I was listening to a recent episode of Victor Antonio’s Sales influence Podcast show and one of his guests was quoting some research which showed that assertive and arrogant salespeople did the best when it came to selling.  Their discussion pinned the key factor back to the seller’s confidence and belief in what they were proposing.  Being an arrogant presenter isn’t going to a formula for success with your audience, so I don’t recommend that route.  Being confident however is certainly a winner in the persuasion stakes.  Think about it though, how many of the people you have seen presenting looked totally confident?  I would vouch not too many.

If this is such an important attribute when presenting and it makes perfect sense irrespective of any research on the matter, then why isn't everyone when presenting doing their best to project confidence?  The pendulum tends to sit in the middle.  Not too hot and not too cold and so the presentation and the presenter both become instantly forgettable.  Vanilla style efforts are a formula for obscurity.  This is ironic really because often the intention is to increase the presenter’s profile and raise the levels of business credibility being attached to the speaker.  These are important motivations to go to the trouble to prepare a talk and to put one’s personal and professional brands out on display for all to evaluate.

How can we project more confidence when presenting?  It sounds too simplistic, but speak louder than normal.  We have to separate our normal work day roles from our speaker role.  We cannot give our talk as if we were chatting over coffee with our colleague.  We have a different set of responsibilities now and we have a greater profile to boot.  The effort to speak louder forces us to raise our energy levels.  This now sets up a transmission of our energy from our position on the stage to the audience members seated in front of us.  They can feel the energy we are projecting.  I don’t mean shouting or screaming, but I do mean trying to “throw” your voice.  One thing to help with this is to try and project your voice to the farthest wall not just to the audience members seated in front of you.  Having that distance objective in mind will help to raise your energy level and also your connection with the audience.

Another simplistic sounding piece of advice would be to look at your audience.  In Japan we don’t make direct eye contact very often, because it is considered to be confronting.  Again, there is a difference between chatting with a colleague over coffee while not staring them straight in the eye and giving a business presentation.  The roles are different and we have to accept that construct.  When we are the speaker we want to stare straight into the eyes of our audience.

The way to do this is to regulate the length of the eye contact.  Three or four seconds is too short because it doesn’t allow us to make that one-on-one personal connection.  If we start holding the eye contact for over seven or eight seconds then the connectivity bridges across into axe murderer, psycho maniac levels of intrusion.  It is too much and it makes people feel very uncomfortable in Japan.  Around six seconds gives us enough connection without too much pressure.  Living in Japan beats the direct eye contact power out of you, so it takes a bit of concentration to suspend the usual societal norms and start making eye contact with strangers.  I would notice it when I went home to Australia and I would find myself avoiding making direct eye contact with people, through force of habit from living here in Nippon for so long.  So it requires confidence and guts in Japan to make eye contact with others in a public forum such as a speech.

When we make the eye contact, we have one thing in our mind.  We want to have the person we are looking at feel as if it were just the two of us in this room and that we are giving them our full concentration.  After about six seconds we shift our gaze to the next person and then we repeat the exercise.  In a forty-minute speech, we could make one-on-one eye contact with four hundred people.  In other words, we could connect with every single member of the audience in most cases and with smaller audiences, we could do this multiple times.

We want to be unpredictable with our eye contact, so we should mix it up, rather than moving along the rows of seated audience members in a linear fashion.  We do this to keep our audience members on their toes and not allow them to zone us out and daydream about picking up the dry cleaning or whatever it is they need to be doing after this talk.  Having the speaker suddenly fix their eyes on you and stare at you while they are talking, definitely wakes you up.

So if we can just change up two things – the power of our voice and eye contact – we can make a big difference to how we are being perceived by the audience.  That high level of confidence will translate into the listeners being more open to believing what we are saying.

