We have a talk coming up which we have to give to a business audience and we work hard on the preparation.  We make sure that we don’t suck up all of the time though, with preparing the slide deck and forget to do our rehearsal.  This run through of the talk before we give it live, is a key component of getting our timing right and our cadence flowing.  This makes us easy to follow for the listeners and allows the talk to move seamlessly through the different chapters of the content.

We arrive early to the venue and start interacting with our audience as they arrive.  We try and meet as many people as possible and build that powerful personal connection.  We ask them why they chose to attend, what are they doing at the moment, what are they interested in, etc.  As the speaker we want to try and demolish that invisible wall separating us from the attendees. We are trying to form a collective, where we are all members together, trying to locate pertinent answers to business conundrums we are all facing.  Their feedback is also useful for us to further refine the delivery of the talk to include some issues they have raised. 

Everyone is naturally totally preoccupied with themselves and their problems, so we need a blockbuster opening to grab everyone’s attention from the start.  At the end, we wrap it up with a sharp summary or a call to action, such that our words are still ringing in their ears, as they wind their way out of the venue.  All the technical aspects of the talk need to be in place.

We can’t be satisfied with this though.  We need to be aiming to strongly engage our audience during our talk.  Sounds easy.  However, think back and consider how many speakers you have sat through, who managed to really engage their audiences?  I am guessing very few or certainly not enough.  Why is that the case?  We would expect that this engagement process would be a big part of the speaker’s efforts to sell their message. 

We want to get the audience on our side and we want to establish rapport and build trust, so they buy what we are saying.  The problem is often the speaker has a misconception of their role.  They think they are there to pile on the information, data, statistics, evidence, etc., and if they do that, then they will be successful as a presenter.

The problem with this approach is it can be very dry, boring and painful to sit through.  Reeling off numbers is a favourite but often it is an abstraction.  We leave the listeners to do all of the hard work to connect these numbers to their individual realities.  For example, I could note that Government figures talk about the number of Japanese aged 15-34 having halved over the last twenty years and that they will halve again by 2060.  Now this is a very abstract idea and useful to a point, but what are the audience members supposed to do with those numbers?

Instead, I could reference those same numbers and then add, “So what does this mean for all of us in this room?”   This is a nice framing exercise to stimulate everyone to start thinking about how to connect the data to their own situation.  We could then go on to add, “basically the data shows we are running out of young Japanese to hire for our firms and we are heading into a zero sum game headwind of winners and losers in recruiting staff.  Which one are you planning for, to be a winner or a loser, in this war for talent?”.  Now I have successfully connected the numbers with a real business problem, they are all either facing now or will face in the future, regardless of their industry or the age and stage of their business.

I could take it even further and start adding in a story from my own experience to really drive home the point and make a common cause with my audience.  After telling them the numbers and asking about whether they will be winner or losers, I could relate a relevant anecdote. 

I could say, “As I stand here, I reflect on this for myself.  Ten years ago, I would have a nice thick pile of resumes on my desk to sort through and plenty of options about who to choose for my new staff.  Each year however, I started to notice that the size of that pile of resumes was getting smaller and smaller and so were my options. I also noticed that the candidates seem to be gaining a lot more choices about accepting offers.  They were becoming pickier and pickier about who they would choose to join.  It has become harder than ever to actually recruit staff. I am sure I am not the only one here to have this experience, which just underlines that we have to switch our thinking about recruiting and retaining staff”.

Even if they hadn’t personally been in a position of responsibility to recruit staff, everyone in the room can get the point. It makes the statistics come alive as a real business problem we are all facing, as the Japanese population continues its unstoppable decline. They are going to be sitting there contemplating the ramifications for their own firm.

We can use a combination of pointed questions to drive the audience to react to a problem or a topic and also add in stories, which further highlight the issues.  Questions are powerful, particularly rhetorical questions, for which we don’t expect an answer.   They are useful in order to direct the listener’s attention to a problem we want to highlight and engage their problem-solving thought processes.

When using storytelling, personal stories are best.  Within the personal story group, disaster stories are the top of the tree for effectiveness.  If I said, “let me tell you how we increased our revenues by 300%”, that will not be as interesting to an audience as if I said, “let me tell you why we saw revenues drop by 300%”.  We are geared up for lessons to avoid mistakes and we love a good train wreck story, so that we don’t repeat that same misfortune ourselves.

