In Chapter 10, “Bringing Your Story to Life,” you read abut the Bookends linkage: start your presentation with an anecdote or data point, and never mention that item again until your conclusion. The two references then serve as symmetrical brackets for your presentation. Once again, I’ll practice what I preach: In the Introduction, I recounted my experience with Jeff Raikes at Microsoft; and so, in the style of a Puccini opera or Broadway musical, let’s reprise that anecdote.

I spent an entire session working with Jeff to focus and organize his story, and never once addressed his vocal inflection or gestures. But that focus paid off. Jeff’s delivery of his presentation rang with conviction, because getting his story right gave him the confidence to express himself with assurance. The lesson: A well-prepared story enhances a presenter’s delivery skills.

Jeff Raikes’ case in point applies to every presenter. Persuading your audience is, above all, a matter of being prepared with a logical, compelling, relevant, and well-articulated story. You need to know where you want to lead your audience, your Point B, and how you will get them there. To do that, you need to focus on the most essential elements of your story, arrange them in a lucid flow, and convey them with frequent emphasis on the specific benefits, the WIIFYs, your audience will enjoy if they heed your call to action. Finally, you need to support your presentation with Less Is More graphics that express your ideas clearly. Your audience is then free to concentrate on you and your discussion . . . Presenter Focus.

If you prepare your presentation with all these elements at their optimum, a remarkable thing happens: Your speaking skills improve significantly. Knowing that you are fully in command of your story inevitably enhances your self-confidence and poise, resulting in a far more polished and convincing presentation. That’s the discipline by which most persuasive battles are won.

Are the specifics of the presenter’s voice and body language important? Absolutely! Think of the diligently crafted story and graphics as a highly sophisticated communications satellite, and the presenter as a powerful Atlas rocket. NASA spends millions of dollars and thousands of hours building such satellites. If the rocket, the delivery system, is defective, the satellite doesn’t go into orbit. The same is true of the presentation. If the messenger is defective, the message goes awry. The well-designed substance needs an effective delivery style to lift the payload into orbit.

However, if I were to ask you to work on your delivery style before your story and graphics were “baked,” it would be like asking you to swim with your feet tied together. For this reason, I have deliberately focused on the clarity of your content in this book and have separated your delivery skills into a separate book, The Power Presenter.

There are several other reasons for this partitioning. In the first place, businesspeople are not performers, nor are they receptive to being treated as performers. If you focused on your delivery skills upfront, you’d feel pressured to perform. If instead you focus on your story first, you can approach those skills in a natural and conversational manner.

This raises another subtle but important point: When most normal businesspeople stand to speak, they experience a sudden rush of performance anxiety. A study cited in The Book of Lists, by David Wallechinsky, ranks speaking before a group as the highest anxiety-provoking event, topping fear of heights, insects, flying, and even death. The human body’s instinctive reaction to anxiety is increased adrenaline flow, which makes any possible natural behavior almost impossible. Fight or flight follows. But clarity of mind diminishes performance anxiety.

Another reason for excluding delivery skills from this book has to do with how the presenter relates to the graphics. Because most slides are all too often guilty of the Data Dump sin, they create a negative effect on the delivery skills: The presenter is forced to turn to the screen and read the slides verbatim, thus evoking resentment from the audience. They think, “I can read it myself!”

The solution is to coordinate the delivery skills, the slide design, and the narrative. This is a unique skill, called Graphics Synchronization that you can find in the pages of The Power Presenter, but even there, the essential starting point is effective graphic design. If you design your slides using the Less Is More principle, you will be free to concentrate on addressing the audience directly and adding narrative value . . . further support for Presenter Focus.

Your sense of self-confidence and your ability to persuade will be even further enhanced if you devote sufficient time to polishing and practicing your presentation after you’ve done your basic preparation. This means Verbalization, one of the essential keys to making your presentation truly effective. Simply put, the more time you allot to Verbalization, and to its vital counterpart, Spaced Learning (the opposite of cramming), the better your presentation will be.

Spaced Learning will help you take command of your presentation and make you more confident when you deliver it. You will be less rushed and more poised. Spaced Learning will also help you give your presentation greater polish. Each time you practice Verbalization, you will find new ways to clarify your story. Finally, Spaced Learning will give you the time to make your presentation more succinct: to trim deadwood, eliminate interesting but irrelevant detail, and hone your fine points. The result will be a finely sharpened message.

Here’s a checklist for your practice:

Make good presentation practices habitual so that you employ them almost without thinking. Verbalization and Spaced Learning are enormously powerful tools that enhance the effectiveness of every other technique you’ve learned in these pages. Practice them!

You’ve seen many of the concepts in this book illustrated with examples from my work with companies preparing for their IPO road shows. Presenting an IPO road show is the ultimate in mission-critical assignments: It’s like piloting a space shuttle flight, conducting the New York Philharmonic, competing in the Olympic finals, or pitching the seventh game of the World Series. I hope you’ve found these IPO stories to be clear illustrations of the Power Presentations techniques.

More importantly, I hope you’ve recognized that these very same techniques can and should be used in every presentation or speech. Their fundamentals have existed since Aristotle. They have been used by Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. You can use them too.

You may have a long and successful business career and never have the opportunity to present in an IPO road show. You may work in a field that isn’t usually considered part of the business world: in a government agency, a community organization, or a not-for-profit group that provides many important and valuable services to our society. You may even work on a strictly unpaid, volunteer basis, perhaps as an officer of the Rotary club, the school board, or a charitable foundation.

No matter what kind of presentations you make, no matter where you make them, and no matter who your audiences are, you want to make your presentations as powerful and as persuasive as possible. The challenge is as urgent as convincing your company’s executive team to support your new business idea, as close to home as winning your neighbor’s support in a local election, or as personal as capturing the delighted interest of a classroom of first-graders on Open School day. In every case, your results are on the line.

If a presentation is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well. Be all that you can be. Invest the time and energy to make every presentation a Power Presentation.

You may never get to pitch in the seventh game of the World Series, but every time you set out to persuade, you’re pitching in the majors. Go for the win!