Chapter 4
Putting Your Dynamic Presentation Together and Delivering It without Any Notes
“In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.”
—Aristotle
Let’s review the process that we’ve covered so far. Step 1 is to create a title that is audience focused. Step 2 is to limit your key points to the top three, four, or five points. Step 3 is to insert proof or evidence that each of your points is true. When determining what evidence to include in your presentation, scan the list of 10 impact ideas and insert the ones that work best. All you really need is one piece of proof, but if you use a combination of two or three impact ideas, you will increase your credibility and become more persuasive.
Consider that each story, anecdote, or audience participation that you insert into your bullet points will take you between 1 and 2 minutes to deliver. So these three impact ideas should be the foundation that you use for each point. Use stories to convey facts and figures by telling the story behind the numbers. If you add in a quote or an analogy every once in a while, it should take your at least 3 minutes and maybe as long as 10 minutes to relay each of your key points. When you put it all together, your well-designed three-point talk will take between 10 and 30 minutes to deliver. If you design a five-point talk, it can last as little as 20 minutes or as long as an hour.
Why the big variance in time? It depends entirely on how detailed you are when you give your examples and stories and how many impact ideas you insert for each point. One of the things that I love about this structure is that it allows the presenter to hit his or her time allotment exactly every single time. Let’s say that you have been given a 45-minute time slot, and just before you go on, the organizer of the meeting tells you that the earlier speakers went over, so they have to cut your time to 30 minutes. No problem. Just cut out an impact idea or two or give fewer details in a few of your stories. This structure puts you entirely in control of the timing of your presentation.
This aspect alone will put you into an elite group of presenters, because there are very few speakers out there—even professional speakers—who can hit an exact time frame, especially if the original time frame is changed on the fly. Most keynote speakers have a few standard speeches that they practice over and over until they are able to hit an exact time frame. Then they promote that 60-minute keynote without a whole lot of options. Because I use the structure just described, I have a distinct advantage over other speakers. If a client wants me to speak for 37 minutes, no problem. If a client needs me to speak for 74 minutes, no problem. If a client wants me to create an entirely new presentation based on another area of my expertise, no problem.
This flexible structure makes designing and delivering presentations unbelievably easy!
A few years ago, I was hired to deliver a keynote speech for an association of sales professionals in Chicago. Since I write presentations for a living and I use this structure, I knew that it would take me only a few minutes to design the presentation. I jotted down a few ideas on the plane ride to O’Hare Airport. Unfortunately, I’m embarrassed to say, six months prior to the presentation, when I was hired, the organizer and I had agreed on a topic that was different from the one that I prepared on the plane. As the organizer was calling the meeting to order, I looked on the agenda and realized my error—about 30 seconds before I was to be introduced. Sheer panic set in almost immediately, and my stomach churned. But as I was walking to the front, all I had to really think of on the spot were five key points related to the topic, which was actually pretty easy, because the topic was, “Five Key Things That You Can Do to Increase Sells in a Down Economy.” I asked myself, “If this group walked away with only one key way to increase their sales in this economy, what would be most valuable for them?” And I had my first point. Then I asked myself, “What real-life story can I use to explain this point?” and I had my first piece of evidence. I literally designed the entire speech as I was giving it.
When the presentation was over, I received a huge round of applause and the organizer came up to me to tell me that of all of the presenters who had spoken to the group that year, my presentation was probably the best. He then hired me on the spot to deliver another presentation a year later. Interestingly, the speech I gave the next year was on “How to Design a Custom Presentation on the Fly,” and I told them the self-deprecating story of what I had done the previous year as my introduction. Since many of the people in the audience the second year had also been there the prior year, they were amazed that I had created that entire speech the prior year while I was actually on stage giving the speech.
Now, I do not suggest that you design your presentations while you are in the process of giving them. I put myself in a terrible situation that could have cheated my audience and ruined my career, and it was entirely my own fault. However, because I had an expertise that is elusive to most speakers, I still succeeded.
If you master this process, you will become bulletproof (no pun intended) when you present your ideas to audiences.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE CONTROL OVER THE CONTENT?
Okay, we don’t live in a Pollyanna society, and we sometimes have very little control over our content. For instance, one of the most difficult (and dangerous) presentations to deliver occurs when someone else designs a presentation and simply gives the presenter a slide deck. “Here is your presentation; now go deliver it.” In addition, sometimes the meeting organizer will give you an agenda to follow. In many of the sales or interview presentations that I’ve referenced earlier, the prospective purchasers will send over a list of 10, 15, or 20 items that they want covered in the presentation, and they will often send this list to all of the presenters at the eleventh hour. A situation like this will limit your flexibility as the presenter. Sometimes, because of legal issues, presenters are asked to deliver only preapproved presentations or slide decks. Many big companies often create an approved presentation and then require that all of their salespeople use the same presentation. If you own a franchise or are a financial planner, realtor, or some other type of independent business owner working under a license, then you might be limited somewhat to what the parent organization has approved.