Ideally, we would have a train wreck story and a salvation story of how we turned things around.  That makes for a brilliant combination and the audience will be all ears to discover the solution, so that they can learn from it too.  The key is to translate the data into issues they will be facing and to make our story delivery as personal as possible.  If that isn’t necessarily available, then referencing third party examples and what happened will also work.

By doing some simple adjustments to our talk, we can elevate if from a remote topic, which is pretty boring, to a theme of hot interest and relevance.  The key is to start from a point of view of how can I find a connector to my audience’s interest, which will engage them, such that they want to hear more from me.  In this way, we can become very effective in building up our personal and professional brands.

The beauty of being the presenter is that for the majority of the time we are dominant, the lord or mistress of all we survey, we are the big shot.  We can craft the speech anyway we wish and deliver it as we see fit.  We control the content, the pacing, the delivery, the engagement with the audience.  Things can a sudden turn for the worse though, when we utter these fateful words, “We have 20 minutes for Q&A and who has the first question?”.  Suddenly we have entered the world of the bare-knuckle street fight, with no rules and no quarter given.  The audience members can say whatever they like and we cannot control them.

Knowing that we can go from hero to zero in record time if we make a mess of the Q&A, are we taking it seriously enough?  I was reminded of the importance of preparation recently.  My son had a job interview to complete and the amount of preparation he did was impressive.  He did a thorough analysis of what he would bring to the firm and he came up with about twenty questions he anticipated they would ask him.  He enlisted me to be his training partner on numerous occasions and ask the questions and then pass on my feedback.  By the time he got to the interview he was fully prepared and even then they asked him questions he wasn’t anticipating and had to deal with them on the fly. 

I was reflecting on this and comparing with what I usually do when I prepare my talks.  I plan the talks very thoroughly and I do rehearse them, but I realised I was a bit light on my preparation for the Q&A.  “Once over lightly” would be a good descriptor.  This is a bit curious though because in a public talk we are launching forth with our personal and professional brands and putting our goods out there for all to see.  Normally I do list up what I think will be the most likely questions and then that is it.  I don’t spend any time constructing my answers, as I rely on my knowledge of the subject and my presentation skills to enable me to handle whatever comes at me.  I have fallen into the Comfort Zone trap of making “being good” the enemy of “being great”. 

I have seen speakers destroyed by questions they couldn’t handle.  They were doing so well up until the Q&A exposed a weakness in their professional capability and it shone a light on their credibility, bringing it into question.  I haven’t suffered that ignominy as yet, but maybe that has just been a lucky run?  When we do practice our question handling with a partner we have to be very careful how we do that.  Most people are not very skilled at this stuff and their advice can sometimes be harmful or demotivating.  We need to project confidence and being fully prepared for the main talk and the Q&A will help with that aim.  We also need to prepare our partner by asking them to give us very specific feedback.  We want to know (a) what we did well and (b) how could we make it even better.

As much as we may do this, the first response of most people is to start weighing in with their critique of what we didn’t do well. This is where we need to introduce some discipline.  The moment they start to criticise you, politely stop them and then redirect them to follow your original guidelines and tell you the good/better answer you are seeking.  Looking backwards is no help and we need to project forward and determine our future state, rather than having someone drag us backwards to a place we cannot change.

The other issue with preparation is to not sound robotic or too prepared.  Our delivery should be conversational and seemingly spontaneous.  It isn't spontaneous in the least because we have drilled the answers thoroughly but we don’t want to come across like that.  When we are asked the question, do not nod your head as if you are agreeing with the speaker.  We can do this unconsciously, trying to be affable.  We don’t know what they will ask, so we don’t want to be seen nodding to a very combustible question, as if we agree with it, so let’s have no head nodding while we listen carefully to what they are saying.

