“Hi, good morning.
My brief that I was asked to talk about today was how to create and deliver a presentation.
So, first of all, let’s think about
what point a presentation should be.
Just before we start,
I’m gonna say that this is
gonna be relevant for you
if you are going to run a
business, work in a business.
Whether you’re going to
use it in relationships
or whether you’re using it to buy a house,
buy a property, this is
storytelling at its best.
So coming back to purpose,
a presentation, what is the
purpose of a presentation?
Why are you doing it?
Why do people spend so
much time and effort
and money in preparing for a presentation?
A lot of people get mixed up
about the word presentation.
I always differentiate between
pitches and presentations.
So presentation in my world
is a transfer of knowledge.
It’s between people who know each other.
It’s an educational thing.
So you might in a business be asked
to go and do some research on A, B and C
by your director or your
boss or your manager
and you go and do the work.
And then you come back and
you present the knowledge.
This is where PowerPoints are useful.
Although I’m not a
great fan of PowerPoints
because most of them are done badly,
but it’s a transfer of knowledge,
this is a presentation.
A pitch is an entirely different thing.
A pitch is where you’re
trying to get somebody
to do something, you’re
trying to change behavior.
You’re trying to create an atmosphere
and you’re trying to trigger change.
This is where most big speeches are.
Most speeches are not presentations.
Most speeches are pitches.
And guess what, we all make speeches.
We’ve all given speeches.
When do you think was your first speech,
the first speech that you gave.
Weirdly it was before you
actually could speak a language.
Your first speech was ‘feed me’.
You just popped out of your mother
and you made a big noise
without even knowing a language
and your first noise was ‘feed me’.
In other words, a verb,
the other big speeches
that you will give in your life,
or the big pitches are hire me, marry me.
Don’t fire me, promote me,
make me a board member or
within a business, buy from me.
Buy more from me, buy again from me.
So there’s a big difference
between a presentation,
which is merely a transfer of knowledge
and a pitch, which is noises
coming out of your mouth
that are trying to trigger actions
on the behalf of the audience.
And there’s three basic ingredients
to what a good pitch should have.
The first thing is, is it’s not about you.
If you have a business that says,
I do global transportation,
I don’t need global transportation.
I’m wanting to get something taken
from London to Birmingham.
So your talking about your
global transportation abilities
doesn’t mean anything to me.
So, it’s not about you.
It’s all about them and what,
you’re trying to get them to do something.
You’re trying to get them
to behave differently.
You’re trying to get them to do something.
So you’ve got to think about things
from their point of
view, what do they want.
Does a local cafe.
Does that want to talk to
you about, we sell croissants
and deliver them to London?
Well, no, if I’m in Bexhill where I live.
I’m more focused on, is
it a fresh croissant?
Do you bake it yourself?
Are your ingredients good?
Is it good for my health?
Does it taste good?
So the first thing is, make
sure it’s not about you.
You’re not talking about your business.
You’re talking about the
needs of your customer
or your clients and what
you can help them with.
And then you do things in threes.
You talk about, let’s
go back to the bakery.
It’s tasty, it’s healthy
and it’s convenient.
You talk in threes, you talk
in the language that they use.
So if you are, and this is not
just a German, French, English thing.
You talk in the types
of words that they use,
which means getting rid of jargon,
big words, bad, small words, good.
I’m a big fan of Hemingway
and he was criticized
by some journalists, critics
who are now forgotten
while he is now famous.
And they said, he’s never,
Hemingway has never sent
anybody running for a dictionary
and Hemingway responded with a great line.
He said, you don’t need
big words for big ideas.
And if you’d go back to
what I said originally
about trying to get people to do things,
marry me, love me, hire me, free me,
liberate me, promote me.
All of these are small words.
You don’t need big words for big ideas.
What you do need is the big idea.
Okay, so you need the right language.
You need threes, talk in
threes, always in threes
and you also need stories.
If you just say my product or service
has characteristic one,
characteristic two,
characteristics three,
that’s very forgettable.
Stories are how we are hardwired.
It’s how knowledge was
passed, historically,
when we sat around the
campfire 22,000 years ago.
Stories are built into our psyche
and the thing that’s great about stories
are that they’re memorable.
Which means that you tell
somebody a story well,
they can retell it without
that story being corrupted.
So the retell-ability is important.
So you will tell your friends
and they will tell their friends.
And the story stays the same
because nobody’s going to just recite
your list of characteristics.
It’s memorable, it’s retell-able.
And also it touches our soul, somehow,
it touches our psyche,
it touches our spirit.
And the thing about
buying, is people always,
always, always justify
what they buy logically.
I bought this because it was hard.
It was hard-wearing, it
was good value for money.
It was durable, it was
environmentally friendly,
but actually we all buy things
because of how they make us feel.
So we buy emotionally,
no matter how much we try
and pretend that we bought sensibly,
logically and all the rest.
So stories help appeal to the emotion
and the deep hard wiring
that is within us all.”