Few human activities are done as often as presentations, and as poorly. One recent estimate has it that 30 million presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint slides are made every day. I’m sure that you’ve attended more than a few. How many of them were truly memorable, effective, and persuasive? Probably only a handful.
The vast majority of presentations fall prey to what is known as the Five Cardinal Sins:
- No clear point. The audience leaves the presentation wondering what it was all about. How many times have you sat all the way through a presentation and, at the end, said to yourself, “What was the point?”
- No audience benefit. The presentation fails to show how the audience can benefit from the information presented. How many times have you sat through a presentation and repeatedly said to yourself, “So what?”
- No clear flow. The sequence of ideas is so confusing that it leaves the audience behind, unable to follow. How many times have you sat through a presentation and, at some point, said to yourself, “Wait a minute! How did the presenter get there?”
- Too detailed. So many facts are presented, including facts that are overly technical or irrelevant, that the main point is obscured. How many times have you sat in on a presentation and, at some point, said to yourself, “What does that mean?”
- Too long. The audience loses focus and gets bored before the presentation ends. How many times in your entire professional career have you ever heard a presentation that was too short?
When presenters commit any of these sins, they are wasting the time, energy, and attention of their audience. What’s more, they are thwarting their own objectives.
Each of these Five Sins is quite separate and distinct from the others. Here’s an analogy to illustrate:
Suppose you and I were chatting, and I said, “Let me tell you about what I had for dinner last night.” My presentation would have a point, wouldn’t it? You’d know what I intended to do, and I wouldn’t be committing Sin #1.
But why on Earth should you care about what I had for dinner last night? Unless you had said, “Jerry, I’m bored with all the restaurants in the area. Can you recommend a new place?” Then, by telling you about the excellent meal I had at a hot new bistro last night, I would be providing a benefit to you, and I’d avoid Sin #2.
Now, if I told you about my fine meal by starting with the dessert, then I went back to the salad, then jumped forward to the cheese course, then back to the main course, my story would have no flow. If instead I went from soup to nuts, it would have a clear and orderly path, and I’d eliminate Sin #3.
If I described the courses I ate by using the phylum, class, order, genus, and species of every animal and vegetable product in the dinner, it would be far too technical and too detailed. If instead I confined my description to colorful adjectives and simple nouns, I would avoid Sin #4.
Finally, if I took five hours to tell you about a meal that took me only two hours to consume, my presentation would be too long. If instead I did it in five minutes, I’d escape Sin #5.
This analogy may be extreme, but the Five Cardinal Sins are all too real. And although each of the five is unique and independent of the others, they can all be summarized in a least common denominator, a Data Dump: an excessive, meaningless, shapeless outpouring of data without purpose or plan. The inevitable reaction of audiences to a Data Dump is not persuasion, but rather the dreadful effect known as MEGO: Mine Eyes Glaze Over.
The inevitable reaction of audiences to a Data Dump is not persuasion, but rather the dreadful effect known as MEGO: Mine Eyes Glaze Over.
Why? Why would any presenter in his or her right mind do that to any audience? Would you do that if you were trying to attract potential clients? Would you do that if you were trying to clinch a sale, raise investment capital, or convince analysts that your company is solid? Hardly.
The objectives of all the preceding presentations are varied, but they all have one factor in common. In every case, you are trying to persuade your audience to do your bidding, to respond to your call to action, whether that means endorsing a proposal, signing a contract, writing a check, or working harder and smarter. The Five Cardinal Sins stand in the way of achieving that goal.
Most people in business, including the most successful ones, are too busy living their stories to focus on telling them. They spend 12 or 14 hours every day working on competitive strategies, product launches, financial analyses, marketing plans, mergers and acquisitions, sales pitches . . . the plethora of vital business details that fill your days, too. They live, eat, sleep, breathe, dream, and inhale their businesses. They see every single one of the trees, but not the forest. They rarely have the opportunity, or feel the need, to take several long steps back from the details to visualize the whole and then describe it compellingly.
For most businesspeople, when a situation arises in which they must sell their business story, their intense involvement in the minutia often proves to be a hindrance. They mistakenly think that for the audience to understand anything, they have to be told everything. That’s like being asked the time and responding with complete instructions for building a clock.
The remedy is painfully apparent: Focus. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Give the audience only what they need to know.
As social animals, we humans find ourselves called upon to persuade other humans almost every day. Persuasion is one of the crucial skills of life. The persuasive situations you may face will be remarkably varied, each posing its own unique challenges and opportunities.
Yet all presentation situations have one element in common. Whether it’s a formal presentation, speech, sales pitch, seminar, jury summation, or pep talk, every communication has as its goal to take the audience from where they are at the start of your presentation, which is Point A, and move them to your objective, which is Point B. This dynamic shift is persuasion.
Every communication has as its goal to take the audience from where they are at the start of your presentation, which is Point A, and move them to your objective, which is Point B.
