There are certain things everybody needs to own.
Every man should own a navy blue blazer. If you have an empty closet and hire a dress-for-success expert or a clothier or other knowledgeable advisor, one of the first things they’ll have you buying is a navy blue blazer.
There are a lot of accepted necessities. Toothpaste comes to mind. Participating in civilized society has certain required necessities—for men, pants. What a lot of people don’t understand is that success has certain required necessities, too.
We put together this book because all three of us believe that owning at least one highly effective presentation is a success essential, owning more than one—possibly for different media—is better, and owning the ability to craft additional ones as needed is best.
Everybody should own a Signature Presentation, which, at Speaking Empire, we sometimes call your Stadium Presentation, in tribute to the seating in that classroom my partner Dustin ran from.
This is a message that works for you no matter when, where, or how you share it—speaking, in a webcast or webinar, facing one person across a desk or 100 people from a stage. This becomes the core of any and every presentation you deliver. Our friend and co-author here, Dan Kennedy, has a portfolio of speeches about his Magnetic Marketing® system. They are 60, 75, 90, and 120 minutes in length. There is a generic one for audiences of varied kinds of business owners and salespeople, specific ones for single professions or businesses or sales groups—for real estate agents or for financial advisors, for example—and adaptations for delivery by other presenters such as GKIC.com’s Certified Magnetic Marketing® Advisors, for video sales letters delivered online, and for sales letters delivered by mail (see https://GKIC.com). In all of these, the core is the same. Usually, we discover that our new clients lack clarity and certainty about their core, and this is one of the important things we help them work out.
Here’s how I started learning the importance of this: When I started my first business, I believed it had to thrive and would be the most incredible business. With it, I was going to help people save time, energy, and money. What could be more attractive than that? So, like many startup entrepreneurs, I pulled out my credit cards and launched my business with a pile of personal debt. Guess how many customers flocked to me the first month? Right. Zero. Of course, I thought that I had such a great idea, the customers would come. A little panicked, I resorted to desperate and frenzied activity, with what I call the Six-Foot Rule: If anybody was within six feet of me, I tried to sell them. I quickly realized that selling to one person at a time, one after the other, with a high percentage rejecting me for one reason or excuse or another, was going to be incredibly difficult. It was inefficient. There was only one of me, and I could run only so fast, work so hard, and take so much rebuffing. I now know, by the way, that this causes a lot of people who enter various kinds of selling businesses or careers to fail, unnecessarily.
Since there was just one of me and a whole lot of them to sort through, to get a customer, I asked myself: why am I speaking to them one at a time? Why don’t I speak to a bunch of them together, at one time? This is now often called “one-to-many selling.”
I put together my first audience of prospects in the back room at a Denny’s. I invited many, 12 showed up, I sold to 20% of them right then and there, and made about $2,000.00. It blew my mind. I might have sold to the same 20% meeting with each of the 12 one at a time, over coffee in a booth at that same Denny’s, but it would have taken 12 hours instead of 2, I’d have been personally confronted and fatigued by each of the no’s, and I’d have owed the waitress rent! Or I might not have even sold to 20%, because there is a group dynamic that helps sales, that never exists in person-to-person selling. From that point on, I concentrated on selling to groups, and for a while, I was speaking at a lunch and at a dinner every day, five days a week.
I was selling, right then and there. A lot of people we help with presentations are, instead, only selling follow-up, one-on-one appointments—like a dentist doing a seminar for invited patients about implants in his office, a CPA doing a lunch presentation for invited small-business owners about cutting taxes, or a travel agent speaking at a civic club about cruise vacations. It doesn’t matter. The process is pretty much the same, and the benefits are absolutely the same.
The key is the Signature Presentation. If it works, you can do just about anything. You can switch from slow and frustrating one-to-one selling to efficient group selling, in your own office, in a restaurant’s back room, once a month or twice a day.
Within three years of starting my first business with my credit cards, this switch in the way I sold made it the 35th fastest growing private company in America, placing on the Inc. 500 List!
Over time, at Speaking Empire, we have “locked in” a formula for these kinds of Signature Presentations, evolved from the one I used initially in the back room at Denny’s. From acorns mighty oak trees grow!
As you can see in Figure 5.1, page 31, this Speaker’s Formula™ organizes your presentation into 12 component parts, in a particular order. I say: Success loves sequence. There are, of course, any number of ways a top pro speaker might rearrange these components and add to or subtract from them, creating his own, preferred presentation sequence. Maybe with good reason. If you are not that top pro, rich with successful experience at crafting powerful presentations, I urge sticking with this Formula. Let’s talk a little about each component . . .
