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When You Speak, the Secret to Success Is Right in Front of You

As a speaker, you want your audience to understand and believe your content.  And you want to be relaxed, confident, and persuasive while you're speaking.

Here's a strategy that will deliver both.  Focus on your audience all through the process.  At every step -- research, big idea, script, rehearsal, and delivery -- think audience, audience, audience. 

Step #1: To develop audience-friendly content, ask yourself these questions.  “What does this audience want and/or need to hear from me?  What can I say that will resonate with them?  During my speech -- in that room, on that day -- what's the biggest audience need I can satisfy?”

Let's say you're introducing a new product.  Remember, customers aren’t buying your product.  They're buying the benefits it produces for them.  That's your starting point. Talk about what customers want and need -- and what benefits your product gives them.

You and your people may want to show off new features and advanced thinking.  Soft-pedal this urge.  Your audience really doesn't care about what's under the hood.  An extended tutorial on "how it works" is about as interesting as what you did on your summer vacation.  If you want to score some competitive points, OK, give them a brief peek at your product's wow factor.

But don't build your whole pitch around what you've done.  Instead, focus on what you can do for customers.

Step #2: Focus on your audience while you're speaking.  When you come right down to it, there is no group.  You are speaking to each individual.

Drop the "I'm giving a speech" voice, persona, and demeanor.  Instead, have a conversation.  Pick out a few people in various parts of the room and talk right to each of them -- as you would in one-on-one conversation.

When you stop focusing on yourself, you free up your attention to concentrate on the audience.  Audiences undergo a magical transformation when they see the speaker's attention shift from self to audience.  They relax.  They listen.  They open up to your ideas.  The audience knows you're there for them, not for yourself.  Huge difference in attitude, receptivity, and audience buy in.

Bottom line: For sure-fire content, a more relaxed speaking experience, and better audience acceptance, put your audience first in all you do.

 

Welcome to the Age of Invisibility

Jurassic Park is a great popcorn movie.  It's got people against nature.  It's got heroes stuck on an island from 65 million years ago.  And it's got an important lesson for public speakers.

This lesson is summed up in a line spoken by Sam Neill when he and the adorable moppets are about to be devoured by a T. Rex.  He tells them if they don't move, the T. Rex can't see them.

We live in a new Age of Invisibility.  It started less than a decade ago and it's accelerating.  Speakers face new problems as media content outlets -- like broadcast, cable, print, Web, blogs, etc. -- multiply at a geometric rate. 

The problem is this.  If you don't speak often enough and to the right people, you start to become invisible.  When you don’t move, they can’t see you.

It's not that your voice is fading.  The problem is that all the other voices are getting louder -- and there are many more of them.

If you stick to your old speaking schedule, you'll begin to disappear -- overlapped and replaced by the flood of new voices and new stories.

How long does it take before you are yesterday's newspaper?  Much shorter than you think.  Six months, a year at most, and you can become, "What ever happened to (your name here)?

So tune up your pipes, punch up your script -- and get out there!

 

 

Delivering the Pitch Perfect Presentation

As a speaker, your first job is to strike just the right chord with the audience and the occasion.  It's all about creating an audience-friendly, occasion-sensitive tone that resonates.  Once you've done that, everything else is much easier.

Years ago, I saw a great example of the pitch perfect presentation.  It was at a gala dinner to dedicate the new, world headquarters of the PPG Corporation.  The event was held in the building's Winter Garden -- a large, all-glass, public space that had been donated for public use by PPG.

The after-dinner speakers -- corporate executives, public officials, etc. -- droned on.  But at the end of the program, one speaker redeemed the whole evening.

He was Philip Johnson, master architect and creator of the PPG Building and the Winter Garden.

Instead of standing behind the lectern, Johnson stepped forward and casually leaned on it.  He was saying to the audience, don't worry, I don't have a script.  This isn't a speech.  I'm just chatting with you.  He was completely relaxed and spoke in his normal conversational voice. 

As he chatted about designing the PPG Building, it was clear that the Winter Garden was his idea -- and the part of the project that he really loved.  There we sat, in this wonderful space, as he told us the story of how it came to be. 

Although he spoke for just a few minutes, he was in complete command of the audience and the occasion.  That evening was almost 25 years ago, yet I remember the tone of Johnson's remarks as if he had spoken last week.

As a speaker, aim for the pitch perfect presentation.  It's one that puts the audience and the occasion ahead of everything else.

 

Use Video in Your Next Speech or Presentation. It's Easier Than Ever.

Here's what happens when you use a thirty-second video clip of a happy customer or a successful project in your speech.

• The audience will be recharged and refreshed because the video "opens up" your speech.  You'll take them out of the room to the scene of the action.
• When you do it right, this can be very rich content.
• You’ll gain third-party credibility.  "Here it is folks!  This is real!"

Producing video used to be a big deal.  Expensive and time-consuming.  But the game has changed in very big ways.  It's now much easier to produce original content.  And you can do cut-and-paste editing on a low-cost, laptop program.

Video equipment is now super cheap.  Check out the Flip Ultra camera.  Here's David Pogue's review in the New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/technology/personaltech/20pogue.html?pagewanted=2&sq=Flip%20Video%20camera&st=cse&scp=1.

Give your sales reps small, easy-to-use video cameras -- and a tip sheet on how to shoot footage that cuts together into an interesting story.

Video is more cost-effective than ever because audience expectations have changed.  They don't dismiss rough-and-ready production values.  The new video aesthetic is YouTube and cellphoned stories from TV foreign correspondents.  Now, informal = authentic.

Instead of just telling your audience, show them.  Expand the impact of your speech with a short video clip of an enthusiastic customer or that just-completed project.  Your audience will remember and believe.