When preparing a talk, ask yourself if your audience wants to solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity.  Maybe they want to do both.  Whatever the case, they’ll want to calculate the risks.

Solving the wrong problem wastes time and money and leaves the real problem unsolved.  And whenever we pursue an opportunity, there are unforeseen dangers.

To be persuasive as a speaker, diagnose the causes and consequences of a business problem and enumerate both the benefits and the risks of action in pursuit of gain.   Second-guess everything.  Nothing is a slam-dunk.

If you don’t want to talk about it, don’t put it on the slide.

Knowledgeable people in the audience notice small details and ask penetrating questions. Less knowledgeable people lob random questions to probe for weaknesses in your argument and character.

If it complicates your point, and there’s no ethical reason why the audience should know it, leave it out.

“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.

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.

The Constant Contact ads on NPR are annoying me.  They promise great business relationships through email campaigns.  Who are they kidding?
 
Giving a speech is a much better way to build relationships with prospects, and even that doesn’t work all the time. A lot of speakers have a boilerplate talk, and they blast it out regardless of who they’re talking to.

That’s basically what e-mail campaigns are like.  They lack intimacy, which is a pretty basic component of trusting relationships.

I estimate that most e-mail campaigns die in the dust bin of the spam filter.  And some get their senders classified as internet outlaws, as recipients either hit the delete button hard, and harbor resentment, or complain to the authorities about unwarranted email.

Getting spam is like being forced to attend a speech or presentation you don’t want to hear.  I often hear clients at large pharma companies complain that they are expected to attend presentations which have little or no relevance to their work. 
 
E-mail only gets opened if it’s from a trusted source.  People who don’t know this will spend a boat load of dough learning this lesson through experience.

And if the recipient opts in and gets crummy content as a result—content all about how cool the sender’s company and products are—then they will unsubscribe.

I know this from experience, as a sender and as a receiver.

To promise businesses that sending more e-mail is going to win customer loyalty is crazy.  Sending more email is going to drive customers away…unless…
 
…unless senders somehow find a way to connect with the interests of their readers, and Constant Contact isn’t about to teach them how to write well, or market well, or empathize with those on the receiving end of their junk. 

 It’s not about constant contact, it’s about relevant content.

You’ve been invited to moderate a panel.  The question is: How can you do it really well so that the meeting is rated highly, you look good, and your chances of being invited back are good?

First, you should look at the job of moderator as a great chance to create a host of positive impressions.  It’s great marketing for you and your company.  Let’s look into the details.

What’s the topic?  Can you change the topic, or re-phrase the title of the topic to make it more appealing?

Who will be on your panel?  Can you invite your own panelists?  Can you prep them so they don’t all say the same thing, so they dovetail nicely with each other?

What is the room like? When can you get into the room to test the microphones and get a feel for the place?  Who is in charge of the logistics?  Can you make sure they are on hand in case one of the panelists can’t be heard, or God forbid, you can’t be heard? Can you have it audio-taped, or video-taped?  Can you distribute copies of the tape?

Can you put a slide up with your name on it?  Can it stay up there the whole time?

How many important people can you invite or at least inform of your role in the meeting?  Can you get complimentary tickets for those you invite?  Free parking?

Once you’ve answered all the above, you should craft some strong opening remarks.  I recommend this outline:

1. Why this topic?
2. Why this topic at this time?
3. Why this topic at this time for this audience?
4. Why this topic at this time for this audience by these panelists?

Only then, after four ringing assertions, should you introduce yourself.  And once you’ve done that briefly and humbly, devote all your enthusiasm to the dignity and stature of your panelists.

Either they are already sitting on the stage, having come to their seats as you approached the lectern, or they wait for you to introduce them before moving a muscle to step forward.

Don’t allow them to move while you’re talking.  Nobody will pay any attention to your brilliance, but instead will goggle at the bodies moving into the limelight.   Panelists need rehearsal and firm stage directions.

Speaking of firm stage directions, your panelists should be instructed to prepare short opening remarks.  Do not let them take this assignment lightly.  The last thing you want is a boring, long winded, meandering, unprepared talk from the panel–it can drain the energy out of the discussion.  If such drainage occurs, it falls upon you to put a stop to it, and that’s hard to do without hurting feelings.

