Presentation Tips

Flagging is a way for you to call attention to the main point of your message. There are some key words and phrases that wake people up and tell them to listen carefully. Here are some of them:

If you take just one thing away from this, it should be…
The most important thing to remember is…
What it all boils down to is…
The bottom line is…
The most critical issue is…
At the end of the day…
That’s a really good question. The answer is…

You can also use:

The best part is…
The focus of the debate should be…
First and foremost,…
The key thing we’re focusing on right now is…

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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“Stories are good, you should use them more often. And it’s important to put yourself in your stories.”

That’s good advice.

But these days a lot of people pass out advice like that, and then you ask them to explain themselves, and they tell you stuff like, “It makes you seem more authentic. It makes you seem more vulnerable.”

They use a bunch of words that nobody understands. Nobody really knows how to implement the advice.

There’s a simpler and more direct reason that stories work well, and that is just that people are social animals and they like to see how other people interact with other people.

So sometimes a story is as simple as, “I walked down the street and I went to a restaurant for lunch, and I learned about XYZ. After lunch, then I had to go to get a haircut, and I learned about ABC.”

Maybe the actual point of your speech is to teach people about XYZ and ABC. The reason that you’re using a story to do it is because it holds people’s attention longer. A well-told story can hold attention for pretty much ever.

Of course, keep in mind what your audience is there for and what they want. That’s the golden rule. In a business presentation, your audience probably wants to know something like the quarter’s sales numbers. They don’t care about your daughter’s boyfriend’s personal hygiene challenges.

Maybe in a personal story, you’re going to talk about your daughter’s boyfriend’s personal hygiene challenges because people want to know about stuff like that and how that affects you, but with business audiences, your stories are probably going to be shorter and they’ll often just be three or four sentences.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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A question that often comes up in investor conference calls, especially with emerging markets companies, is “How are political or regulatory changes affecting the business environment?”

The way your company chooses to answer this question is a stylistic difference. There is rarely a right or wrong.

There will be some companies who have the CEO answer that question, and there will be some companies who have the CFO or one of the other officers of the company answering it.

Again, both styles are completely valid, but one thing to keep in mind is how they affect the deep bench question.

If the CEO answers the question, the CEO’s answer might be very knowledgeable, but the audience might wonder, “Is the CEO the only one who understands and knows how to deal with this issue, or do the other officers understand it and know how to deal with it, too?”

On the other hand, if the answer is given by one of the other officers, then it answers the deep bench question well. It shows that the other officers of the company understand the political changes and what they will mean for the company.

However, it might leave the audience wondering how well the CEO understands how the political environment is affecting the business.

One other thing to watch out for is if you have the chief legal officer answering regulatory questions, the answer might be the most accurate, but the listeners might start thinking, “Is the chief legal officer the only one who understands this, or does the bench understanding run deeper?”

Again, like most things related to investor conference calls, there is no right or wrong answer. It’s largely a stylistic question. The thing to keep in mind is that no matter what method you choose, it will raise questions in the audience’s minds, and you need to come up with a game plan for addressing those questions.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Steven Pressfield, the author of The War Of Art, one of my favorite books, once said:

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.”

Since you’re a professional, you know what Pressfield knows: nothing conquers fear quite like taking action.

Acknowledge the fear, then set it aside and get to work.

This goes double for public speaking. Your audience wants to hear from you. Your duty is to speak to them. You will never stop feeling fear, so learn how to deliver your message anyway.

A related video: You’ll probably never not be nervous

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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The most effective presentations aren’t presentations at all. They are conversations, and you probably already have all the skills you need, they just need to be unlocked.

Let’s say the Big Boss from Headquarters is coming to your regional office for a full day of all the department heads presenting their annual plans to him, or their major initiatives for the next year.

Your end goal is that you want to stand out in front of the Big Boss. The best way to stand out is to do what other people are not doing.

Start by imagining what the other department heads are doing. What they’re usually doing is, if their presentation is to be thirty minutes, they start out with about an hour of content, and then they gradually cut things out until they get down closer to forty minutes. They they cut some more until they get to thirty minutes, or at least they try to.

