a quote up on a slide and just says, “What does that quote mean to you?” About 25 percent of people in an audience will think this is a fantastic activity, but another 25 percent will not like the activity and are just too polite to say anything, and the final 50 percent will be very irritated by an activity like this. So if you use a quote as a visual aid, do like Tom Peters does and leave it unspoken.

IMPACT IDEA #7: SHOWMANSHIP ADDS DRAMA AND ENERGY TO THE PRESENTATION

Never disregard the entertainment value of a presentation. Most business presentations are really, really boring, so if you add just a little entertainment to your presentation, you will be remembered in a positive way. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by magic. To get enough money to buy a new magic trick, I used to scavenge for money by digging through the cushions of our couch and looking under the seats in my dad’s car; I’d also collect Coke bottles to return for the deposit. What I figured out was that no matter how easy the trick looked when the guy in the store showed it to me, it was always much, much harder when I got home and tried it myself.

So when I started teaching leadership and management classes and I was looking for ways to “wow” the crowd, I went to my local magic store and asked the guy behind the counter for foolproof magic tricks. One of the ones that they recommended was what they called the “solid water” trick, where water stays in a Styrofoam cup even after you’ve poked a good-sized hole through it with a pencil. (The magician’s code forbids me from telling you how the trick works, but trust me, it is so easy that a little kid could do it.) Once I practiced the trick a few times, I was excited to insert it into my class.

The session of class that I was teaching was on conflict resolution, and I was explaining to the class that if we respond to angry people in anger, it will always lead to an argument. In addition, when people are angry, they don’t think very clearly, so it is difficult to get through to them with logic. First, you need to let them vent and diffuse the anger; then you might have a shot at persuading them. I pulled out my Styrofoam cup and started pouring water into it. Then I took my pencil and held it up to the full cup of water and said, “So when a person is angry, they will poke you and poke you (and I poked the cup twice—the second time the pencil went through both sides of the cup as a through and through) to try to get you to react to them.” Of course, the audience was amazed when I pulled the pencil out of the cup and no water came out. I finished by saying, “Others will be amazed at your poise under pressure.”

Sometimes, your visual aids themselves can be your showmanship. I was coaching a team of presenters who were competing against seven other companies for a big contract. Each competing company got 45 minutes to present, and there was a 15-minute intermission between each group for setup and takedown. Our team was going first, which is good, because if the team did well and set the bar high, the committee would be comparing everyone else to them throughout the rest of the day. The downside of being first, though, was that after hearing eight presentations in a little over 9 hours, the committee would be really burned out and would find it difficult to determine who said what. What often happens in these instances is that members of the committee really like specific groups, but when the members vote for the group that they liked, they accidentally end up voting for the wrong group.

So this group decided to use their visual aids as a memory aid. They created a 6-foot poster for each of their presenters, and at the top of each poster was a portrait of the speaker, in the middle were a few bullet points with projects that each had worked on similar to the project they were bidding on, and at the bottom of each poster were a few pictures of samples of each speaker’s completed projects. As each person spoke, they used the posters as their visual aids by telling success stories about their past projects, noting how those projects related to the current project, and pointing to the bullet points and pictures related to each story. They gave such a great presentation that they were just ecstatic when it was over, and they raced from the room to congratulate one another. In their haste, they forgot their boards, so the next group who came in to present had to move the posters out of the way quickly so that they could set up their own visual aids. When they did, they placed the posters on the wall, facing out. The posters stayed there all day, so every new group who came in to present had their competitors’ portraits staring at them. We couldn’t have planned it better if we had done it on purpose. When the committee met at the end of the day to give their opinions about the presenters, I’m assuming that it was much easier for them to remember who the team was and what they had said because the visual aids were still in the room with them.

So be different and be creative, and you’ll make a great impact on the audience.

