“Every word uttered evokes the idea of its opposite. “  –Goethe

In other words, when you assert your opinion, your listeners will reflexively search their own minds for a thought that could prove your idea flawed.  

To take the wind out of their sails, and to demonstrate that you have considered other perspectives, speak their thoughts for them, and explain why your idea is superior.

In this way, your talk takes the form of a dialogue between your proposal and reasonable objections to it.

You will be seen as credible and balanced, and your listeners will be more likely to agree.

Meghan called.  She was a high school senior, my daughter’s friend and highschool classmate.  She had a summer job selling for the CutCo Knife Company, and wanted to make a presentation to us in our home. 

I said, “Yes,” although my wife was uncomfortable that she might have to say, “No,” to Meghan.  So she arranged to be out of the house when Meghan arrived.

On the appointed evening, Meghan carried her hefty sales case through the front door and set up on the dining room table.   While she was unpacking her wares, she asked me if I would please get her a glass of water.  I did, and when I returned to the dining room and sat down, she asked me to get the knives we currently used and bring them in.

I went back to the kitchen and returned with the knives.  When she was all set up, she asked me, “How would you describe your current knives?”

“Old, dull and inadequate,” I said.

“Why do you say that?” she asked.  I described how hard it was to keep them sharp, how some of the blades were so old they were worn thin, and how some of the blades wobbled in their handles.

 She pulled a length of rope from her case, and asked me to cut it with my sharpest knife.

“My sharpest?  That’s not saying much,” I said, taking my grandfathers old carving knife that was probably a good 70 years old.  It had a hardwood handle.

Meghan held the rope down on a cutting board that she pulled from her bag.  “Count the movements back and forth,” she said. 

 I began to saw.  It took fourteen saws.

“Now hold it down for me,” she said.  She picked up one of her new knives from a wooden block.  I grabbed one of the lengths and held it down.  “You’re stronger than I am, but count the saws it takes me with this knife,” she said.

 It took her four.

“Let me try that,” I teased her, as if she had done something slick.  I took the knife from her while she held the rope down on the cutting board.  Expecting it to be difficult, I pressed hard with the new knife and sawed through the rope in two strokes.

 I was impressed.

Meghan asked me to bring my best pair of kitchen scissors to the table.  They were also old, and could not make a dent on the rope.  She got out her CutCo scissors, and not only cut through the rope with ease, she also cut a penny in half.

I was pretty much sold.  She gave me information about the steel and the handles.  She showed me the different sets I could buy.  My wife came home and I called her in to the dining room.  She sat down reluctantly, and I asked Meghan to do the rope trick.  She had my wife count the strokes, etc. etc. and I saw my wife change from skeptic to true believer in a matter of seconds.

“Do the scissor trick,” I said.  Meghan cut the rope and the penny.  I saw Sharon’s eyes wander over to the full set of kitchen knives displayed on the table in a butcher block case.

We ended up buying all the kitchen knives and a set of 12 steak knives.  They remain in their butcher block on the kitchen counter seven years later.
                                                         ______

Selling by telling is what most of us do.  But selling by doing is more powerful because it’s active and experiential.  You could say that conversation is also experiential (in that we experience it) but words are more likely to get caught in the filters of the mind and not reach the muscles.  

I know of one law firm that goes to major corporations who are shopping for a new legal advisor, and begins by saying, “We can do the March of a Thousand Slides, or we can have a discussion about your issues so you can get a feel for what it’s like to work with us.” 

More often than not, the clients look at each other and choose to have the discussion.   

An active audience is more likely to be moved than a passive.  Hitler knew this, unfortunately, and had his followers do their “Sieg heils,” throughout his speeches. 

Meghan was trained by a very successful company.  She got me to do things—bring water, bring knives.  She got me to say things, “Old, dull and inadequate.”  She had me cut rope, and compare the old with the new.  It was sensational—literally sensational—in that it gave me a sensation, like driving a new car after you’ve been driving your old one for 10 years.

Plus, she was Meghan, my daughter’s friend, and the daughter of my friend Merrill.  She was in a strong position to win my business. 

According to Robert Cialdini and others, there are at least 25 proven Principles of Persuasion.  Meghan may have invoked 7 in her brief visit to our dining room. 

What can we as business speakers, and as sales professionals, learn from this exchange?  Stay tuned for more. 

You are a visual. Every move you make, every step you take…they’ll be watching you.