What often ends up happening is they get to under forty minutes and then they say we can’t cut anymore, so they take that forty minutes and they try to cram it into thirty minutes.

These people end up trying to go too fast and barely having time to say what they walked into the room to say. They’re not doing their specialty, not doing what the company is paying them for. They’re doing something else, presentation skills, or, more correctly, what they imagine those presentation skills might be.

Their presentations are almost certainly going to be terrible. The Big Boss is going to be in pain. By the end of the day he’s going to be aching to get out of there. His head is going to be ready to explode.

So go the other way. Do what the others are not doing:

You know your subject better than anybody in the world, so distill your subject into a couple sentences. We’ve even seen one of our clients distill his message into six words.

The others will get up there and start presenting to The Big Boss, and their message will get lost. They’ll be trying to do a million other “presentation things,” but they won’t be doing what they’re really good at, which is talking about the subject they’ve spent years working on.

You, however, get to walk into that room confident that you can sum up your message in just a few words if you need to.

You get to get up there and talk about the things you’re really good at, using the skills you’ve already been practicing everyday for you whole life, because the “presentation things” aren’t getting in your way.

Yes, it’s a little counter-intuitive, but the best way to present is the way that unlocks the skills you already have: the communication skills you’ve already been practicing your whole life, and the subject matter expertise you bury yourself in every day at work.

Now, this does not mean you get to be lazy, or that you’re going to oversimplify things. You’re not going to walk into that presentation room, magically deliver your entire message in 15 seconds, and then confidently strut out of the room while everyone says, “Oh my god, that was the most amazing presentation I ever saw!”

No, on the contrary, the reality is that you’ll probably need the whole half hour, but the difference will be that The Big Boss will be asking you questions, asking you to dive deeper and brainstorm with him right there on the spot. He will remember you as the one who electrified his brain when everyone else put him to sleep.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Wherever you look, your audience is probably going to look there too.

This is a human trait. You’re not going to get around it. There’s no amount of presentation training that is going to help you overcome it.

If your audience sees you looking at your slides, they will probably also look at your slides. That doesn’t mean that looking at your slides is inherently bad, but it does mean that, since you compete with your slides for attention, when you look at them you are almost guaranteed to move the audience’s attention off of yourself and onto your slides.

Another way that this plays out is when people are participating in panels. When you are on a panel, even when you are not speaking, you are basically performing. Wherever you look, the audience will look too. If, while you are not speaking, you look at the floor, or at your hands, or at the ceiling, your audience is also going to look at the floor, or your hands, or the ceiling, too, and not at the speaker. You are distracting the audience.

So keep in mind that when you are on a panel or when you are using other people on your panel, that you are performing the whole time, not just when you are speaking. Wherever the audience should be looking, you look there too.

By the way, we recommend that you run a little test, just so you too can see how natural and unavoidable this little human quirk is:

Get a couple friends. Go out on to the street. Look at the sky.

Chances are pretty good that people passing by will also look at the sky. If they’re busy and they’re hurrying to get somewhere they might only look at the sky for a second or two, but they’re going to look at the sky.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Every CEO has a different style when it comes to handling investor conference calls (for example, an annual earnings report).

The styles lie on a spectrum.

On the one end, you’ve got a Jamie Dimon style, which is where the CEO will just say two or three sentences about the big picture and then throw it over to the CFO to go into the details.

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, where you have a CEO who will go into a great level of detail, and may actually deliver large portions of the report himself, and may talk about revenue numbers and distribution changes, and may mention customer names during the call.

Then there are CEOs who move back and forth, even in their opening statements. Their opening statement might begin with big picture stuff, but then it might transition to more detailed stuff, mentioning the earnings numbers, etc.

You often hear the more detailed approach at companies that have recently begun doing conference calls.

Every CEO has his or her different style, and there’s no right or wrong answer.

Keep in mind that the listeners on the conference call are often just listening to see what is the style of this particular CEO.

Then they’ll ask themselves questions. For example, if they hear a CEO who’s big picture, they’ll be looking to see, does this company have a deep bench?

If, on the other hand, the CEO is going into a great level of detail, they’re going to be wondering, “Okay, is there evidence that the CEO is delegating things, or every time there’s a problem, does somebody run into the CEO’s office?”