If you’re a stickler, you may even ask the panelists to send you their opening remarks a week ahead of time, and help them do better.  Certainly, gathering all their notes will help you steer them away from redundancy.

Familiarity with their remarks will help you prepare questions, and you can ask them if they have questions they would like to be asked.   You don’t have to oblige, but if the asking will make the meeting shine and illuminate the expertise of the panelist, why not?

Listen to your panelists talk, and interrupt them to ask questions.  Get them to clarify, or expand on particularly interesting or controversial issues.  Get them to stop talking if their response to a question is lengthy.  Moderating panelists is like herding cats.  You’ve got to be quick and alert.  And you have a responsibility to the audience to keep the meeting on track and on time.

You would do well to recall that panelist number one said something that contradicts what panelist number three is saying.   Interrupt number three, and point out the contradiction.  Or interrupt and ask number one to comment in light of what three is saying.

The whole point of having a panel is to take the burden of energizing the room away from a sole presenter and shift it onto the shoulders of a lively group.  Your job as the moderator is to keep them doggies rolling.  A little friendly verbal jousting will serve your purposes well.

At the end, remind the audience of the beginning.  “Why this topic, at this time,” etc., etc.  Try to summarize, or better yet, synthesize the key themes in the discussion.  Tell the audience where they can find more information.   Invite them to speak to panelists at the break.  If you’re willing and able, offer to provide notes on the discussion.  Thank your panelists and the sponsoring organization.

And then get the heck out of Dodge.

I recently sat down to interview myself on the subject of speaker evaluation forms. Here’s the transcript of the interview.

What’s the use of a speaker evaluation form? First of all, I prefer the term assessment to evaluation. It sounds to me less clinical–less distant.

Sorry. What’s the purpose of a speaker assessment form? To help speakers get better. However, let’s distinguish between the uses of a speaker assessment form at a training course, and one passed out at the end of a live presentation.

What are the differences? A training course assessment form will be more detailed and analytical–more process oriented, more focused on the mechanics of speaking. A form meant to be filled out by audience members after a talk should be short and sweet, focused on what audience members took away from the experience and any suggestions they might have for improvement.

In what areas do speakers need to get better? In messaging, use of PowerPoint, and personal impact.

How should messaging be evaluated? The message of a good presentation should:

• be audience-centric
• define a business problem from the perspective of the audience
• pose a valid question about that problem
• answer that question satisfactorily in a clear and vivid manner
• compare the speaker’s answer to alternative answers
• argue why the presenter’s answer is better
• end by reminding the audience of the problem and asserting the need to think, feel, or do as the speaker suggests.

How should PowerPoints be evaluated? They should follow the principles of cognitive guidance, which are:

1. The Multimedia Principle; we learn better from spoken words and pictures than from spoken words alone.

2. The Coherence Principle; we learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.

3. The Contiguity Principle; we learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented at the same time or next to each other on the screen.

4. The Modality Principle; we learn better from pictures with spoken text than pictures with printed text.

5. The Signaling Principle; we learn better when the material is organized with clear outlines and headings.

6. The Personalization Principle; we learn more from a conversational style than a formal style.

This adds up a few simple rules.

• Headlines of slides should be short, assertive sentences that summarize the information on the slide.
• The body of the slide should be a visual–a photo, drawing, graph, scheme, etc.
• Bullet points should be kept to an absolute minimum.
• Put the details, or the speaker’s points, in the Notes section of the PowerPoint and hand the document out after the event.
• The speaker should introduce the next slide while the old one is still on the screen.

And finally, how should a presenter’s personal impact be evaluated? That’s a harder question. The simplest answer is she should be evaluated based on what she causes her audience to feel, know, or do. She should be judged by outcomes, not process.

How can presenters take control of the way they make listeners feel? By making a serious, sustained effort to understand how they are coming across and what they can do to improve. For instance, evidence suggests that tone of voice, image, body language, and clothing and grooming play a significant role in our impact on others.

