Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story
- What is your Point B? (What conclusion do you want your audience to reach?)
- WIIFY What’s in it for you? (What benefits will your audience get, not you?) In other words every feature about your product or service that you want to present needs to be translated into benefits for the audience.
- What are your key ideas? (He calls them the Roman Columns.)
- What flow structure will you use?
In addition to his advice on flow and structure Weissman also suggests how to design slides using how our eyes sweep a slide. For instance, he recommends bar charts increase in size from left to right. A chart that decreases from left to right creates the mental image of decline which we would not want to use (unless, of course, your goal is to paint a negative picture).
Weissman also recommends using phrases that do not talk down to your audience. Use “As you recall” instead of “Like I said.” Or, “I think you’ll see that” is better than “We believe.”
The common theme is that everything, from the structure to design to delivery has to be geared to the audience. The advice might appear obvious but we often tend to get wrapped up into what we want to say that we lose sight of how the message is being received.
In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions...When It Counts
In the Line of Fire takes on Q&A’s, especially confrontational ones. While I found this book useful and different too, I do have a negative comment to get out of the way. This is one of those cases where it manages to squeeze a good article into a book. You know what I’m talking about. The content is enough to warrant a 10-page article. To fit it into a book the author has to pad it with lots of stories and filler. I’ve read books in this category where I felt it was not worth the money I spent. However, in the case of In The Line of Fire, the value of the core concept was worth the price and the padding. Weisman lays out a structure for answering questions. Not just questions at the end of a Q&A but handling tough questions in general.
Like Presenting to Win, Weissman advises us on how to phrase questions to show the benefit to the audience. He also recommends rephrasing questions using words like “what” (such as “What will we do to …”) or “how” (such as “How are we going to …”) which require more than “yes” or “no” answers and also do not admit to uncertainty or doubt about your being able to deliver. We say “How do we” instead of “How can we.” Rephrasing also strips out emotional words. The question “Why are your prices too high?” becomes “What is our pricing rationale?”
The key idea is how to slow down, think and structure your response first. Our normal reaction is to plunge into answering the question. Weissman says that we should buffer the answer from the question by rephrasing or restating it. This accomplishes three things. First, it buys you time to formulate your answer. Second, it lets you take the initiative by framing the question. Perhaps sanding the edges off of an antagonist question. Third, you can check whether you properly understood the question when rephrasing it by watching the questioner’s body language.
After the third step, which is to answer the question, you give your answer “topspin.” This lets you show your audience “what’s in it for you” and for you to get back on track towards your Point B, the message you want your audience to retain and hopefully accept.
I have been working on applying the key ideas from both books and feel they do work. I highly recommend both books.