This is good news because once you know this, you can take control of the message you send by aligning your gestures, movements, and facial expressions with your words.

Who you are speaks more loudly than what you say. Actions speak louder than words. You are a visual message. Master your body language.

A report to a senior executive group is not a conversation, although it should sound conversational.  It is a communication designed to facilitate a prediction or a decision.

In order to sound conversational you need to be relaxed.  Ironically, relaxation comes from the tension of hard rehearsal.

Get to your recommendations as soon as possible. Don’t make them wait to find out why you are there.

Describe the benefits of your recommendations, preferably in quantitative terms—such as gross margin, time to ROI, or % of market share. Best case, base case, and worse case scenarios also add clarity and credibility.

Describe the costs, positioning them as reasonable compared to other similar projects that you can identify.

Include the downside if they decide not to follow your recommendation.  A favorable statistical confidence interval on your estimates of upside and downside will help.

As usual, occasionally get out of the abstract and into the concrete.  Illustrate the benefits of your recommendation with stories about other companies.  Likewise, dramatize the cost of not accepting your recommendations.

Senior executives tend to be big picture people.  Keep your remarks as short as possible.  They probably have to listen to a number of presentations at one sitting.  If you tell them everything they’ll remember nothing.

Don’t read bullet point slides. It’s the #1 thing people hate.  After all, why go to the trouble of a meeting if all the speaker does is read.  The senior people need to see you bring your idea to life, and demonstrate the character traits necessary to make it happen.

In terms of delivery, this is not the time to display your wild passion.  Just be extremely clear about what you want to do, why it’s a good idea, and how you plan to get it done.

Take away:  help them make a decision or a prediction.  In the fewest words possible.

Needle in a haystack

The audience will be drinking data from a firehose.  The savvy presenter recognizes this peril as an opportunity.

To capture attention—do something that stands out from the environment.  The opposite of getting attention is camouflage. Being attention-getting is not a quality; it is a contrast.

Trying too hard

Lots of people will be trying to stand out, and they’ll make the mistake of telling jokes, displaying cartoons on the screen, or trying to connect with the audience by telling stories about themselves.

Don’t do it.  The audience is content driven, results oriented, and time pressed.  They have limited space in short term memory.  Eliminate all extraneous information.

Not setting the scene

In an effort to get to the point, many speakers will forget to remind the audience of the back story—the space in which their molecule competes, and what the unmet medical needs are.

Your drug is the hero of a story.  It is stepping onto a stage to overcome important obstacles and bring health to sick people.  Set the scene so your drug looks like it has an important job to do.

Offending the experts

Analysts and other savvy investors may curl their toes in agony if you spend too much time on the big picture.

Set the scene quickly, then summarize in a fair and balanced way the achievements of your compound before you walk them through the data.

Using the word, “Robust”

The term “robust” has become a meaningless buzzword, especially in a scientific context.  Be the first presenter to dispense with using it.

Instead, make a statement that is meaningful, such as, “The data are promising,” or, “The data suggest…”

Going down rabbit holes

If you leave information on your slides that you don’t plan to talk about, you are inviting savvy listeners to drag you down into the weeds, which will choke your message with irrelevancies.

Unless there is an ethical reason that the audience needs to know it, keep it off the slide if it does not support your argument.

Not making an argument

There are some presenters who believe their job is to deliver information.  This approach leaves too much room for the audience to draw their own conclusions.

A good scientific presenter should make an argument for the quality of the study, the validity of the data, and the implications of his conclusions.

Blowing Q&A

It’s easier to make a slick presentation than it is to handle a room full of skeptical and insightful questions.

Brainstorm with colleagues to come up with all possible lines of inquiry, and practice responding to the most penetrating and damaging assaults.

Lack of conviction

Finally, your delivery stands guard over the material.  Great data poorly delivered at a high stakes venue is a huge waste of resources.

Rehearse, and where you falter, alter.

And you thought your job was to stick to the facts! Here are the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, making a strong point about making a point in their wonderful book Made to Stick.

          Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards.  Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire.  She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher.

          Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class.  Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does:  A journalists gets the facts and reports them.  To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why.

          As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment.  They would write the lead of a newspaper story.  The teacher reeled off the facts:  “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods.  Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.”

          The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers.  According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence:  “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School Faculty Thursday in Sacramento…blah, blah, blah.”

          The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly.  Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment. 

          Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.”

          “It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls.  “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point.  It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant.  And why it mattered.’” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

That’s the Golden Mean, or the Golden Ratio It’s the method by which the ancient Greeks would determine how to build something in order to make it beautiful.

I like it because it suggests there is science to beauty, and that proportion is important in all endeavors, including speaking.

For instance, what is the appropriate mix between data and interpretation? Between entertainment and substance? Between self-revelation and listener-centric content?

All these elements–and others– need to be balanced in a highly effective presentation.

In fact, in any important business conversation, we need guidance to balance the myriad views that need to be heard…and spoken.

And there’s another ratio for highly effective meetings: the Listening to Talking Ratio.

Somewhere in the fog of being there’s an optimal mix.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

The arts of music, poetry, literature, and drama have been around so long that each of them has templates.  To dismiss templates is to ignore the wisdom of the ages.

To name a few, music has verses and choruses, poetry has sonnets and haiku, literature has novels and short stories, and drama has setting, character, plot, and resolution.

Templates exist for speeches and presentations too.  Past to present to future is one.  Cause and effect is another.  Thesis, antithesis, synthesis is yet a third. But by far the most useful in the business world is the situation, problem, solution template.

 In business, define the problem first, then argue for your solution.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

A sales exec I know was up for a plum gig—a rotation assignment in headquarters that would groom her for a promotion to Regional Director.  She was confident that she’d get the job, and went to the interview thinking that she was by far the best candidate.

They chose someone with less experience and less success from another district.  Why? 

 Apparently, the VPs who conducted the interviews reacted negatively to her telling them that she would take care of everything that crossed their desks and make them look good.  Several of them said that they would rather have heard that she was eager to win the assignment so that she could learn and grow as a professional.

 What did she do wrong and why did she do it?

The Wrong?

1.  She took a salesy approach.  She assumed that they wanted to look good, which may have been true, but to state it overtly was not a wise move.  We don’t want our need for recognition to be a topic of discussion with a stranger.

2. By saying that she could take care of their affairs, she was making a claim that she was already as skilled and knowledgeable as they were.  Again, maybe true, but it sounds presumptuous and arrogant to say so.

3.  Her salesy approach, and her assumptions about their motivation made her seem less of a future colleague and more of an outsider trying to storm her way into the inner circle at headquarters.

4.  She is a large and tall person with a powerful speaking voice.  Her confidence and size can make her appear intimidating.

Why did she do it?

1.  She was, and is, an extremely ambitious and capable person.  She has won awards for her creative solutions to business problems within the company.  She is extremely proud of her abilities and her success, and is not reluctant to bring attention to both.

2.  When she encounters people who are less skilled and knowledgeable than she is, she can be impatient and condescending, and she harbors the attitude that some of the VPs are not her equal.

3.  Her military background led her to believe that the best approach to the interviews would be to toot her own horn. 

 My friend was shocked and upset that she was not chosen for the assignment, but she has bounced back and is eager to take the feedback she received and continue her career path, which says more about her than her one bad interview.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

First of all, don’t overdo it.  If it’s dry, it’s dry.  I heard someone link his call to action to survival, which was a bit of an overstatement.  Modesty in all things!

Nevertheless, since I often find myself urging clients to include emotional arguments as well as fact-based, here are a few tips.

1. Reason makes us think.  Emotions make us act.  You need both.
2. Begin with the problem that your audience faces.
3. If they don’t face a problem, begin with the opportunity they have.
4. Then talk about the consequences if they fail to take advantage of the opportunity.
5. Personalize your message.  Speak about your own experience.  Disclose something about yourself.  Confess your own struggle in regards to the issue, or a similar issue.
6. Tell stories that are about life-changing experiences.  Make sure your stories have a character, conflict, and dialogue.
7. Stories about people they know, or famous people, living or dead, are most effective.
8. Use emotional words.  I once sat through 16 people delivering the exact same presentation, and the only person I could remember when it was over was the one who said, “I love my job.”
9. Look your audience in the eye, one person at a time.
10. Smile when appropriate.  Visibly enjoy yourself.
11. Don’t talk about how dry the topic is.  Ignore the dryness, and find a way to make it moist.

The mother of the great American poet John Berryman told him, “Ever to admit you’re bored means you have no inner resources.”

Don’t let your topic bore you, or you’ll bore your audience.  Find a way to fall in love with it.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.