IMPACT IDEA #8: A SAMPLE WILL GIVE THE AUDIENCE SOMETHING TANGIBLE TO REFER TO

A sample is something that the audience can see, touch, and feel. It might be a prop, a poster, a model, a product, or anything else that gives a visual representation of what you are covering in your presentation. A few weeks ago, I attended a company’s convention where they had attendees from more than 100 different countries. The executive who ran the South American offices gave a short 15-minute presentation on his group, and at the end of the presentation, he had a team of people from his region distribute these individually wrapped chocolate candies from Brazil that were absolutely scrumptious. He got a big applause when he finished. A sample can be something as simple as a small parting gift, but whatever sample you give the audience, make sure that it helps you clarify your presentation.

I once had a chemical engineer in one of my presentations who had invented a type of plastic that could be fused together without any adhesives. He explained to us that there were unlimited applications for the product, but he had found a big niche in the medical field, because in order to do simple things like attach an IV to a patient, doctors and nurses have to use needles and adhesives to connect the IV bags to the patients and to hold the pieces in place. These adhesives will often introduce contaminants into the sterile environment. (Think about flypaper. Hang a piece of flypaper in your window, and in a couple of days, you will have all kinds of dirty objects in the glue.)

This new plastic technology eliminated the contaminant by eliminating the adhesive. This new plastic could be sterilized, and each piece could be attached to another piece and fused together without contamination. When he explained this to us, we logically understood what he was doing, but it was still pretty tough to visualize all of the different possible applications for the process—until he passed around a sample. He gave us a contact lens case that he created. The case had a washer in the lid that had been fused to the top of the cap. He explained to us that contact lens cases have a short lifetime, because what keeps the solution inside the case is a little washer in the cap that is attached by a type of glue. Once that glue starts to break down, the case is useless, because it will never again create a seal that will not leak. The sample that he passed around, though, had no adhesive, so it would never break down. He let us pick at the washer to try to get it to come out of the cap, but it was no use. His sample helped us understand something that was foreign to all of us just a few minutes prior.

Samples aren’t always appropriate to a presentation, though. For instance, if you are giving a financial presentation, then a sample might not be a good choice. However, when they are appropriate, they can really help you sell your ideas. I once did some coaching for a team of presenters from the Southland Corporation, which owns and franchises out 7-11 convenience stores. One of the participants was a marketing manager who was rolling out a “healthy food” campaign. 7-11 has done a fantastic job over the past three or four decades of building some powerful brands. When you think about 7-11, you probably think about 32-ounce Big Gulp drinks and Slurpees, as well as Big Bite Hot Dogs. Unfortunately, in the past 10 years or so, the market has changed pretty dramatically. The marketing manager told us that some of their stores sell more of a single brand of bottled water than all the soft drinks combined. The market wants healthier alternatives, so the company began rolling out deli-style sandwiches, salads, and fruit cups.

When she was delivering a practice presentation early on the second day of class, one of her bullet points was about how healthy and fresh their deli sandwiches were. I have to be completely honest. I was enjoying her presentation, but in the back of my mind, I was thinking, “I don’t think I’d ever buy a deli sandwich from a convenience store when there is most likely a Subway right down the street.” We took a lunch break, and while we were recessed, she went to one of her stores and bought one of these sandwiches. She also went across the street to a different store and bought a sandwich from a competitor. The one that she got from her store was beautiful. It was made with a really fresh bun and had bright green lettuce that was symmetrical all the way around the sandwich. She used the deli sandwich as a sample during her final presentation, and I realized that I had misjudged her and her store that morning. The sandwich looked really good. Then she pulled out the competitor’s sandwich. It was one of those refrigerator sandwiches on plain sliced white bread and was cut into two triangles and shoved into a triangle box. She concluded by saying, “This is what you get at one of our competitor’s places.” It was brilliant.

A good sample can be very persuasive.

IMPACT IDEA #9: NAME DROP

Name drops are like quotes from experts without the actual quotes. For instance, when I mentioned earlier in the book that you want to limit your key bullet points to just three, four, or five, I’m not the only person who teaches presentation skills who believes that. Dale Carnegie was the father of modern presentation skills, and his books say the same thing. Toastmasters, PresentationSkills.com, and articles from Presentation magazine all concur. So if a number of experts agree with your conclusion, you can just list them.

