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Presenting With Impact

Dianna Booher

September 15, 2007

Excuse me for paraphrasing a cliché, but you are what you write and say. Your reputation with customers or colleagues often rests on a single interaction. Whether presenting in a boardroom or conducting daily business, you may only have one shot at communicating—not just your message, but who you are.

Creating Your Message: So What’s Your Point? You do have one, right? And a purpose? In any communication—whether a speech, e-mail, report, meeting, cafeteria poster, or trade show hospitality suite, identify your purpose: to inform, persuade, inspire, coach, commend, warn, entertain, introduce, overcome objections, respond to concerns, or answer questions. Once you’ve determined your real purpose, you can shape your one-sentence message as a road map.

Take a Point of View

Avoid hype as a form of persuasion. But remember that the absence of hype doesn’t mean the absence of opinion. Hired to help an investment company develop and shape their message, I listened to four executive vice presidents as they presented their segments of the “official” company overview. The General Counsel presented his overview of real estate investing and new regulatory laws relating to such. When he finished, I asked him, “Do you think real estate is a good investment for high net-worth individuals today?” “Absolutely,” he said. “The best. For several reasons.” And he listed them for me. “Why didn’t you include those reasons in your presentation?” I asked. “I did.” “I missed them.” “Maybe they didn’t come across as reasons. But the facts were there. The investor could have drawn that conclusion.” “But why would you leave it to the listener to draw that conclusion?” “Well, I’m a lawyer. I didn’t want to come across as a used car salesman.”

For the next hour, we discussed the differences between hype and a persuasive presentation. After all, his organization spent several million dollars annually flying in estate planners, financial advisors, brokers, and potential clients to persuade them to invest in real estate. Why would he not want to lead them to a conclusion? Be clear about your purpose. If you’re asked just to dump information, do it. But more often than not, you’re expected to take a point of view about the information you provide. That point of view involves the four S’s of persuasion to make sure all your listeners arrive at the same destination: solid facts, sound logic, straightforward language, and strong structure.

Translate Concepts Like “Vision,” “Strategy,” and “Initiatives” to Specifics

If you’re writing or speaking to an audience larger than one and using these vague terms, people are going to have different tasks in mind for their next week’s to-do list. Vision in Asian corporations often refers to plans to be executed 20 to 50 years into the future while vision in American companies may refer to next quarter. It’s not just the lower-ranking employees you address who’ll want more specifics. Political candidates receive as much criticism for vagueness on implementing their campaign promises as they do for their positions on controversial issues. People demand the particulars.

Remember That Facts Aren’t Reasons—Don’t Just Show a Scoreboard

Have you ever researched a “fact” on the Internet and found contradictory data? For example: What’s the literacy rate in the United States? According to the United Nations Development Programme Report 2005, the U.S. literacy rate is 97 percent. The U.S. Department of Education says it’s 90 percent. The latest National Adult Literacy Survey in the United States reports that the literacy rate is between 77 and 79 percent.

How about holiday spending? Family Life Communications research firm says that the average U.S. household spends $490 each year on Christmas gifts. The National Retail Federation reports that the average consumer spends $738 on holiday gifts. MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) says that the average household spends over $1,000 for gifts during the holidays. The fact is that facts can be false, wrong, misleading, or misinterpreted—purposefully or accidentally. According to Mark Twain writing in his autobiography, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Even if a fact happens to be correct, it doesn’t always double as a reason. For example, a salesperson may tell me that I can buy a caseload of off-brand PDA's for a special price of $99 each to give to key clients as a gift at the end of the year to express appreciation for their business. The salesperson may interpret that fact as a reason to make the purchase: a low price, a nice gift for clients. I may interpret that same fact as a reason not to make the purchase. No matter the special price, giving an off-brand to key clients may not create a good impression and instead may make my company look cheap. Facts are just facts, until you interpret them as reasons “for” or “against” something.

Make Your Facts Tell a Story

To be useful, facts need to serve some sort of strategy. The only thing worse than filling up your speech, slides, e-mails, or reports with fact after fact after fact … is not shaping them to tell your story. What story do your facts tell? What trail do the facts leave? Tell how your division exploded with the introduction of the new widget, and your headcount climbed from 3 to 68 engineers in the first two years you were in business. Then tell how you grew lax in your quality control. Tell about your reject rates. Show how the customer satisfaction numbers plummeted. Show how orders started dropping off as fast as they were logged onto the computer. Then circle back to the layoff of 58 engineers three years later. Then out of the ashes came … Well, you get the picture … Drama. Dialogue. Climax. Denouement. Set the scene at the trade show. How many competitors were there? How many attendees? Of those, how many did your booth attract? Why? What was the attraction—or non-attraction? What did the competitor do to drive you nuts? What kind of lead follow-up/closing ratio do you have to do after the trade show to make your competitors eat dust? Music, lights, camera, action. Facts alone will never feed the mind—at least not for long.

Analogy & Metaphor: Juicy Details Deliver Big Impact

Analogies lead to a conclusion based on a specific comparison and add significant impact to a factual argument. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, used this analogy in a recent report to shareholders: “Long-term thinking is both a requirement and an outcome of true ownership. Owners are different from tenants. I know of a couple who rented out their house and the family who moved in nailed their Christmas tree to the hardwood floors instead of using a tree stand. Expedient, I suppose, and admittedly these were particularly bad tenants, but no owner would be so short-sighted. Similarly, many investors are effectively short-term tenants, turning their portfolios over so quickly they are really just renting the stocks that they temporarily ‘own.’’’ We talk about “prime real estate” in referring to the home page of a Web site or placement above the fold in a newspaper or product catalog. Many Human Resource managers talk about “cafeteria” benefits to their employees. With just one word, this analogy implies that employees have a “menu” of benefits to select from, that a “parent” has agreed to cover the “total” invoice up to a certain amount, that employees select according to “taste or preferences” from that menu. Such comparisons as these don’t exactly solicit an emotional response; they simply clarify a complex concept. Metaphors, on the other hand, imply a comparison and typically evoke an emotion and a mindset. Both types of comparisons can be succinct, yet powerful ways to manage how people think about an idea or situation.