Almost every style is going to kick off some questions in the listeners’ brains. The key is not to look for a perfect style, because there isn’t a perfect style. The key is to know or to anticipate what kinds of questions your style might be kicking off in the brains of the people listening on the other end of the call.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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The other day a reader said, “My boss asked me if I could do an unplanned talk for 10 minutes. What do I say, how can I organize my thoughts?”

Here’s what we suggested…

“Two things humans almost always find fascinating:

“1. Change or movement (think of early humans out hunting, watching the savannah horizon: Fixed things, like a tree, don’t get much attention, but a moving lion or tiger, the humans will watch that and discuss it for hours).

“2. Will these changes or will this movement affect me?

“So if things are changing at [your organization] or with [your program], just spend your 10 minutes talking about that. Start with a general principal, and then give a case study / example / story about how clients are responding to that change.

“For example:

“Over the past half year, I’ve seen a bunch of things evolving, but here are the biggest three things you should probably keep your eye on…

“Thing-I’ve-seen-change-recently #1. For example, a couple months ago we saw a client run into this issue during their experience with [your program], and this is what happened (you describe the challenge, and then you tell the audience how it got resolved).

“Then there’s Thing-I’ve-seen-change-recently #2. For example, a couple months ago we saw a client run into this issue during their experience with [your program], and this is what happened (you describe the challenge, and then you tell the audience how it got resolved).

“Then there’s Thing-I’ve-seen-change-recently #3. For example, a couple months ago we saw a client run into this issue during their experience with [your program], and this is what happened (you describe the challenge, and then you tell the audience how it got resolved).”

“From the audience’s perspective, you’re giving them advice on what to look out for, and how others are solving it. The [audience members] get to take that knowledge back to their own people, and use it to help their own people prepare for [your program].”

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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When the speechwriting is almost done, it’s time to move on to the delivery training.

Why do we say “almost done”?

Because we need to make sure the speech we’ve written is going to work in real life, and we can’t start to gauge that until we start the training. Does the speech hold up when it gets into a more dynamic “stress test”-sort of environment? Does it sound right coming out of the mouth of the speaker?

There are many facets of delivery training, but one is particularly important for lead generation activities:

Cultivating audience participation.

An audience that knows it’s okay to participate is an audience that is more likely to come up to you after the speech, or at the breaks, to introduce themselves and find out more. If you don’t break the barrier between speaker and audience, that barrier will remain and you will only get about 30% as many opportunities to follow up with potential customers afterwards.

There are many ways to drum up audience participation, but here we’re going to mention a couple in particular:

1. Start with a time shift phrase

We all recognize time shift phrases from the stories of our childhood: “once upon a time,” “way back when,” etc. And so we’ve been trained all our lives that whenever we hear a time shift phrase, it’s time to sit back and listen. Time shift phrases put us in listening mode.

Examples:

–Last year, we noticed that…
–Two weeks ago, when I was cleaning out the trash…
–Yesterday, someone asked me why…

2. Open a question

The human brain is a question-solving machine. It’s so obsessed with solving questions that it will invent patterns and answers that don’t really exist. Sometimes, that obsession causes us to do stupid things, like vote for the wrong presidential candidate or date the wrong person.

However, a speaker can (and should) use that tendency to his/her own advantage.

Plant a question in the audience’s minds. Better yet, if you know your audience well, you already know the questions on their minds. So ask one of those questions, and let the audience watch and learn as you journey towards an answer.

Examples:

—Profit margins at many agencies are falling. Why?
—Stock levels at wholesalers are typically much higher than they need to be. The technology to bring them down exists, but still they stay high. Why is that?
—The boards of many companies tend to be too quick to support the CEO’s decisions. You might think you know why, but today I’m going to float another theory past you.

Often, there’s a tendency to want to answer the question quickly. After all, you may be thinking, you’re an expert, and shouldn’t you know the answer already?

And in fact, you probably do know the answer already. But the audience already knows you know the answer. That’s why they asked you to speak. They want to see how you think, how you go about solving problems, how well you can understand a situation.

So resist the temptation to answer the question immediately. Let it hang out there, unanswered, for a while. Your audience wants to know what you did between the time you asked the question and the time you answered the question. They want to learn from you. Don’t disappoint them.

