When we are asked to give a business presentation, we may imagine we are the hero, arriving on our white charger, to rescue the audience from their woes. We may come armed to the teeth with research, data, statistics, evidence, testimonials and proof. We have it partially correct. We are definitely there to add value, to make their attendance worth it and to leave some positive residue from the experience. However, we are not the hero, jauntily dispensing wisdom and gold nuggets. We must make those attending the hero and we need to find out what is their kryptonite, the things which are making business hard for them. We are the catalyst, the seer, the guide, the trusted advisor showing a different and superior path to those already considered.
Once we know their issues, we can fix on our purpose, determine our central message to give them help in their work. We probably have a lot of good ideas for them, but we have limited time for our talk, so we need to refine the message down to something we can get through in about 40 minutes.
We have some central aims in the talk. Firstly, we have to find ways to connect with them. Our grand resume will hopefully go some way to establishing our credibility, but in this era of fake news, that may not be enough anymore. Our opening has to really crack the code and grab their attention. A boring start will ensure everyone is grabbing their phones and surreptitiously scrolling around the internet, looking for something much more interesting that us. We need to flag that we have some answers, for some of the central problems which have been plaguing them for some time.
Secondly, we want to motivate them to take action to do something. This is where we can often get carried away. Before you know it, our talk has become the hundred things you need to do to achieve wealth, happiness and the secret of life. We need to fix on one major thing which will lift all boats and make a fundamental improvement in their businesses. We will be facing a mixed audience scattered across industry, specialization, gender age and position. One key action item and one key benefit is the target, because that forces us to go for the richest vein, to tap into the motherload.
Thirdly, to get people behind the idea we need to offer proof of what we are saying. This is where storytelling is so critical. If we bundle up a whole bunch of numbers, assorted data and various details, the chances of anyone writing it down are very slim and that anyone will refer to those same notes ever again is even slimmer. For everyone else, they won’t recall the content, because we forget about 50% of what we hear within an hour, 70% within a day and 90% within a week.
We tend to remember the stories we heard in presentations we have attended if they were told well. There should be a central figure, the main character and we tell the story of what happened to them. If we are trying to make a key point, then the main character can become a proxy, an avatar for those in the audience. The hero of the story is just like them and they can identify with the hero’s situation.
Next we need to add in some tension. We want to create some conflict to underline the struggle our hero is going through and which the audience is going through too. For this purpose, we need the baddie and the “winter is coming” scenario of impending doom, unless we do something right now. Covid-19, for example, would fit the bill for the common evil negatively impacting our businesses.
We tell the story of some action taken by our hero, who looks very similar to our audience and what was the result of the action they took, that kept them from going off the precipice to their destruction.
When we tell this story it needs to be graphic in order for it to resonate. We need to transport the audience to the scene, the season and introduce the different characters involved while outlining the plot of what happened. For example, if there is a CFO in this story, we can’t just say Suzuki was the CFO. We need to flesh it out more and make it more relatable. We can say, “The CFO Suzuki looked a very worried woman, her face was lined with worry and you could sense the high levels of stress the low revenue numbers were generating”.
Each main character needs a small bio involving some emotion, so that we can connect and empathise with them. We might be having very worrying revenue numbers too, so we know what Suzuki is going through or we may have had this experience in the past, so we can relate. We need the emotion to be there, to provide the glue to get us interested in what happened to this other company.
Finally, we introduce the fix, our recommendation in the context of what it did for the hero in the story. We set the scene for what success looks like and this is appealing to the audience, because this is what they are seeking too. They have identified with the hero’s dilemma and the audience will also identify with the solution.
The more we can have the audience identify with the hero in the story, the more likely they are to receive the lessons we are recommending through the medium of the example we are outlining. Our purpose was to impart some recommendation and this is one powerful way to get an audience to adopt what we are saying.