Recently, I worked with a client on creating a presentation to tell small community banks about a new service his company was offering.
Richard showed me his working title: “Leasing—Opportunity or Just a Reaction (Lender’s Workshop).” The word “opportunity” sounded good, but I really had no idea what this presentation was about. True, I’m not a banker, but I have learned that if a title is effective, even people outside the field to which it applies may be able to understand what’s being offered.
Next, I asked him to give me the topics he planned to cover. This is how he described them:
- Can leasing provide solutions to challenges facing community banks?
- Are these risky assets?
- Review the leasing value proposition for your customer
- Examples of local market opportunity
- Marketing approaches and discussion points
The first two topics were questions that could be answered with yes or no. The last two suggested you’d get a list of items. The middle one had a verb in it that suggested action, but the action was unclear.
It’s important to remember that adults all tune into one radio station: WIIFM, “What’s In It For Me?” When you present an agenda, they want to be able to figure out immediately how it will benefit them. Richard’s agenda didn’t make that clear.
Richard suffered from what Chip Heath and Dan Heath described as “the curse of knowledge” in an article in the Harvard Business Review (December 2006): “…once we know something…we find it hard to imagine not knowing it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. We have difficulty sharing it with others, because we can’t readily recreate their state of mind. In the business world, managers and employees, marketers and customers, corporate headquarters and the front line all rely on ongoing communication but suffer from enormous information imbalances.”
As a result, Richard used a lot of terms and concepts that might not be familiar to everyone in his potential audience. While that might make him appear credible and authentic during the presentation, it didn’t help convey what they’d get out of coming to his presentation.
What, exactly, was being leased? What were the challenges the leasing solved? What exactly were these risky assets he was referring to? And as for Item 3: Would everyone in the audience understand what a value proposition was and how it related to their customers?
Good takeaways inspire your potential audience members to think, Wow, this presenter really gets me. He knows just what I want to know and says he’s going to tell me. And they’re caught up in the mystery. How is he going to do it?
Make Every Takeaway Specific
For a takeaway to be meaningful, it has to be actionable and of immediate value.
To help Richard create his takeaways, I asked him to think about this question for each topic: “What tangible, measurable benefit does this takeaway give to your audience members that they can put into action right away?”—and to answer the questions according to this formula:
- Start with an action verb. The trick to doing this is to mentally insert the words, “As a result of my presentation, you will be able to…” at the beginning of the phrase.
- Use seven words or less. A string of seven items is the maximum number people can hold in their short-term memory.
- Use familiar words. Avoid what I call cliquespeak—using words or assuming a grasp of concepts people new to or unfamiliar with your field won’t understand.
Richard’s presentation was basically a sales pitch. He was offering community banks a new service that would help them make money by offering types of loans that they perceived as risky and were outside their area of expertise. His company knew how to structure the loans in a less risky manner, and, in addition, his people would make their expertise available to help the community bankers work with new and existing customers on these loans.
Be Brief
Completing the sentence, “As a result of my presentation, you will be able to…” in seven words or less in simple, familiar language was challenging for Richard. Brevity often is. Mark Twain once said, “I apologize for writing you a long letter. I didn’t have time to write you a short one.” Being an expert with “the curse of knowledge” makes your task even harder. It took Richard two hours of brainstorming to come up with the following five topics:
- Expand your loan services
- Get a supportive partner
- Mine existing relationships
- Meet your customers’ needs
- Lower your loan risk
Create the Title for Your Presentation
Your title is key. It’s the main mystery. It’s what motivates your audience to attend your presentation in the first place—an immediately useful, measurable outcome or benefit they will take away from the presentation as a whole.
Once you have figured out your takeaways, you have defined exactly what your presentation is about, so you are ready to summarize them in one phrase: the title.
In Richard’s case, I told him to go through the same process as he did in creating the takeaways, with slight modifications.
- Start with an action verb that follows the phrase, “After you have listened to my entire presentation, you will be able to…”
- Use seven words or fewer. Sometimes you have quite a bit to explain, so I propose the solution people often use for book titles. Start with a short, catchy title and then use a subtitle.
- Use familiar words.
To complete the phrase “After you have listened to my entire presentation, you will be able to…,” here’s what Richard came up with: “Increase business with new, low-risk loans.” That became his title. The bankers in Richard’s audience would know from that title exactly what they were going to get from his presentation.
Compare that to his original title: “Leasing—Opportunity or Just a Reaction?”
Excerpt from “Rule the Room: A Unique, Practical, and Comprehensive Guide to Making a Successful Presentation” by Jason Teteak (January 2014). Click Here To Order a Copy of Rule The Room
Jason Teteak is the visionary founder and CEO of presentation consulting firm Rule the Room, LLC. In 20 years of working as a presenter and coach, he has trained more than 15,000 professionals to “Rule the Room” and has appeared before more than 100,000 people. He has developed more than 50 presentation and communication training programs ranging in length from one hour to three days that serve as the basis for his new book, “Rule the Room: A Unique, Practical, and Comprehensive Guide to Making a Successful Presentation.” For more information, visit www. Rule The Room.com