But what role does intention play? You said earlier that messages should be listener-centric. Our intentions are important. We should align them with the interests of our audience. But we often have goals for a talk that are both overt and covert. For instance, ever since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, the Republicans have been successful in winning the votes of working class white southerners. Since then, the overt goals of Republican speakers has been to convince those voters that the Republican platform is in their economic self-interest. The covert goal has been to play on their historical racial bias.

So what should A Really Useful Speaker Evaluation Form look like? It should be:

• On one page
• As simple as possible
• Be designed for a specific purpose
• Address messaging, PowerPoint, and personal impact
• Use a few specific criteria for each of those categories
• Leave room for subjective comments and suggestions
• Attempt to measure outcomes

Can you give us an example? Yes, here are two that I find useful. Neither is perfect. One is clearly for training purposes, the other is meant to be completed by audience members after a talk.

Training Assessment Form

And here’s a Speaker Assessment form meant to be filled out by an audience member after a talk. It was created by Cliff Atkinson of Sociable Media.

I just returned from an engagement during which I was asked to give partners in a professional service firm 10 minutes to pitch the firm to a brand new prospect, played by another partner sitting across the table.

Most partner/presenters were tentative at the start. They began by asking the prospects what they wanted to get out of the meeting. Since the exercise was only ten minutes long, the prospects gave a 30-second overview of their needs and asked the sales person to, “Give us your pitch,” or said, “We use a lot of firms like yours. What makes you different.”

And that’s when the difficulty began. Few presenters were prepared with a brief, interesting headline focused on customer benefits. Most of them hemmed and hawed, drilled down into one particular feature of their services, or provided a summary statement that was fact-based and feature-based, not emotionally strong and benefit-driven.

For instance, the firm is proud of their process, their results, and their willingness to measure and publish those results. But all of those are internal and ambiguous to the prospect. Clients care most about results, and are more than likely indifferent to the process, as long as it gets the job done without too much disruption to their own work flow.

Furthermore, in this case, while my client firm could report their own success metrics, they could not report those of their competitors, so the information was meaningless.

And when they did mention their success metrics, they often quoted a number–”82% of our engagements are successfully completed,”–leaving the prospect to wonder if that number is good or bad, what happens with the other 18% of engagements, what does success mean, and what is the likelihood that I will be one of the 18% who get screwed?

The best guy in the whole exercise opened with three crisp points: we have a transparent process, we complete more assignments than our competitors, and we complete them faster. But he failed to stick to that outline during the subsequent role-play.

I liked what he was trying to do. He made three bold points, or claims, at the start, and he was going to describe how and why those claims were true. But he got derailed by the back and forth, and lost control of the meeting.

He would have done better if his points had been benefit statements–if they had been about what the client gets, rather than about his firm’s attributes. His message was seller-centric (all about him!) instead of customer-centric (all about them!)

Moving to a listener-centric message would have required that he understand why his clients buy services such as his, what they like about such services, and what they dislike.

I asked the group if they had any market research, or any well-founded opinions, that could guide us in the exercise. They did, and we were able to suggest another set of headlines that, if used broadly throughout the firm’s selling efforts, could provide new language, and a greater return on new client interactions.

The bottom line is this: language shapes reality! Some cognitive scientists say that language creates reality for us–that it is generative. Effective presentation of intangible professional services depends on a highly-skilled use of language capable of inducing clarity and trust in the prospect.

It’s worth the time to find the right combination of words that resonate with the target audience.

I once had a colleague who said that everyone is in two businesses: their own, and show biz. He didn’t go far enough. Every business is show business. Business would be impossible without acting skills. Theater artists have the talent to believe in the imaginary circumstances of the script and act so as to induce the audience to believe in the characters and the story. A business communicator must also believe in her product, idea, or service—and speak so as to create belief in others.

As a business speaker you have a better chance of making others believe in your idea, product, or service if you believe in them yourself.  If you don’t believe in your product, you’ve got to scratch and claw your way into belief. How? How do you hoist yourself into contagious belief? The simplest way is to rehearse.

Find the reasoning. Find the words. Find the attitude. Find the gestures that make you feel connected with yourself and the subject. If you’re not turning yourself on when you talk you’re turning the audience off.