How do we want to be perceived when we give our talk?  What constitutes the personal and professional brand we are creating?  How can we master the first impression?  Often we are not thinking about these things at all.  We are too busy piecing together the slide deck puzzle we will use during the presentation.  Perception, personal brand, first impressions are a thousand miles away thoughts, as we tinker with the visuals.  What a big mistake.

Whether we like it or not, the audience will form an impression of us, they will perceive something about us as a presenter and they will make a judgement about our brand – for good or bad.  Given all of this is going to happen anyway, we should make a decision on all three fronts and determine the outcomes we want, rather than leaving it to chance or random luck.

Planning the talk is important, although for a lot of presenters that stops at the complexity level of the decisions about the order of the slides and not much more.  We should start our planning with the outcome in mind.  How do we want to be perceived?  Take a moment and start writing down the type of perceptions you want to enjoy after the talk.  It will probably be an easy list to assemble – “I want to be seen as professional, competent, clear, engaging, interesting, knowledgeable, etc.”  Now make a new list about what constitutes your personal brand. 

In my case, it means how I dress, because that is often the trigger for those all important silent first perceptions about who I am.  So it is always an expensive Italian suit, usually Zegna and always worn with the top jacket button done up.  It means French Cuff shirts, so that I can wear cufflinks, it means a pocket chief to be an accent to the silk tie.  The Italian leather shoes often have a brogue pattern and the shine should always be mirror like.  The hair always trimmed and neat. 

Basically, I am trying to convey that what we do is deliver quality solutions.  We do this with great attention to detail and we are reliable and by just looking at me, you can see that is true. If I turn up dishevelled, everything a complete mess, then the audience may draw the conclusion I or my organisation cannot be trusted with their business.  Boris Johnson was able to pull off total dishevelment and still become the UK PM, but I lack his wit, charm, erudition and vocabulary.

First impressions also means how I come across.  For me this usually means lots of energy and dynamism.  It means using a lot of eye contact with the audience and trying to meet as many people as possible, before I give the actual talk, to create that personal connection.  It means getting there early and checking the name badges or the attendee list, to recall any of those pesky names of faces that I have met previously and to look for people I want to meet.  Like most people, name remembering is a struggle, so a bit of early arrival name badge checking goes a long way to remedy that character flaw.

In my case with regard to perceptions and brand, I want to come across as dynamic and powerful, so the very start of the talk is critical to deliver that impression.  When my name is called, I move quickly and confidently to the middle of the stage and do not spend even one second finessing the laptop to get the slides up.  I leave that to others to take care of, so that I can take care of my audience and get proceedings underway immediately and start delivering value.  I am already set up with a lavalier microphone. This allows me to free up my hands for gestures when I need them to come forth to accentuate a point I am making.  We only have a few seconds available to cement that first impression and wasting it on playing around with the equipment is a big fail.  There are many ways to open a speech and I will have chosen one suitable for thAT particular audience in attendance on that day. 

Now it is quite possible that your audience may require an entirely different persona as a speaker.  It may require a very soft, calm, quiet approach, taking a lot of the energy down a few levels and dropping the decibel level of the voice projection as well.  The stage entry might need to be slower and more deliberate, calmer and more considered. If that is the case, then I switch gears and deliver accordingly.  For example, if the audience were in their teens or in their eighties, we would think about what would resonate best with them and then adjust our approach accordingly. It makes sense doesn’t it.

However, is this a fake presentation and are we fraudsters, if we switch gears like this?  No, but it is a calculation of how to match the needs of the audience, rather than satisfying our own needs.  This delivery may need less dynamism, volume and gestures and more pauses for reflection.  Is this still within my brand guidelines?  Yes, it is, because I choose it to be a broad tent, to accommodate my brand. The dress part may not change all that much, except perhaps the intensity of the tie and pocket chief combination, but everything else remains pretty much the same.