When most people get up on stage, make a video, or hold a webinar, they talk at people. That’s a pushing energy. It actually pushes people away. It is better to draw them toward and into your presentation so that they give you their attention and get interested in what you have to say. A compelling emotional or dramatic story can do this. This can tie to your reason for making your presentation and for being in the business or for selling the product you are selling. A set of provocative questions is another approach. A set of specific, intriguing promises is yet another. One way or another, the first block of your presentation needs to be about getting and holding attention.
FIGURE 5.1: The Speaker’s Formula™
People buy from people they know, like, and trust. People don’t just buy things from you; they have to buy you. An excellent way to build rapport is with personal transparency. You may choose to share your personal challenges, an obstacle you’ve overcome, or doubts you conquered that got you to this moment of appearing before your audience and introducing them to your opportunity. Dustin’s story in Chapter 2 is this kind of a story. It is usually a mistake to barrel ahead with a presentation of facts, figures, product features and benefits, and propositions without first establishing some rapport with the audience.
An audience needs some reassurance that you deserve being listened to. The same presentation gets very different results if delivered by two different people and only one has and gives reasons why he has the right to talk about the subject and to talk to the audience in front of him. Are you part of a respected group or association? Are you an author? Have you been seen in relevant publications? Have you been seen on TV or heard on radio? Are you just another cosmetic surgeon, or are you THE cosmetic surgeon who wrote The Official Consumer’s Guide to Cosmetic Surgery . . . who lectured at known hospitals . . . who has been a guest on a popular TV show . . . who is certified in the technique favored by major movie stars? In short, you need to lay out your claims to fame at this point in your presentation.
If you do not have any of this now, getting it is one of the many things we assist Speaking Empire clients with, in addition to the development of their Signature Presentation.
Your audience entered the room, came to the webinar, started listening to your audio CD already in and with pain—if not physical, then in the broader sense: disappointment, frustration, recurring failure, anxiety, confusion. Everybody has something of this nature going on. For many people, it is simmering—not acute or urgent. At this point in your presentation, you want to draw it out and state it, turn up its heat, and make it acute and urgent. Relatively few people can be motivated by gain alone. Most move toward gain as a way of escaping pain.
After you’ve dialed up the pain, it’s time to show the audience your solution. This may be your product or service, your diagnostic process, an appointment with you or exam by you, or otherwise engaging with you. I’ve made this fifth in the sequence. If you get to it too quickly, you have not laid groundwork needed for your solution to be readily accepted. If you get to it too late, you may frustrate your audience. There is a sweet spot in the sequence for this, and we’re confident from experience with literally thousands of presentations that this is it: fifth.
A big mistake that a lot of people make with presentations is to move from stating the solution to teaching the solution. Unless you are a school teacher, with kids in a classroom, you do not want to actually teach. I guess I’m a salesman by instinct or impulse, so this was not hard for me to understand and accept, but Dustin is a technical thinker, so his temptation is always to explain how and why something works as it does and exactly how to use it. He and I watch many people struggle with this. Decide on the purpose of your presentation: to influence or persuade, to make an immediate sale, or to set in motion a selling process. Decide on the action you want from the audience. Everything in the presentation is to serve this purpose, and anything that doesn’t gets left, as they say in Hollywood, on the cutting room floor. Real teaching almost always goes six steps too far and raises as many doubts and questions as it answers. You want people to know you have a solution and to be excited about it without getting bogged down in its details.
An audience needs to know where they are going with you. They don’t want to board an airplane, embark on a cruise, or join you in your presentation without a good idea of the destination and the landmark points along the way. Any uncertainty raises anxiety. So, you need to tell them what you are going to tell them.
Also on a more sophisticated level, you want to try to direct and control their reactions to your presentation. This is sometimes called framing or pre-framing. By setting these expectations, you create an open loop in their minds, particularly in their subconscious minds. How they feel about and respond to what you say, do, and ask of them during the rest of your presentation will loop back to what you told them to expect.
I often use a very simple, four-point “rap” in my presentations that goes something like this:
I’ve got three rules before we begin . . . Rule #1: We’re going to have fun. Is it OK with everybody if we have fun? Good. Rule #2: I promise to give you 110%. Is it OK with everybody if I give you 110%? Good. Rule #3: This is going to be an interactive presentation. The more you give to me, the more feedback I get, the more I give to you. Is that fair? Great. Then the bonus Rule #4 is: You’ll take action. You won’t just listen and leave. You’ll decide and do. You know success comes down to taking action, right? Great . . .
This creates a “yes energy” with the audience. When the time comes for them to make a (buying) decision and take an action, they have been pre-framed to do it and have even agreed in advance to do it.