If you are forced to do it, can you give a 10-point talk in 15 minutes? Sure you can, but you need to manage your expectations. This type of presentation will likely be very difficult to deliver, and unless you are just incredibly charismatic and energetic, the presentation will be difficult to listen to as well. You also want to keep in mind that the audience members will likely not remember a lot of your content, because they will probably be overwhelmed. But you can do it.
Following are a few tips that can help you get better results.
BREAK UP THE BIG PRESENTATION INTO MULTIPLE PRESENTATIONS
If you have lots of content that you have to cover, then the best way to deliver all of your points is to break the presentation up into two or more different speeches. This is the technique that I used when I created my original leadership class, High Impact Leaders. I wrote a book called 28 Ways to Influence People & Gain “Buy-In”, which identifies a single leadership principle for readers to apply every day for 28 consecutive days. It takes about 28 days to create a new habit, so this daily activity reinforces the leadership activity. The original High Impact Leaders class was composed of four individual seminars spaced a week apart, and in each session, we covered only the seven principles that the participants would be focusing on in the upcoming week. Then, a week later, we’d come back and cover the next seven for four consecutive weeks.
I know what you are thinking . . . “Wait a minute, Doug. You said that people will retain only three to five points, so why did you cover seven principles instead of five?” Well, because I had to. Just like the situations that you will find yourself in where you have to cover more than five points, I created one of these situations myself. However, I created a couple of additions to the program that made the retention of information much more solid. First, I created a desktop card file that looks like a set of business cards, and each card has one principle on the front of it. Participants would flip a card every day and get a daily reminder of the content (so, in effect, each day they were receiving a one-point talk).
The point, though, is that if I had given the audience the 28 principles in a single sitting, no one would remember any of them when the presentation was over. But when I broke the 28 principles into four different presentations, the retention went up exponentially.
INSERT A SHORT BREAK
Another option that you can use is to just insert a short break once you cover a few points. This is an easy option, because your break doesn’t have to be a formal break. If you have 10 points, cover five of them, and then just say, “Hey, I’ve been speaking for a while, so let’s just take a 3-minute stretch break so that you can refill your coffee. No need to leave the room, though, because we’ll be taking a formal break in about 25 minutes.”
The neat thing about this option is that you don’t need to get an organizer’s permission to do it, because it doesn’t affect the agenda at all. However, if you are able, you could insert a formal break between your two parts and get much better results. For instance, if you are doing a breakout session with 10 items, then talk to the coordinator about giving you two consecutive breakout sessions and create a “Part 1” and a “Part 2.”
GIVE PRINTED MATERIAL FOR ALL OF THE CONTENT BUT DELIVER ONLY A FEW OF THE POINTS
Years ago, I had a person from Hewlett-Packard (HP) attend one of my coaching sessions. She was an account rep, which basically means that she was one of the few top-level salespeople at her company who handle their really, really big accounts. These salespeople are the best-of-the-best in the companies (their Top Guns), and they got to this level because they are confident and because they are problem solvers. After a few years, HP had a big problem. These high-level sales reps were creating presentations for their clients that were creative and on the cutting edge but that were sometimes contradictory and sometimes even different from what HP was distributing corporately. Out of necessity, HP made a corporate decision to create one big, all-encompassing preapproved slide deck that all of the account reps were required to use in their presentations. This slide deck included more than 100 slides, and most of the presentations that these sales reps delivered were less than an hour long. So when this account rep came to my class, she had a pretty big challenge.
What she ended up doing was printing off her slide deck as a “leave behind.” Then based on the needs of the client that she was delivering to, she went to only 5 of the 100 slides during her delivery. At the beginning of her presentations, she would always say, “I know that you have a team of people who really like to see all of the details, so I am leaving a bound packet of information that I have indexed for you. But based on my discussions with you, it looks like you are most interested in . . .” She would then move to the slides that she had previously identified as the most important ones.
DELIVER EVERY POINT, BUT REINFORCE A FEW OF THE POINTS SEPARATELY
One of my favorite ways to cover a lot of data and still get the audience to remember some of the content is to deliver every point in a cursory fashion but then go back and reinforce three or so points more thoroughly. When I deliver the 10 impact ideas in my classes, I use this technique. I give the audience a handout with the 10 points (I don’t have a slide with all 10 points), and I spend about 30 to 60 seconds covering each point. This allows me to get through all 10 impact ideas in about 15 minutes. Then I go back and cover the three most important points (typically stories, audience participation, and analogies) with a single slide that includes these most important points. I spend 30 minutes or longer on the three most important points, so, with the 15-minute overview, the session typically lasts just about 45 minutes. Because I reinforce the three main ideas at the conclusion of the presentation, the audience knows exactly what I believe are the most important of the items that I’ve covered.
This is the technique that I encourage presenters to use when they are conducting sales interviews or if they are delivering a short list presentation and the purchaser sends over a long list of items to cover at the eleventh hour. Answer or cover every item, but focus on the items that are going to be most important to the purchaser.
More on this in Chapter 8.