Many speakers then give the entire answer to the questioner and keep their focus on the one person.  Instead, we spend the first six seconds of our answer giving them eye contact and then we switch our gaze and start giving six seconds of eye contact to others in the audience.  We want to be inclusive so let’s use the baseball diamond method of six pockets - left, center and right field, as well as inner field and outer field.  Naturally we don’t spread our eye contact around in a geometric pattern which is predictable.  We mix it up and we catch people unawares as we address the answer to as many members of the audience as we can.  In this way we can engage the entire audience with our answer and we try to deliver it in a casual, relaxed “good bedside manner”.

I am constantly amazed at the lack of thinking about seizing opportunities for storytelling to be more persuasive in business.  Most interactions are one dimensional.  We want to buy something and the seller supplies it and that is the end of the transaction.  This is particularly so in the retail environment.  What is ironic is that vast swathes of products have huge budgets devoted to creating the story behind the product or service.  Somehow it doesn’t leap across to infect the staff who are selling it.  They just operate at the transactional level and don’t make any effort to go beyond that.  Why would one part of the organisation be ploughing big money into storytelling at the marketing level and not be making use of that same effort at the point of purchase?

Mindset and training are obviously the issues.  It is up to the company to work on the thinking of the staff and educate them why this is a gamechanger for the business. The people taking the dough off the buyer are not trained to think holistically about the brand or the business.  Every company has amazing stories about the origins of the firm, the amazing clients they have served and the fantastic results they have secured.  Sadly, they keep all of this stuff to themselves and we never hear about it.  Let me prompt some re-thinking here.

Imagine when someone is making a retail enquiry, that the salesperson was well trained and able to go beyond telling the client they are “there to answer any questions they might have”.  By the way, at least in Japan, there are staff there to serve you.  With the green eye shade bean counting crew running riot in big Western retailers, there is always that constant search for finding someone to serve you or to answer a question.  I was in Brisbane recently shopping at a major department store and there was stock everywhere on the floor and very people to process the sale.  Anyway, the person serving can become a storyteller as well as a transactor.

They could approach you and say, “Thank you for shopping today and thanks to you and our other valued clients, we are celebrating out sixtieth year in business.  If you have any questions, I am right here to answer them for you”.  That simple additional statement adds credibility to what is being sold because it says this company has stood the test of time and as a consequence, must be reliable. 

When explaining the good or service they can tell a brief story about the provenance of the solution.  How did this solution come into existence, who was involved and when did it happen.  There are so many rich stories tied up there and they are all known, but often not collected or promulgated.

In a B2B example, if a client was looking for sales training, we could just say we have various training courses available and then go through the detail.  Or we could say, “the roots of our sales training stretch back to 1939 when Dale Carnegie had reached global fame with his best selling book How To Win Friends And Influence People and responded to requests for public training classes in sales.  Prior to that time, if your company provided training you were looked after, otherwise you were on your own.  Dale Carnegie really democratised the process and made it available for everyone.  What we have today is the product of 80 plus years of experience, research and kaizen”.  That little story takes about 25 seconds to tell, which means it is rich enough and compact enough to give the client a solid impression of our credibility as a supplier of sales training.

Buyers, be they retail or B2B want to know who they are dealing with.  None of us want to make a mistake, so we are all looking for risk reduction. One of the most visited pages on our website is the section called “About Dale Carnegie Training”.  People want to know the backstory.

Another common interest part of website is the “About Us” segment. We are all looking for reassurance that we are dealing with the right people and that these are people we can trust.  So in our case, we have a section on the company, Frank Mochizuki who started the business in Japan, me as the President and then brief histories of our leadership, sales, presentations and communications core courses.  We are telling stories to persuade buyers that they are making a good decision to buy from us.  How about your website, what stories are you telling about your solutions?

This is the easy part of course and the hard part is training the team to both know the stories and to be able to communicate them concisely and powerfully in front of the buyer.  We need to create the content and then the time to teach people what they can say.  The key part is shifting gears away from a passive approach of serving, to a proactive approach of really serving the buyer, by going the extra mile to assure them you are a safe supplier they can trust. 

This is a major mindset shift and if that is all that is achieved, it will still put you far in front of the competition.  It is up to the firm of course, to do the backfill and give the team the tools and training to be more effective in their storytelling.  The cost is minimal in the big scheme of things and the outputs will be disproportionate to the effort to organise the inputs.