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The Worst Way to Start a Presentation

Posted on June 27, 2011 by in Articles

Imagine you’re out on a date (it could be date night with your spouse, a blind date with a total stranger or whatever). Now, let’s say you really want to win that date over, become the only person in the room he or she can see or hear. We’re talking full-blown smitten here. How do you think you should start that date: by talking about yourself or by talking about your date?

Now, mostly everybody gets the right answer in the date scenario: Of course, you talk about them. But here’s the shocker: In the world of business presentations, a place where you also want to quickly capture the positive attention of your audience, almost everybody gets it wrong. And it’s destroying a lot of potentially great presentations.

Let me prove it to you:

Over 90% of the presentations we’ve studied began with a slide that looks like this:

Unless you’re attending a narcissist’s convention, this slide is terrible. You don’t even have to read every bullet point to feel the automatic turn off. This slide is all about “you”: when you were founded, how many clients you have, how big you are, how many awards you’ve won, etc. In the blind-date equivalent of this slide, you’d be sitting alone at the bar before the first round of drinks arrived. It doesn’t matter if you are presenting to one person or a thousand, the only way to grab your audience’s attention is to spend the first 10 minutes talking about the issues that matter to your audience and whether or not you can meet their needs.

Neurologically, the first 10 minutes are the most important. It’s during these first precious moments that your audience forms their opinions about you, when their brains decide whether or not to allocate any more neurological energy to listening to you.

In our upcoming webinar, “The Secrets of Killer Presentations,” you’ll get a crash course on the neurology of your audience and learn how to use that knowledge to your advantage. Plus you’ll learn how to grab your audience’s attention right from the start using secrets from speakers like Steve Jobs and the founders of Google, Starbucks and more. The first 100 people to register get $50 off, so hurry to reserve your seat now.

Let’s jump back to the dating scene for a minute. Perhaps you’ve heard of a free online dating site called OkCupid. Now, I married my high school sweetheart, so I’m not there trolling for dates, but I am impressed with their statistical research. OkCupid has a very advanced statistics shop called OkTrends, where they study the hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions. In one study, they looked at the kinds of words men use in their opening messages to women in order to learn what does (and doesn’t) generate a reply. If you’re not familiar with how online dating works, basically, you check out people’s profiles on the website, and if you like what you read, you send that person a message and hope you get a response. (And then, maybe after that, you meet for an actual date, like we used to do in the old days).

You can just imagine the cheesy messages that the study revealed don’t work (i.e. women did not reply to the man’s message). But you know what phrases generated HUGELY POSITIVE responses? “You mention,” “noticed that,” and “curious what” all got fantastic responses. (Statistically, messages with those phrases get double the normal response rates).

Basically, if a guy appears to have read a woman’s profile, and shows knowledge and interest in the things she’s interested in, he’s got a much greater chance of hearing back from her. A good message would sound like this: “You mention that you like cooking and I noticed that you traveled to Italy. I’m curious what your favorite region was in terms of cuisine?” That’s the kind of guy we fathers might let our daughters date. (I also have a son, and when he hits dating age, he will be forced to read all of this research).

The lesson in all this is: Whether you’re dating or making million-dollar presentations, always start the interaction by talking about the other person and their interests. Let them know that you know what they want to hear about, that you are sensitive to what they want to gain from this interaction, that you care about the same things that they care about. And if you don’t know what your audience’s interests are, it’s your job as presenter to find out: sooner rather than later.

People want to hear about things that meet their needs and solve their problems. They don’t care how long you’ve been in business (unless that just happens to be the one big question they really need to get answered, but I wouldn’t bet on it). Your audience cares about whatever they care about, and that’s what you need to give them. Meet their needs, and you’ll hear nothing but applause.

In our upcoming webinar, “The Secrets of Killer Presentations”, we’ll show you the 4 personality types in your audience and the kinds of things they typically want to hear. Plus you’ll learn how to grab your audience’s attention right from the start using secrets from speakers like Steve Jobs and the founders of Google, Starbucks and more. The first 100 people to register get $50 off, so hurry to reserve your seat now.

