Everyone faces challenges when making a presentation. Some are crippled by anxiety; others don’t know what to do with their bodies. One recent client, an entrepreneur/engineer I’ll call J, failed to correctly assess his audience. This was almost fatal.
J called me in a panic ten days before he was to address a large manufacturer about the intersection of technology and toys. The stakes were high: he was hoping the company would acquire his startup or at least make a substantial investment. (No matter how high you’re reaching, it helps to know what you’re gunning for. It focuses the mind and informs all content decisions.)
Before beginning, I explained that one-on-one training is highly immersive and varies depending on each client’s concerns. It can include content creation, strengthening delivery, or selecting the most intriguing visuals. Overall, it equips clients with tools that enable them to share their ideas, personality, and stories with an audience of 1 or 1,000. These are tools — not rules – that you’ll employ given the audience, setting, and desired outcome. I stressed that a great presenter allows his or her passion to shine through. Connecting emotionally with an audience is the goal. Once that’s established everything flows.
J was facing 450 executives and his aim was to provoke them by showing them how out of touch they were with the buying patterns of millennial parents. He wanted to pique them further by telling them that by ignoring new technologies they were making themselves irrelevant. In short, he was going to insult his audience.
Never a good idea.
I suggested instead that he tell them a story, recounting his own journey to parenthood and how it affected his decision to launch a tech company aimed at new moms and dads. As a nervous father J was constantly checking on his baby while she slept, fearful that she might stop breathing. The technology he ended up developing turns data – room temperature, outside noise, an infant’s rate of breathing — into immediate feedback that reassures parents that all’s well. It saved him sleep and saved his marriage. In other words: rather than telling the execs how out of touch their company was, he told them how out of touch he was.
J took it on and embellished the story with a few carefully selected statistics to bolster his argument. He was insightful about how growing up in a digitally connected world was changing the ways millennial parents viewed their lives, even something as simple as a toy, and he had a few specific stories to back this up.
Once the content was compelling we moved to delivery.
J speaks with machine-gun rapidity so we practiced dramatic pausing to slow him down. At 6’4” he is a big guy so he learned to use his body to control the energy in the room. We worked on replacing filler words (“you know,” “um,” “like,” “actually”) with powerful language. Finally, I urged him to leave his audience with One Big Thought to chew on – one Tweetable line — which he was able to do. This speech was compiled, practiced, and refined over 8 hours.
After his talk, I asked J how it went: “I killed it, in their words,” he told me. “They are now offering up strategic investment of $5 million.”
He added that after his presentation he was swarmed with questions — that’s a great way to gauge a presentation’s success and the value of training. The $5 million investment didn’t hurt either.