The key point is to consider how you need to arrange your brand and your first five minutes for that particular audience.  If you give the presentations only as you like to give them, then that will work with a certain proportion of the audience who are more like you.  It will however fail to resonate with a large swathe of the audience who you still want to reach with your message.  The planning is the key to get this right.  Thinking about who you are speaking to, what initial impression you want to form, how you want to be perceived and what is the personal brand you are projecting, are all key elements of that planning process.  This shouldn't happen by chance, it should be a product of your design.

Recency is a simple concept to understand.   It basically means that we are all simple beings and we tend to remember best what we heard last.  Given this is so simple, you would think that presenters would be masters of the wrap up.  Not so.  I am always amazed at how often speakers allow the final impression to crash and burn through neglect.  What do I mean by neglect?  They are missing in action when it came to the planning of the final impression and they are also underperforming in the delivery of the last section of their talk.  So often the voice mouthing the words of the last sentence just trails off and dies a slow death.

If we understand the importance of recency and the critical nature of determining our final impression, then we will carefully plan for it.  Often, the speakers are trying to stuff too much material into the time allotted, so you see that pathetic mad rush at the end.  They start apologising and begin skipping through the slide deck like they have been snorting cocaine, because they have grossly miscalculated the time.  As audience members we feel totally short changed and cheated.  Some of those final slides looked very valuable and we see we are not going to get what we came here for, because the speaker was so inept.

They manage to complete the catastrophe by allowing their final sentence to just trail off into oblivion, as they suck all of the energy out of the room, dribbling out the finish.  The end is a massive anti-climax and the whole presentation lands with a massive thud, as it fails on so many levels.

The planning process has one hugely significant contingent and that is the accompanying rehearsal time.  This is when you discover you have too much material for the time you have been given to deliver the presentation.  It is painful to cuts bits off the flesh of the corpus of the talk, but you need to be surgical about it and trim, trim, trim until you get down to presenting only the richest residue. 

The planning process also allows you to work out what you need to say after the end of the Q&A.  Remember, the Q&A is a street fight – there are no rules.  Anyone in the audience can take the whole talk off topic with their dubious question.  Suddenly the recency is at risk of being disconnected from what you have been talking about and the final impression is focused on their question. Everyone has forgotten all about the main body of your talk.  Your message has potentially been supplanted by something irrelevant to the topic.

We need to have decided our key message right at the start of the planning and that becomes the frame around which we build the talk conjuring up the most powerful and relevant evidence.  In the last five minutes we do a couple of things.  We reiterate our key message and we do this slowly, being in no haste, because we have rehearsed and we have allowed enough time to finish in a relaxed and professional manner.  We take our time and we again try to connect this message to the audience and how it will help them.  We try to draw out its relevancy for their work.  We might be throwing down a challenge to the audience to institute what we are suggesting and attempting to get them to take specific actions after this talk.

We are purposely slowing down the pace, talking slowly and employing pregnant pauses to allow the listeners to digest and contemplate what we are saying.  Contrast this with the mad rush through the slide deck by the disorganised speaker who is in a mad panic

 to run faster off the cliff, because they didn’t plan and didn’t rehearse.  Instead, we are relaxed and in perfect control, as we lull the audience into a psychologically safe place, before we lower the boom.

As we get to the completion of the talk, we start to inject energy, conviction and power into our voice and body.  We start to build to a crescendo, combining body language, eye contact, voice and gestures.  This is a combination of all the tools available to us, which accentuates our message and our final impression.  Our audience buys belief, confidence and commitment and our job is to make sure this is the final impression they have of us.  None of this is left to chance.  We plan it, we rehearse it and then we deliver it with a flawless execution.  It doesn’t come across as canned though and instead seems a spontaneous eruption of passion for our message.  Start with the intention to finish like this and your talks will be so much more memorable than others.  Your personal and professional brands will soar while others will just disappear from collective memory.  People will remember you and will remain impressed well after the event has finished.