The Secrets of Killer Presentations

Posted on June 21, 2011 by in Past Events, Webinars

When you have to make a presentation, don’t you wish you could morph into Steve Jobs for the hour?

Think how great that would be. Your audience leaning forward to experience what you have to say about your company, its products, its strategy all because YOU can connect with that audience on emotional and intellectual levels that keep them riveted to your message.

In our new webinar, “The Secrets of Killer Presentations,” you will learn, what Jobs and other powerful presenters know — the tips, tools and techniques that you can use to connect powerfully with your audience and transform your presentations into can’t-miss visual experiences.

We’ve compiled the latest presentation techniques from neurologists, visual designers, speech writers and psychologists, PLUS the most cutting-edge presentation technologies from companies like Google and Prezi, and packed them into a 60-minute, interactive presentation that will get you up to speed with the best presenters in the business. We’ll show you how to keep your audience riveted on the edge of their seats (and not sitting back in their chairs, arms folded, half-asleep).

The trick is learning how to develop a stage charisma that will help you connect with your audience on an emotional level and keep them riveted to your message. After you attend our 60-minute webinar, The Secrets of Killer Presentations, you’ll be able to differentiate yourself, sell your big strategy, land that big client, impress the Board, get your project funded, and more.

Of course, you could choose to continue to be like most presenters who trudge through a pile of text-heavy slides, boring their audience to sleep, never conveying the one thing an audience actually needs to hear. Or maybe you’re already an effective presenter, but you’re looking for a few tips to take your presentations to the next level.

Here are the 12-plus tips, tools and techniques you’ll learn. Adding just one of these tips to your presentation arsenal will make you a more effective presenter. Adding 10 or more will make you a killer presenter, second only to people like Steve Jobs.

See if this is what you’re looking for:

  1. The secret technique that neurologists know for making your message unforgettable (and planting it deep in peoples’ brains)
  2. How to use a specific storytelling technique proven to entice your audience in the first 30 seconds
  3. How to make PowerPoint jump off the screen (and not look like PowerPoint)
  4. How CEOs of Apple, Google and Starbucks deliver killer presentations in just one sentence
  5. How to create a presentation roadmap that keeps you on track and your audience engaged
  6. New presentation technologies that are easier and more versatile than PowerPoint
  7. 3 visual designs that need to be in your next presentation
  8. How to speak effectively to the 4 distinct personality types you’ll find in every audience
  9. How to develop “stage charisma” whether your audience is big, small or even online
  10. New online technologies that radically improve attentiveness during webinars and teleconferences
  11. 2 critical changes you must make to adapt your live presentation for an online audience
  12. How Analogies, Pain, Stories and Facts help you connect to your audience on an emotional level and create the “wow” factor you need to drive your message home

DATE & TIME:
This 60-Minute LIVE Teleconference is being held on Friday, September 16th, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time. 24 hours before the event, you will receive an email with detailed instructions for calling in and downloading handouts.

PRICING:
This 60-minute interactive session is $249 $199 only for the first 100 registrants. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like to listen in at one site or location, using a single phone line and one computer. You will also get slides to download before the session.

LEADERSHIP IQ has been featured in:Steve Jobs Killer Presentation

THE FACULTY:
Mark Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Leadership IQ
Mark Murphy
Mark Murphy is one of the country’s leading management & communication experts. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, and more. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins, and hundreds more.

Mark leads one of the largest leadership studies ever, and his groundbreaking work has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many more. He has also appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS News, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark has authored 4 bestselling books, including HARD Goals: The Science of Extraordinary Achievement, Hundred Percenters, Generation Y and the New Rules of Management, and The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention.

Mark Murphy is a 3-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare” Award. And Mark won the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Helen Yerger Award for Best Research.

Why Your Presentation Needs a Headline

Posted on March 24, 2011 by in Articles

Do your presentations have headlines? When you’re delivering a presentation, is there one sentence that sums up your presentation and sears it into the minds of your audience?