When you present a product, service, or just an idea, people have objections and doubts. Most buyers start out as nonbuyers. Most believers start out as skeptics. Maybe, in their mind, they’re saying, “I don’t have time,” or, “it won’t work for me.” They’re saying something, and it will likely be a reason not to go forward. The antidote is targeted social proof. When we build a presentation for and with a Speaking Empire client, we typically identify 5 to 7 typical objections or doubts likely held by large percentages of their audiences. Then we find 5 to 7 matching social proof stories, testimonials, or fact-filled case histories. Each erases one of the 5, 6, or 7.
This is elementary, but it still needs to be said: People do not buy a product to have the product or even because of its features. They don’t even buy the benefits of the product. They buy the benefits of the benefits. Nobody buys fast-drying paint because it dries fast, or even because of the benefit of that: less chances of it being touched, smudged, dirt falling onto it. They’re buying time and freedom (from drudgery). Virtually every presentation needs at least one slide that lists or depicts the benefits of the benefits.
Think about offers as “1 to 10.” 1 is basic, ordinary, and/or unexciting. 10 is absolutely overpowering, “must have,” urgent, and exciting. Think about the offer you are going to make with your presentation. Is it a 1, a 3, a 5, a 7? It is hard to get to 10—to absolutely irresistible—but the closer you get, the better. A great presentation can fall flat and fail if it brings everybody to an unexciting offer.
Usually, you will build value by listing and describing every separate item of the product or service, or even of something like a private appointment, call, or exam. For health-care practices, Dan Kennedy invented the “5 Questions That Will Be Answered at Your Exam” and “What To Expect at Your First Appointment” lists back in the 1980s and has kept these in health-care practice and financial services marketing to this day.
There’s a lot more about this in Dustin’s Chapter 6 on Irresistible Offer Architecture®.
The number-one reason people do not respond to the offer you make with your presentation is that they feel they were let down by somebody else. As you are presenting, they are remembering! A strong, simple, straightforward guarantee gives them needed reassurance that they can make a decision with you without getting burned.
You might ask: How long should a guarantee be? I’ve done extensive testing of this myself. In over 3,000 presentations for my own products and services, I’ve offered 7-day, 30-day, 6-month, and 12-month guarantees. Which do you think converted the best?
Most guess 12 months. Actually, there’s very little difference between 7 days, 12 months, and anything in between. What matters is that you have an appropriate guarantee. If they can judge in 7 days, then that’s fine. If they need a month, then a month. What’s most important is that you have a guarantee, period. (See Figure 5.2.)
In Point 9 on page 36, I talked about how you build value as part of an Irresistible Offer. You create urgency to act immediately with a deadline and with fast-action bonuses. People procrastinate. It’s what they do.
FIGURE 5.2: Guarantee
The last thing you want is a presentation that lets the audience off the hook and lets them meander out of the room or exit your webinar to think things over. The whole point of doing powerful group presentations is efficiency. The last thing you want to wind up doing is chasing people who saw your presentation, by email, mail, or phone. My goal is to have a presentation that will have people dancing and running—not walking—to the back of the room to buy or sign up for whatever next step is offered.
A lot of people will do this with now-or-never discounts. This can be effective, but I personally never like lowering prices because it’s what everybody does. Other techniques are fast-action bonuses, a limited bonus only for the first x-number, or an impending event, like a fast-start class, breakfast, lunch, or online session within hours or the very next day. In any case, the deadline itself must be very clear. If for some reason, it is not immediate and it is within, say, 90 minutes after the webinar, consider displaying a countdown clock by the order page and sending at least one email going out: “Just 29 minutes left.”
I see so many people who seem afraid to make the call to action and tell people exactly what to do and to do it now. You need to be very direct about this. You can tell them to get up and go to the table at the back to schedule an appointment or quickly complete a form and buy the product. You can have forms handed out as you are getting to this point in your presentation and tell them to fill them out and take them to back tables, “the folks in the red jackets at the doors,” or to bring them up to the front to you. If you are delivering your presentation in a physical location, it’s a bad idea to be sending them to some location outside of that room and out of your sight. If you are delivering a presentation online as a webinar or webcast, this step should be easy and seamless. Whatever they are supposed to do as the response to your presentation, they should be told exactly what to do.
I want to emphasize that you can count on this Formula. I have written over 500 presentations for use in 43 different industries and professions, in 109 countries around the world! With a Signature Presentation built with this Formula you really can go ANYWHERE and sell ANYTHING.
To download a larger version of the Speaker’s Formula™ along with additional valuable presentation creation tools, visit http://NoBSPresentations.com/bonuses.