It seems logical that any presentation we are giving is ours.  Well, that is sort of correct, but what I am talking about is making it reflect your style and personality.  When you talk to people about being a leader, they often bring up the word “authentic”, but when you talk to people about presenting, few ever mention that word.  They are focused on being easily understood, convincing, concise, memorable etc.  Being yourself should be the default, but somehow many people get wrapped up in being the “presenter”, as if it is a role they are playing.

I totally agree that the presenter role is a thing.  What I usually tell the Japanese participants in our classes is that when you are presenting you have a different set of responsibilities.  When having a chat with your friend over coffee, you can talk in a soft voice and not project any great energy.  However, when you are up on stage, that is a different set of responsibilities.  The volume has to be sufficient that no one in the audience is struggling to hear what you are saying. Of course, you might be thinking, what is the issue, we all have microphones today.  True, but have you ever noticed that many people have no clue how to handle the technology.  They hold it down way to too low relative to their mouth or they strangle it, by placing their hand over the mesh, which is specifically designed to pick up the sound.

The energy part is also important.  We buy enthusiasm and confidence and the amount of buying going on is in direct proportion to the amount of energy being projected.  What if I am a low energy person, aren’t I being authentic to speak with low energy - isn’t that who I am?  The answer here is that you should give up any ideas about being a speaker, because there is a range of skills and mindset required to do the job well.  If you don’t have those skills and the right mindset, why do we have to listen to you, when we can listen someone who is more professional.

We have to be ourselves but be our professional selves, not our train wreck selves.  What I am talking about is operating at a high level of skill and bringing aspects of your personality into the presentation.  Many presenters are stuck in low gear and they give a journeyman performance but we don’t feel close to them or impressed by them.  Being able to bring more of yourself means, not being afraid of adding a little flair when presenting. 

I will contrast two presenters.  I attended an event recently and the slides were well done, the presenter (I am his client by the way), was very well presented, his voice was clear and calm.  That was the problem – it was calm.  It wasn’t energised or excited by the chance to share his content with the audience.  The voice was clear but the tone was flat – it was a Johnny One Note performance which can be sleep inducing, if we get too much of it.  He is the President of his firm and he should be the chief proselytiser, he should be projecting his confidence about what a great company they are and about all of the great things they can do for their clients.  The demand for his company’s services is strong, so maybe he doesn’t feel any need to project anything, but that is a big mistake.  Markets turn and he has a professional brand for himself, regardless of where he works.

Another presenter I saw brings all the clarity, professional slides etc., to the party but he also brings a lot of himself and all of his little idiosyncrasies as well.  He brings all of the professionalism around the skill and mindset but also some of his personality.  This is what makes him memorable.  We associate the professionalism with his personal brand and he can take it one step further – he makes his talks entertaining.  This is dangerous territory because being entertaining as a speaker is the hardest element in the speaking universe to pull off.  The true professionals are just that – they are doing stand up for a living and the rest of us are amateurs delving into an area of great complexity.  I am sure you have no shortage of recollections of speakers attempting to be humorous and just falling totally flat.

We don’t need to be comedians, but we can allow aspects of our personalities to shine through which can be entertaining or at least work well in that environment.  The speaker I was referencing isn’t setting out to be humourous, but he is allowing his natural personality to come through and that makes his talks entertaining.  I realise about myself that comedy is not in my future, so I don’t even try it.  I also realise that there are limits to how much I can loosen up on stage.  I compensate for these weaknesses by being authentic, which in my case means being high energy, confident and powerful when presenting.  Think about how you can be authentic, but also be skilled and memorable when on stage and not just fade into the wallpaper and become totally forgettable after the talk is finished.

I get this question quite often: “should I follow the logic of ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do’ with regard to doing business with Japanese companies?”. Their question is usually related to how to present to buyers. The Western “pitch deck” is usually well designed, professionally laid out and zen like in its simplicity.  Ironically, the equivalent decks from companies in the land of zen, are usually more reminiscent of the Baroque period, highly ornate and florid in design.  Polar opposites in fact.  The style of the actual delivery of the decks is usually also a world apart and it is quite shocking when you first encounter this phenomenon. What should we be doing to be effective in winning business from Japanese companies?