When Steve Jobs announced the launch of the iPod years ago, his headline for his presentation was “1,000 songs in your pocket.” When he announced the MacBook Air, his headline was “The world’s thinnest notebook.”

Those are headlines that immediately capture the essence of the presentation. And even more importantly, because the language used in those headlines was both pithy and highly visual, every audience member instantly remembered it. In fact, most of the press coverage following those presentations used those headlines right in the articles.

Here’s a fun little test of the “stickiness” of those headlines: Googling “1,000 songs in your pocket” returns more than 71,000 results. And “The world’s thinnest notebook” returns more than 457,000 results. That’s the kind of retention and viral discussion you get with great headlines.

In our webinar, “The Secrets of Killer Presentations,” you’ll learn the science of creating truly compelling presentations. You’ll learn how to write great headlines (including the correct length), and much more, like optimizing your message to reach 4 distinct personality types, developing stage charisma and using a specific storytelling technique proven to entice your audience in the first 30 seconds. Follow this link to learn more about the upcoming webinar, plus get $50 off if you’re one of the first 100 people to register.

Speaking of Google, when the founders of Google were seeking venture capital to launch the company, they described the company by saying “Google provides access to the world’s information in one click.” Starbucks founder Howard Schultz said in his presentations that “Starbucks creates a third place between work and home.”

Like the Apple headlines, notice how these headlines are short and highly visual. I know I keep beating this issue that headlines have to use highly visual language, but there’s a great reason why.

There exists a whole science of language retention that looks at the use of visual language (also called “concrete” words). Allan Paivio, now professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, is the scientist who pioneered the concept of concrete words (aka visual language). In one of my favorite studies, Paivio analyzed peoples’ ability to remember concrete words vs. abstract words.

Concrete words have high “imagery value,” that is you can visualize or picture that to which they refer. For example, words like road, bridge, clown and even picture, are all pretty concrete (and thus highly visual). But words like condition, amount, request and purpose are all pretty abstract. (Even before you read the rest of this article, just ask yourself, are the presentations in your organization filled with more concrete words or abstract words?)

Paivio paired concrete nouns and adjectives and tested them against paired abstract nouns and adjectives, to see which words were easier to recall. Some of the word pairs were related, like “young lady,” and some were not, like “soft lady.”

In every case, recall was better for concrete word pairs than it was for abstract word pairs. It’s just easier to remember “dead body” or “happy clown” than it is “essential nutrient” or “significant result.” In fact, and this is critical, you’ll remember totally unrelated concrete word pairs way better than you’ll remember related abstract word pairs. Across Paivio’s experiments, concrete words could be remembered as much as 2-3 times more frequently than the abstract words.

Now here’s the real kicker: The majority of presenters in today’s organizations suffer from abstract word disease. Let me share some of the actual abstract word pairs tested in Paivio’s study:

  • Complete set
  • Annual event
  • Useful purpose
  • Original finding
  • Critical condition
  • Reasonable request
  • Constant attention
  • Adequate amount
  • Significant result

If you’ve ever heard a corporate presentation, I guarantee you’ve heard word pairs like this (and probably these exact ones). Over and over again we hear presenters use abstract language. Then they look around bewildered as to why nobody remembers what they said. And the reason is because they are using language that is guaranteed not to be remembered.

Nobody’s going to remember every single point you make in a presentation. But if you give them a great headline, that’s both pithy and highly visual, they’ll remember the most important parts. And when other people ask them what they heard in the presentation, they’ll spit back the exact message that you want the whole world to hear.

In our upcoming webinar, “The Secrets of Killer Presentations,” you’ll learn the science of creating truly compelling presentations. You’ll learn how to write great headlines (including the correct length), and much more, like optimizing your message to reach 4 distinct personality types, developing stage charisma and using a specific storytelling technique proven to entice your audience in the first 30 seconds. Follow this link to learn more about the upcoming webinar, plus get $50 off if you’re one of the first 100 people to register.