If you wanted to make the point that someone was not fully engaged with his or her colleagues in a mission, you might use a war metaphor: “John ducks into his cubicle as if it were a foxhole. He needs to stick his head out occasionally and help the rest of us fight the war. Otherwise, the parent company is going to take over the entire department.” If you wanted to talk about how indifference to quality customer service could destroy your business, you might put it in these terms: “Our poor customer service has become a cancer eating away at our business. I see customers walk in here and wait 10 minutes before being greeted. Then once we do help them locate what they need in the store, they have to wait again at the checkout. Then they wait again at the loading dock. The longer a customer stays in our store, it’s like our cancer metastasizes rather than goes into remission.” If you were making a point to your colleagues about the importance of living a balanced life, you might use a sports metaphor. “Most of us would agree life has many dimensions or tracks, all important to our overall well-being: mental, physical, spiritual. But some of us are spending all our time on one track and ignoring the rest, thinking we’re going to find satisfaction and fulfillment along the way. It’s not going to happen. That’s like entering a triathlon and practicing only the bicycling for the three months prior to the race.” Or there is always the classic command to, “Keep your eyes on the goal!” Any basketball player knows that you won’t score if your eyes stray even an inch off mark. It’s a simple way to remind coworkers that they won’t hit something that they’re not aiming for. “Dear Catherine….You are my true north.” Even when taken out of context, this famous line from the movie Message in a Bottle clearly describes a powerful love. Without knowing that they are written by a sailor who lost his life tragically and that that sailor is, in fact, Kevin Costner, reading them makes you want to know the guy. The analogy paints a picture of a deep relationship in two simple words.

Author Malcolm Gladwell uses the metaphor of “contagious disease” in his bestseller The Tipping Point to describe how ideas gradually “catch on” and spread in the general population. Metaphors and analogies, by their very selection, create a powerful way of thinking about an issue and often evoke a strong accompanying emotion that makes ideas memorable.

Truth that Tells, Truth that Sells

Learning from mistakes. Growing through change. The value of experience. Life’s greatest lessons are learned by living through memorable situations, whether good or bad, and not just talking about them. That’s why your mom was able to “get through to you” with stories of her high school mistakes in ways that she never would have if she had just said, “Don’t do it. You’ll be sorry.” When presenting an agenda, giving a speech, or trying to illustrate a point, actual experiences can be as strong as cold fact.

Captain Charlie Plumb, a jet fighter pilot who was shot down, forced to parachute into enemy hands, and held as a prisoner of war for nearly six years during the Vietnam War, tells a fascinating story. Several years after he was released from the POW camp, Charlie accidentally ran into the man who had packed his parachute! His story makes the point that none of us ever knows the impact we are having on the lives of others. And the point is so powerful that audiences remember it for years—even recapping it to their friends on the Internet and calling him years later to tell their own tales.

Whatever your message, stories will make it stronger: courage, determination, commitment, persistence, customer service, vision, caution, change. Consider all the stories that have created the rich cultures and legendary CEOs. There’s the story about the employee who made a costly mistake at IBM that cost the company $10,000, then walked into CEO Tom Watson’s office to offer his resignation. Watson’s famous line: “Why would I want your resignation? I just paid $10,000 for your education.” Then there’s the Disney story of Walt himself walking through the theme park, picking up trash. There’s the story of Sam Walton driving to work every day with his lunch in a brown bag. There’s the story of the Marriott bell captain giving a hotel guest his own shoes to wear for an early morning job interview. As a teenager in my first job at Six Flags over Texas theme parks, I heard stories about hosts and hostesses being sent home from work if they got a drip of chocolate ice cream on their white tennis shoes. You can be sure we didn’t show up with dirty shoes and disheveled hair if we wanted to be issued a uniform for the day and keep a summer job.

Such culture-creating stories still surface during my consulting projects. Perry, a financial advisor and now regional manager of a large brokerage house, encourages his trainees to use more stories in their sales presentations with clients by telling his own story of an earlier lost account. He was competing with another brokerage house for the 401(k) funds at a large hospital system in the Northeast. The hospital invited him and a competitor in to make a presentation to the group of employees, after which the employees could choose where to invest their 401(k) funds. Perry walked in with all the facts on his side—better yields, better customer service ratings, wider fund choices, more flexibility in the plans. His competitor walked in with a better presentation. She focused on a few stories of how her company got involved in the lives of their clients, helping them to achieve their personal goals, particularly in times of crisis. She walked away with 92 percent of the employee accounts; Perry, 8 percent. He attributed the loss solely to his competitor’s use of stories to make her points memorable.

Two years ago I heard Colin Powell address an audience in Chicago, where he captivated the crowd––not with platitudes, statistics, and studies about leadership––but with stories of leadership and what makes America great. He ended with a story about a Chicago restaurant owner and a group of foreign exchange students who couldn’t pay their dinner bill for the evening. Powell’s point was that the generosity of America would best be demonstrated to the world individual by individual rather than through acts of government. Drive your point home with a well-chosen story. On the other hand, never use a $100 story in a three-minute time slot to make a nickel point. Make sure the point deserves a story. Consider carefully as you develop your message. Is your goal that of retention and impact? If so, create, shape, and deliver accordingly, with analogies, statistics, and words that persuade listeners to believe in the point you’re making.

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