Very, very occasionally, when teaching presentation skills here to Japanese people, we will encounter a preference for the “Japanese way” of presenting, rather than the global standard that we are advocating.  What do they mean by the “Japanese way”?  We should speak in a monotone, with no energy, have our back to the audience and read everything on the screen to those in the room.  It also means having a slide with 5 different fonts and a similar number of colours, packed to gunwales with data.  If using graphs is a good idea, then let’s put up five on the one slide, so that everything is so tiny, you cannot make much sense of it.  If proffering information is considered important, then let’s affix vast slabs of impenetrable text to the slide and then read it to the audience.  Another favourite is to put up the entire spreadsheet, packed with microscopic numbers in the cells.  Just to spice it up, let’s add some animation and have various bits move around.

Why are the Japanese decks and every other collection of information offered often so crammed and dense?  I discovered the reason when I was a university student here in Tokyo.  Back in 1979, I attended an academic conference on Sino-Japanese relations, which was my chosen field of study at that time.  One of the professors was relating a point about the difference in thinking between Chinese people and Japanese people.  Zen travelled from India, through China to Japan and so at various points in history, Japanese Buddhist priests would go to China to study.  There was an allegorical zen tale regarding a well and a bucket, which in the Chinese version, made a macro point about the condition of humanity in the world.  The good Professor made the observation that when that allegorical tale was translated into Japanese, in addition to the macro point, there was a tremendous amount of micro detail about the construction of the well, how the rope was made, the dimensions of everything, etc., etc.

Japan Is A Data Consuming Tornado

This is the point – Japanese buyers have an insatiable need for data.  You simply cannot oversupply data to a Japanese client and they will just keep sucking it up, like a tornado devours everything in its path.  So, when we present our highly refined, trimmed down slide deck or submit our carefully manicured written proposal, the Japanese side often feels like they have just missed their lunch and are starving, ravenous for more information.  Written materials in particular can be a problem.  We are trained in the West to be succinct, to focus on the core information, to get to the point.  Japan is just not that way.

The language itself is circuitous, vague and indirect.  We are a bilingual operation here in Tokyo, so we are constantly switching between languages. Even after 37 years here, I am still amazed at how many more words are needed to express the same concept in Japanese than in English. 

So should we become Japanese when we present?  To be successful here we need two presentations.  We need the global best practice slide deck, the one which gets to the key points quickly and clearly.  The information on screen must be able to be grasped in two seconds.  If it takes longer than that, the slide is too complex and needs to be simplified further.  When we deliver it, we use our eye contact to engage the audience, our voice modulation to provide variety to keep the audience with us and use our gestures to highlight key concepts, phrases and words. 

Bring Supporting Multi Volume Compendiums

We should also bring a massively thick compendium of supporting information, so high you couldn’t jump over it, to go with your presentation which was focused on the highlights.  After the meeting or after they have received your written proposal, there will be staff designated to comb through this data to find all the problems associated with working with you and doing business with your company. 

Japan has a highly risk averse culture, especially in business.  The people you are dealing with are not going to get massive bonuses and rewards for risk taking.  In Japan, the ratio of CEO pay, vis-à-vis the median employee’s pay, is 58 times greater, compared to 670 times in the USA.  The upside isn’t big for risk taking here, but the downside for making a mistake is massive. The people you are dealing with or the people in the presentation room, will not be making any decisions, until the forensic due diligence has been completed. For that purpose, they have a data devouring demonic need for information.  Always be fully professional in your delivery, but carry a very big bag full of information and hand that over. Trust me, no one will complain about the weight. 

Once you understand the conversation going on in the mind of your Japanese customer you can meet them there and things will become much easier.  Don’t try to be Japanese.  Be yourself, but be smart, professional, well organised and come packing heavy with data – lots and lots of data.