Recognizing this truth is the best starting point to learn the art of persuasion. Your presentation may be entertaining, eloquent, or impressive, but that’s not your main purpose in offering it. Your main and only purpose is to move people to Point B. That’s the point! When your point is not clear, you have committed one of the Five Cardinal Sins; when your point, Point B, is readily apparent, you have made your clarion call to action.
Let’s take a closer look at what’s involved in the challenge of moving an audience from Point A to Point B. In psychological terms, Point A is the inert place where your audience starts: uninformed, knowing little about you and your business; dubious, skeptical about your business and ready to question your claims; or, in the worst-case scenario, resistant, firmly committed to a position contrary to what you’re asking them to do.
What you are asking them to do is Point B. The precise nature of your Point B depends on the particular situation you face. To reach Point B, you need to move the uninformed audience to understand, the dubious audience to believe, and the resistant audience to act in a particular way. In fact, understand, believe, and act are not three separate goals, but three stages in reaching a single, cumulative, ultimate goal. After all, the audience will not act as you want them to if they don’t first understand your story and believe the message it conveys.
When I coach the executives of a company to prepare for their IPO road show, the audience for whom they’re preparing will be composed of prospective investors. Point B is the moment at which those investors are willing to sell some of their holdings in Intel or Microsoft and invest those valuable assets in shares of the fledging company.
Dan Warmenhoven, the CEO of Network Appliance at the time the company went public, began his IPO road show with this opening statement: “What’s in a name? What’s an appliance? A toaster is an appliance. It does one thing and one thing well: It toasts bread. Managing data on networks is complicated. Until now, data has been managed by devices that do many things, not all of them well. Our company makes a product called a file server. A file server does one thing and does it well: It manages data on networks.”
If Dan had stopped there, his investor audience would have understood what his company did. But I coached Dan to go beyond that description to add: “When you think of the explosive growth of data in networks, you can see that our file servers are positioned to be a vital part of that growth, and Network Appliance is positioned to grow as a company. We invite you to join us in that growth.”
That last sentence is the call to action. Notice that Dan did not ask the investor audience to buy his stock. That would have been presumptuous and unnecessary; after all, their very job titles included the word “invest.” But the additional sentences gave Dan the opportunity to lead his audience from Point A to Point B. A synonym for “lead” is “manage.” The subliminal perception, then, is Effective Management.
Point B, then, is the endgame of every presentation: its goal. The only sure way to create a successful presentation is to begin with the goal in mind.
This is an age-old concept. Aristotle called it teleology: the study of matters with their end or purpose in mind. Today’s business gurus market the same idea. In Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he stresses the importance of starting with the objective in sight. Aristotle in modern terms.
Few executives study Aristotle these days, but Covey has been read by millions, to say nothing of the countless others who’ve heard about his ideas from friends and colleagues. Nonetheless, this crucial concept of starting with the goal in mind hasn’t penetrated our thinking about presentations. Think of the many times when, after sitting through an entire presentation, you asked yourself, “What was the point?” One of the Five Cardinal Sins. The missing point is Point B: the call to action.
Unfortunately, and inexplicably, Point B is missing from all too many presentations.
If you’re a sales professional, how can your customer reach the point of making a purchase unless you ask for the sale? If you’re a corporate manager, how can the members of your team agree to support your new business initiative unless you tell them unmistakably what you need them to do, and explicitly ask for their help? If you’re an ambitious young worker, how can your manager give you the raise or promotion you desire unless you ask for it?
Obvious? Maybe. But it’s surprisingly common for businesspeople to forget to focus on Point B when they communicate. If you start your persuasive process with a clear focus on Point B, you’ll have a far better chance of ending there, accompanied by your audience. Ask for the order! Call your audience to action! Get to the point! Get to your Point B!
For the presenter to succeed in achieving the clarion call to action, the audience must be brought into equal focus with the presenter’s objectives. To establish that balance, let me introduce the term Audience Advocacy. Mastering Audience Advocacy means learning to view yourself, your company, your story, and your presentation through the eyes of your audience.
Mastering Audience Advocacy means learning to view yourself, your company, your story, and your presentation through the eyes of your audience.
In programs with my clients, I role-play potential investors, prospective customers, or would-be partners. In developing my own program material, I take the point of view of my clients. You must do the same in whatever presentation you are developing. Take your audience’s point of view. This is a shift in thinking that requires both knowledge and practice.
Let’s refer again to Aristotle, that pioneer in the art of persuasion. In his master work, the Rhetoric, Aristotle identified the key elements of persuasion, the most important of which he called, in the Greek of his day, pathos. Pathos refers to the persuader’s ability to connect with the feelings, desires, wishes, fears, and passions of the audience. The English words we use today reveal connections with the ancient Greek root of pathos. Think of “empathy” and “sympathy,” for example. Aristotle wrote: “ . . . persuasion may come through the hearers when the speech stirs their emotions. Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.”[1]
The question is: How can you communicate so that your audience will be pleased, friendly, and ready to act on your Point B? My experience, and that of thousands of my clients, suggests that the best method is Audience Advocacy. Everything you say and do in your presentation must serve the needs of your audience.
