The renaissance of selling your ideas

New Presentation Form - Duarte Design

Do all your presentations have a dull, predictable pattern: Title Slide, Agenda Slide, About XYZ Company, Our Customers, Our Platform, The Problem, The Alternatives, the solution, Summary, Call me?

There is another fresh way to sell your ideas. Some of the earlier blog posts point to a new way to conduct a presentation, new ideas for how to express important aspects of your idea - like the contrast between how things are and how they could be and the automatic elements of resistance that pop into peoples minds as you tell them your way of doing things. In the previous post we talked about presentation structure, beginning, middle and end, we also discussed how the customer is the hero and the hero needs to agree to go on a journey with you to overcome the challenges and return home to the new dawn.

Now we need to discuss how to help the hero on their way, this involves a more intricate presentation form - visually it looks like the picture above - a constant movement between two contorting scenarios. In a movie once the hero accepts the challenge and embarks on the journey (think Luke going off to rescue the Princess) the story unfolds chronologically - however in your presentation we are unconstrained by the boundaries of space and time and as long as we stick to the presentation form - what is and what could be - we will do just fine.

It is into this form that you place your ideas that ultimately will convey the status quo - a day in the life of a customer without your product, the complexity of today's solutions, the overhead, the cost, the gaps etc...this is interspersed with ideas that convey how life will be like once the hero is using the product, how simple, how much cheaper, how much faster, how much more comprehensive. The presentation form ends with a declaration of how life will be in the new era underwritten by your product. This is your Big Idea and we'll discuss this in the next post.

In Apple's WWDC, Tim Cook ends with a statement about how the world is with Apple in it:

Only Apple could make such amazing hardware, software and services. We are so proud of these products, as they are perfect examples of what Apple does best. And ultimately, it’s why people choose to come to work at Apple, and with Apple. To do the very best work of their lives, to create products that empower people to do great things, to make a difference in the lives of so many people around the world. The products we make, combined with the apps that you create can fundamentally change the world. And really, I can’t think of a better reason of getting up in the morning.

Powerful stuff from Tim Cook, CEO of Apple at WWDC 12 in San Francisco.

Can you reimagine your default presentation presented in this new form?

With an ending like that you too can expect new converts to your ideas.

Adding drama to your presentation helps you sell faster

A Hero - Daenerys Targaryen on a journey

How many of your presentations have a slide all about you - a "me" slide - generally at the beginning of your deck? How many of you believe that your product or solutions solves customer problems in a kick-ass way? In fact that your product is so kick-ass that it is the hero and will lead your customers out of the wilderness? Well it is true that some people are attracted to that guy that comes up to you at a cocktail party and talks all about himself...but let's take a look at another approach, one that will give you significantly different results: You are not the hero, your customer is the hero. You are taking the customer on a journey and they are going to need your help in overcoming a series of obstacles, but once resolved they will enter into a new state of being.

Books, screenplays, mythology, cinema all provide a structure for a story to be told; one of the reasons some presentations are so boring is that they lack a story. In stories we have heroes that we relate to, we root for them as they face challenges until they reemerge transformed and the final story is revealed. There are other key attributes of story telling, the notion of stakes - something must be at stake if the hero doesn't reach his goal. This tension creates drama and without it you have a boring story.

All stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, screenwriters employ more complex forms and Joseph Campbell who deconstructed stories and myths from around the world  created a circular diagram to show the different stages of the journey a hero takes.

Christopher Vogler’s version of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, as visualized in Stuart Voytilla’s Myth and the Movies

With presentations it is the customer and/or your audience that is the hero - you take them on a journey from their world to your special world and they learn new ways of dong things. Along the way they will resist your ideas citing roadblocks. Before they can get past this point they have to change their perceptions internally of the problem before they change the actions they take. Getting the audience to step into something new is the goal of your presentation, you need to acknowledge that change comes with a struggle, and once audiences are willing to make that change then you as their mentor help them with the rest of their journey to make them successful.

In the next post I will describe a presentation form that is part of great speeches given by luminaries such as Martin Luther King, Richard Feynman and Steve Jobs, a way of introducing ideas that resonate and that cal people to action.

Meanwhile take a look at your decks, are they all about you? Can you describe the day in the life of a customer without your product and with your product? Do you have a story to tell?

Related articles

• The renaissance of selling your idea (reimaginestrategy.com)

Contrast creates connections and helps you sell faster

Those of you who have sold to enterprises may be very familiar with a selling approach popularized in a book by Michael Bosworth called "Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets" which discusses how important it is to establish the pain that a prospect may be feeling and to make sure that prospects are made to 'wallow' in that pain. This approach means that you establish empathy with your target buyer and then create a contrast when your solution is revealed and addresses all of the pain points the prospect has indicated are particularly onerous.

The implementation of this approach in presentations is often done by having a slide which lists all the problems, followed by a slide which lists all the benefits of the solution and possibly in between there are some mapping slides, maybe even some animation and arrows. This is all very useful in the overall sales process but there is a more nuanced way to show contrast and in future posts I will discuss presentation structures that help with this (for instance Duarte Design's approach overviewed in this earlier post), but today I just want to focus on types of contrast and how you can incorporate those into your existing presentations today.

So we're on the same page, why is contrast important? In today's world people are faced with multiple choices - in fact we are bombarded all the time, the only way the human brain can comprehend all of these inputs and messages is by looking for the differences between things - this is the basis of differentiation. So when you are presenting about a topic or a product it is important to help people join the dots, differentiated facts are important but so is the way in which you contrast the status quo with the future way of doing things, the greater the contrast the more connections are made and the process of selling your idea becomes easier. The more times you contrast and the more ways in which you establish contrast the greater the engagement with your audience.

Consider this research published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1986 by John Heritage and David Greatbatch: Generating Applause: A Study of Rhetoric and Response in Party Political Conferences, which studied why some speeches resulted in total silence and others received applause, their conclusion, which is also described in Resonate, based on analysis of nineteen thousand sentences is that contrast plays a critical role. In half the instances where the audience applauded the speaker was communicating a contrast.

Directly from Resonate:

To refine your presentation with contrast shut off powerpoint and do some brainstorming. Write down ideas which express the status quo and next to them what could be:

• Staus Quo - What could be
• Past/Present - Future
• Pain - Gain
• Problem - Solution
• Roadblocks - Clear sailing
• Resistance - Action
• Impossible - Possible
• Need - Fulfillment
• Disadvantage - Advantage or Opportunity
• Information - Insight
• Ordinary - Special
• Question - Answer

These ideas should help you trigger changes to you presentation. In addition to these elements its also important in the delivery to access emotional contrast. Analytical slides - lots of charts and gaps, diagrams, facts often have little or no emotional content. By alternating with more emotional ways to tell your story you can engage the audience and make many more connections.

Intersperse the following types of emotional content, in fact convert some of your existing analytical slides to slides that convey:

• Biographical or fictions stories
• Analogies, metaphors, anecdotes, parables
• Use props or demonstrations
• Shocking or scary statements
• Evocative images
• Surprises
• Suspenseful reveals and sometimes humour

Then make sure in the flow of your presentation you are balancing out your analytical slides with your emotional contrasting slides. By reimagining your current presentation by incorporating contrasting ideas and contrasting emotional content you can make better connections with your prospects and speed up the selling of your ideas.

Related articles

• Resistance helps you sell faster (reimaginestrategy.com)
• You have the power to change the world (reimaginestrategy.com)
• The renaissance of selling your idea (reimaginestrategy.com)
• Adding drama to your presentation helps you sell faster (reimaginestrategy.com)