The Hill Group

By Phil Roybal

Back when I was a newly-minted computer salesman, I loved to talk about my products. They were just so cool! And ours had such wonderful features. If I could just tell prospects enough about the machines, I knew they’d buy.

One day my boss took me aside after a presentation and said, “You know, you’re selling the product in the first five minutes, then buying it back in the next 15. Don’t tell everything you know. Just talk about what they’re interested in, then shut up.”

Great advice.

I try to remember it as I prepare a talk., and follow these three steps to connect with my audience and get results.

FIRST

I decide what my audience should do as a result of listening to me. Do I want them to allow a sales call? Vote for a policy? Sell me their home? Effectiveness is measured by audience actions, and I can’t plan for results if I don’t know what I want. As Yogi Berra said, “You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”

SECOND

Knowing my goals, I look for why my audience would want to help me get there. My goals aren’t (necessarily) theirs. So what would they gain by helping me? I try to list their most important benefits, then focus on the two or three most powerful ones. In the end most decisions are emotional, rationalized by facts. And emotional decisions aren’t made on twenty factors. They’re often made on one or two.

That means I have to know enough about my audience to guess what’s important to them. That may vary by age, gender, occupation, company, race—a thousand things. I can never know enough, so I try to allow time to chat with individuals before a presentation, learning as much as I can about what’s important to them. Since I already know what I’m going to talk about, I’m looking for “hot buttons”—ways to make my content meaningful to them.

THIRD

I know my goals and the key benefits that might motivate listeners to help me achieve them. Now is the time to marshal just enough facts to back the claim that my approach will get listeners what they want.

Here’s where my old boss’s words ring in my ears. I want to talk about how my listeners benefit, and provide a few facts to make my claim credible. I don’t want to provide more than that for two reasons:

New facts raise issues people may not have considered before. What I see as a bonus may get someone else thinking, “Gee, I wonder if I should hold off while I investigate…”

Each new fact is one more thing for the listener to remember. If I pile on enough, they’ll forget the things that are most important for their decision. Cicero said, “Every unnecessary word pours over the side of a brimming mind.”

“But what about all my great facts?” Put ‘em in the handout. Make your stage presentation simple, powerful, and oriented around a few key benefits. If you connect with your audience, they can turn to the handout for the facts that help them rationalize the decision you’ve already helped them reach.