Another type of name drop is a list of satisfied customers. For instance, my company, The Leader’s Institute, works with more than 405 of the Fortune 500, including Exxon Mobil, Walmart, Chevron, and General Electric. Since those are four of the biggest companies in the United States, it gives me credibility to name drop them. “If those big companies trust him, I guess we can, too.”

IMPACT IDEA #10: ANY VISUAL AID THAT IS NOT A POWERPOINT SLIDE

Never, never, never rely entirely on PowerPoint as your sole visual aid. From time to time, get away from your slide deck for something a little more spontaneous. I picked up a handy trick from a friend who is also a professional speaker. After you have your slide show designed, pull out one of the slides. When you get to that point of the presentation, just go and write your bullet points from that deleted slide onto a whiteboard or flip chart. To the audience, this part of the presentation will seem fresh and spontaneous.

Another way to incorporate handwritten text is during the audience participation that we talked about earlier in this chapter. When you get responses from the audience, write their words on a board. It will help you to better incorporate their responses into your presentation, because you won’t have to remember all of them individually. Also, the audience will like it much more because you are quoting them.

Instead of inserting a picture on a slide, you can get the picture, graph, or chart mounted onto a board fairly inexpensively now. A picture on a slide has a short life. Once you click the button, the picture goes away. But if you have a poster, you can keep it visible throughout your presentation.

A couple of years ago, a firm was competing to win a big five-year project to remodel old school buildings and build all the new schools in Denver, and they wanted to prove to the school board that they were qualified to do the project. The company had previously worked with more than 350 other school districts doing similar projects, so they listed all of the school district names on a movie credit–style slide where each name rolled from the bottom of the slide up to the top. It was pretty impressive, but it didn’t make the kind of dramatic statement that they wanted. So we had one of their team members download a single picture from each of those 350 projects and create a poster for each of them. Because of a time crunch, they were able to get only about 125 created, but it was enough to create a pretty nice presence. When they set up the room, they lined each of the posters along the base of the wall in a U shape, and they had each poster tagged so that they could easily pull them out to reference them when they needed. As they began to present and tell their success stories, they would go to the appropriate poster, pull it out, and reference it during the story. When they were finished with that poster, they would place it back against the wall. They did this about six times during the presentation.

Because they pulled a single poster from the 125 posters for each story, the natural conclusion for the audience was, “Since they had a story for each of the posters that they pulled, they probably had a story for all of them.”

Use your visuals well and avoid “death by PowerPoint.”

USE AT LEAST ONE IMPACT IDEA FOR EACH BULLET

To create a knockout presentation that will cause your audience to realize just how much of an expert you are, take that skeleton of a presentation that we created in the previous chapter and add at least one impact idea to help you prove each of your bullet points. (I’d encourage you to add at least two or three if possible.)

The real beauty of a structure like this is that you don’t have to memorize anything. You could create a single PowerPoint slide with your title and three to five key points, and then prepare two or three impact ideas for each point to prove that it is true. If you prepare three impact ideas, choose the best two of the three and use them in your presentation, keeping the third impact idea in your pocket as a fallback if you find the audience confused or if someone asks you a question during the presentation.

Regardless, if you stand in front of the group and forget one of your impact ideas, who cares? You really need only one to prove your point, and when you get really comfortable with the structure, you will likely begin to add new proof on the spur of the moment because you think of an even better way to prove the point on the fly.

Most people will start with their slide show and design a bullet point for every concept they want to tell the audience about, using the slides as a prompt so that they don’t forget anything. Of course, the inevitable will happen. These presenters will either talk too long on every slide and begin to run out of time, or they will forget what they were going to say about one or more of the bullet points. It creates a mess to deliver and a mess for the audience to follow.

Instead, follow the simple structure I’ve outlined here. If you start to run out of time, just cut out a few of the details in one of your stories or skip an analogy. You really can’t forget anything, because whatever you end up saying is exactly what the audience thinks you prepared.

You will always be seen as the expert!