It’s a simple concept, yet profoundly important. If Audience Advocacy guides your every decision in preparing your presentation, you’ll be effective and persuasive.
One way to understand the concept of Audience Advocacy more fully is via one of the classic rules of advertising and sales, still emphasized in those professions today because it is so fundamental . . . the distinction between Features and Benefits. This distinction is vitally important whenever you’re called upon to sell your story. In fact, when you shift the focus of any presentation from Features to Benefits, you heighten the chances of winning converts to your cause.
A Feature is a fact or quality about you or your company, the products you sell, or the idea you’re advocating. By contrast, a Benefit is how that fact or quality will help your audience. When you seek to persuade, it’s never enough to present the Features of what you’re selling; every Feature must always be translated into a Benefit. Whereas a Feature may be irrelevant to the needs or interests of your audience, a Benefit, by definition, is always relevant. Without Benefits, you have no Audience Advocacy. For people to act on anything, they must have a reason to act, and the reason must be theirs, not yours.
For people to act on anything, they must have a reason to act, and it must be their reason, not yours.
The same principle applies to any persuasive challenge you face. Features are of interest only to the persuader; Benefits are of interest to the audience. Go with Benefits every time.
You can create an effective presentation only if you know your audience: what they’re interested in, what they care about, the problems they face, the biases they hold, the dreams they cherish. This means doing your homework. If you’re in sales, for example, it’s imperative that you take the time to get to know your customers: how and why they could use your product, their financial constraints, their competitive issues, and how your product can help them achieve their personal or professional goals. And while you need to understand them as representatives of the marketplace or of a client company, you also need to understand them as human beings. What are their biggest headaches, fears, worries, aspirations, needs, loves, and hates? How can what you have to offer serve them?
At times, your interests and those of your audience are bound to diverge, which creates the potential for conflict and frustration. You may dearly desire that raise, that lucrative sales contract, or that crucial loan or investment needed to keep your business afloat. Inevitably, your audience members will have their own motivations and issues that differ from yours. The art of persuasion must be balanced by Audience Advocacy: convincing your audience that what you want will serve their interests, too.
Alex Naqvi was the CEO of Luminous Networks, a private Silicon Valley company that has since been acquired by Adtran. Luminous’ technology provided optical Ethernet solutions that enabled the giant telecommunications carriers to deliver, on a single platform, a combination of Internet traffic, interactive and broadcast video, and voice services. Although a veteran in the industry, Alex usually found the telecoms, as they are known in the trade, a crowd that is an especially tough sell. But Alex learned to recognize, understand, and respond to the interests and feelings of those audiences. Alex explained:
Our new technology makes it possible for telecoms to deliver better Internet service more economically than ever before. We thought that using Luminous Networks would be a no-brainer for any telecom manager.
Unfortunately, we weren’t considering the point of view of our audience. I’m thinking of one potential customer in particular: a big, important telecom with a long history in the industry. Many of the managers we were hoping to sell our services to had been with the firm for 20 years. They were conservative and maybe a little afraid of the new and the unknown . . . both of which Luminous represented.
In our early days, we didn’t understand how to reach out to an audience like that. We went in with a rather cocky attitude, talking about how our technology was “a radical paradigm shift for the new century.” We described its advantages in a way that implied that anyone who didn’t get it was probably kind of dumb.
Looking back, it’s easy to see our mistake. We were alienating the very people we needed to win over. No wonder they didn’t want to buy from us.
In time, we learned to soften our presentations. We started describing our technology not as a radical shift, but as a natural evolution from the current technology. We learned to send the message: “You’re not dumb. The technology you now have in place was perfectly appropriate for its day. But now the world has changed, and Luminous is ready with the next-generation technology you and your customers need.” As you can imagine, our sales results are a lot better with this approach!
It’s funny: As engineers, we tend to look at the challenge of selling our story as a lifeless, logical proposition. We forget the human factor. The message must be honed to address those human motivations. We forget that it’s living people we are selling to!
Let’s review what we’ve discussed so far.
When stories are complicated, when continuity is absent, when the audience is overwhelmed, and when the presenter doesn’t establish a clear bond with the audience, presentations fail. The MEGO syndrome sets in. As a result, no business gets done: The investment isn’t made, the deal isn’t consummated, the sale doesn’t happen.
Your goal, of course, is just the opposite: to get your audience figuratively or literally to ask, “Where do I sign?” That is the essence of persuasion.
Persuasion is the art of moving your audience from Point A, a place of ignorance, indifference, or even hostility, toward your goal . . . navigating them through an unbroken series of Aha!s . . . to Point B, a place where they will act as your investors, customers, partners, or advocates, ready to march to your drum.
You can move your audiences along this path only when you follow the principles of Audience Advocacy: to place their needs at the heart of your presentation. The central expression of Audience Advocacy is presenting Benefits rather than Features.
Few communicators achieve the sheer exhilaration of end-to-end Aha!s. But most communicators can come a lot closer than they usually do . . . as you will when you apply the Power Presentations techniques in this book.