Which is more convincing: a speaker’s conviction or her reasoning? Isn’t that the same as asking which blade in a pair of scissors does the cutting? You need both. Intelligent people will dismiss conviction without clear thinking. And reasoning without an emotional investment by the speaker is busywork—boring, pedantic, and inconsequential to all. You need both—reasoning and conviction.

Reason makes them think.  Emotion makes them act.

Rehearsing aloud, you acquire both. And they feed each other. You find words that bring your thoughts to life, and when your thoughts are lively, you grasp them with greater conviction and infuse them with passion. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Eloquence is reason set on fire.” Rehearsal can help you find the reason and set it on fire.

So what are the standard excuses that the business presenter makes when she says she can’t or won’t rehearse?

No time! (He’s making slides five minutes before show time, making his performance slide.)
No need! (She’s done the same talk a thousand times; her suit could make it, and often does.)
No sense! (He thinks rehearsal makes him stale. Without it, he’s cooked.)
No standards! (Everybody in her company/industry is mediocre. Why should she be any different?)
No ego! (He doesn’t want to experience the awkwardness and vulnerability of finding his own voice, alone or in front of colleagues. Wimp!)
No show! (She thinks showmanship is unprofessional, which smacks of sour grapes. She’s probably afraid she doesn’t have the gene.)
No guts! (If he doesn’t rehearse, he’ll have an excuse when his talks flab out and fail.)

A good presentation can make a career. A bad one can leave you clinging to the suburbs of success for years to come. Actors get a month; we only get a few days. Let us remember that business without show business is no business. Rehearsal makes our thinking crisper, our language more vivid, and our passion a better ally. Without rehearsal, we have no show. If you have any sense, you’ll rehearse.

For more on what constitutes preparing for important presentations, see Ford Harding’s Blog.

A few years ago, I had a procedure done in a doctor’s office in which a small camera at the end of a tube was inserted into my body for the purpose of observing the inside of my bladder (you can imagine through which aperture.)  I have never been so terrified in my life.  I was trembling and could not stop .  I was out of my mind with anxiety.

A nurse stood next to me where I lay and held my hand.  She patted my head.  She rubbed my chest.  I held her hand with my two hands and put my cheek on her hand so she wouldn’t pull away, holding it for dear life.

“You’re gong to be fine,” she kept saying.  “Shh…” she said, stroking my forehead.  She spoke to me in such a way that she recognized my fear without embarrassing me..

When it was over, she got me up off the table, and walked me naked across the floor.  She sat me down on a chair where I continued to shake.  She got me a paper cup of water and held it up to my lips and tipped the cup gently so I could drink.  She handed me my clothes, but I couldn’t put them on.  My body was rigid with anxiety.  She dressed me, helped me stand and balanced me with concentrated watchfulness.

I never knew her name, but to this day I can see her face and hear her voice.  To me she was an angel of mercy, and I’m sure she is still out there like an angel, ministering with unflinching tenderness to wimps like me.

As a student of human communication, and the president of a small New Jersey consulting firm, I am interested in the behaviors that create trust, because much of leadership, salesmanship, and interpersonal influence depend on the communicator creating trust with her listeners.    While year after year nurses are rated as the most trusted of all professions, the pharmaceutical industry is about as trusted a Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and Big Government

Lance Armstrong is alive today thanks to pharma. Magic Johnson is alive today thanks to pharma. My neighbors Donna, and Lucy are alive today thanks to pharma. Bob and Liddy Dole are enjoying themselves, thanks to pharma. For these people, and millions of others, the pharmaceutical industry has been a savior. Its remarkable rise to power during the last half of the 20th Century is paralleled only by the meteoric rise of the personal computer and the internet.  A staggering number of people alive today owe their lives to the medicines developed and distributed by pharma.  The industry not only saves lives:  It improves the quality of life for many chronically ill people, provides millions of high paying jobs, and leads the way to new discoveries that will benefit future generations.  Pharma is a savior—day after day.

But then why is pharma named in survey after survey as one of the least trusted industries in the country?  And what can the industry do to regain the trust it has lost?

Please read Charlie Green’s blog posting at www.trustedadvisor.com about this issue.  I have also copied it into a blog posting here on my site.

Charlie suggests that recovery starts with radical honesty and self-reflection.  What do you think?