Compelling Presentations Answer the Audience's Question: "What's in it for Me?"

Most of the presentations and subsequent strategic consulting assignments in which we engage are focused on helping clients selling a value proposition.

• C-Level leaders focus on mobilizing the troops to enthusiastically adopt the company's new vision/mission, and implement the organizational and strategic changes needed. They rely on us to make the message more powerful and enable them to project a strong Leader Presence, since execution requires everyone to follow their lead when the inevitable obstacles appear.
• Sales & Marketing leaders use us to re-shape their presentation templates to reflect the new market realities – including counterpunching the competition – and then training each sales person to customize the template to meet each client's unique needs.
• Corporate officials, especially Human Relations and Finance, rely on us to turn presentations on benefit plans and organizational changes, which can get tedious and lose an audience when they get overly detailed, to engage their audiences and get people to take action, quickly.
• Investor Relations-related professionals rely on us to create succinct, persuasive messages and train their presenters to deliver them powerfully in order to close the deal.

1. Decide 'What's Important Now". A WINning strategy calls for eliminating all irrelevant information or images. Every presenter gets to the conclusion by analyzing lots of information, but once there, the audience needs only see the direct path to the conclusion. Give as much details as is necessary for this audience – and no more. Therefore, a focus on building a powerful, compelling message without distractions is step one.
2. Provide Support for your Position. If there are multiple perspectives, share them. If your solution costs a little more upfront, but saves service and maintenance costs, avoid potential lawsuits, document it. Don't use those that won't necessarily resonate with the audience. If you have significant endorsements and testimonials, use them. If your clients list is large, share that information, but don't list them all, just those that are well known – and preferable use their logos, rather than a list of words, because logos are easier to recognize and have emotional brand value.
3. Generate Trust: When a presenter's message, tone, style and focus generates trust and confidence, the audience is more likely to accept the message as a whole, and ask questions that confirm such a feeling at the end; without doing so, the audience is constantly challenging the statements and actively looking for data which may contradict or weaken the argument. Ultimately, customers buy from people they trust the most – even if the competitive argument has some advantages.
4. Make it Engaging. Organizing it so each section is concise, follows a structure that guides the audience's decision-making, and is attractive and easy-to-read for everyone, engages the audience so they 'get" the message at both the rational and emotional level. If the presentation is too long, has too much text, has distractive imagery or transitions all detract from the presentation. Use graphics – pictures, diagrams and animations - that facilitate speedy comprehension. Use large size sans-serif fonts for readability; use different colors (rather than underlines and italics) for emphasis.
5. Counterpunch when appropriate. If you know your audience is going to be listening to contrary arguments – such as pitches from competitors – don't ignore what they are going to say; instead, address their issues by identifying the 'weaknesses" of their arguments. For instance, if a competitor offers a warranty, while your company offers money back guarantee, highlight the difference through a story about what additional costs you may incur for 'parts" even with a free service warranty. If your competitor offers round-the-clock availability, and you are open 24/7, describe the advantage you offer – allowing the customer to just show up because someone is always there. Weakening your competitors' alleged strongest points takes the wind out of their sail. Similarly, if you know you have a weakness that your competitor might exploit, address it head-on; this increases your credibility and deflates your competitor's arguments.
6. Make it Memorable and Conveyable. Most people will share the information with others, to get confirmation of the position they are going to take, and/or to get buy-in from other members of the decision team. Therefore, the material must be easy for the audience to understand, factually and emotionally, and easy to transit to others. If you have great case studies to report, share them – because stories are memorable and easy to convey. If not, weave your data into a story. Stories are easier to remember than lists of evidence, in part because they allow the mind to make more connections, which improves memory. They are also more memorable to the extent that they engage emotions. Indeed, people appear to take information that comes to them in a non-story form and turn it into a story. For instance, think of all the criminal trial movies you've seen. Lawyers and juries use a story approach to make sense of the trial data. So, create a story you want them to have, so they remember it and can convey it.