On a related point:

Make the question a little more complicated than you can answer completely during the presentation. Leave some possible answers unaddressed. Not too many, because then you might seem like you don’t understand the complexity of the issue. But enough so that audience members come up to you at the break and say things like, “Yeah, but what about XYZ?” And then you get to talk about XYZ and cut the conversation short and say things like, “I’ve got to go, here’s my business card, call me and we can discuss this more.”

By the way, when we say in the sessions “open a question,” we mean “ask a question.” When we say “close the question,” we mean answer the question.

3. The list goes on and on. There are many ways to enhance audience participation. For a deeper study of them, consider signing up for our Communications Tuneup weekly course. Studying and practicing those techniques is a big part of what we do in there.

But the main takeaway to remember at this point is that 80% of those ways, including the two you just read about here, are structural. They are not personality-dependent. They do not rely on some magical charisma that allows you to work a crowd like god knows what.

Some charisma helps, sure, it never hurt anyone. But the truth is that most audience participation techniques rely on seeds that were already planted in the audience’s minds years ago. There’s no magic to stirring audience participation. It just takes a little practice so you know where to find the existing triggers and how to pull them.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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A reader asks, “How can I ask difficult questions?”

You know the kind of questions, the ones where you wonder beforehand if you dare ask them, the ones where you stop first and think things like is that question too forward, or too bold, or is it too early in the relationship, etc.

Yes, asking questions like that is risky, but the upside payoff is huge. People almost never make it to the C-suite unless they’ve shown they can ask difficult questions well. Also, if you’re an outside consultant, your clients will almost never see you as a trusted advisor unless you know how to ask difficult questions.

So knowing how to do it well is an important skill to have.

Here are three tips for doing it well:

1. Keep your eyes lower than the other person’s eyes.

Not lower as in “look down at the floor, away from the other person” but lower as in slightly below the other person’s eyes in elevation. In fact, to avoid confusion, let me restate that: Keep your eyebrows a little lower than the other person’s eyebrows.

And it doesn’t have to be a lot lower — in fact, keeping your eyes a lot lower would probably seem funny. And if both people are playing the same game, there will be a ridiculous-looking competition where both people will slouch lower and lower towards the floor until both people are practically falling out of their chairs to see who can get lower.

2. Keep your body loose. Remember mirror neurons and the tendency of people to act like people around them? You want the other person to stay loose and relaxed when you ask them the difficult question, to keep their defenses down, so you need to do the same.

3. And probably most importantly, use the other person’s words and phrases, not your own. For example, if the difficult question is how do you achieve “A” and “B” at the same time, even though they are mutually exclusive, get the other person to say “A,” and then to say “B,” and then you say, “Wait a minute, I don’t understand something, a few minutes ago you said A, but you also say B, and those seem like they are kind of contradictory, so how do you do both?”

Once you’ve asked the initial question and a couple followup questions, and no one has died, you can relax a bit and begin digging deeper into the difficult subject, knowing that you’ve been accepted into the club that gets to talk about that stuff.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Transcript:

The title of this segment is The Story Happens In The Listener’s Head, Not In The Teller’s Head.

There’s a story about Ernest Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway is in a bar and there are a bunch of other writers at the bar. They have a little bet, a little challenge.

They say, “How many words do you need to tell a story?”

One of the writers, he says he can tell a story in 10 words. Another writer says, “I can tell a story in 9 words.” Somebody else says, “I can tell a story in 8 words,” “7 words.”

Ernest Hemingway says, “I can tell a story in 6 words,” so there’s silence at the table. Ernest Hemingway, he tells a story in 6 words.

What is that story? He says, “For sale, baby shoes. Never worn.”

Notice that that story did not take shape until it had some time to rattle around in your head. That story did not have any shape when it came out of my mouth. It only took shape, it only took life, in your head. Stories take life in the heads of your listeners …

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Here we dive deeper into one of the five elements of story structure. This one is perhaps your speech’s most important element, but it’s usually the most difficult element to communicate clearly…

Notes:

HGOMM (5 points of story structure)
Jesse Jackson speech (repeating the moral — listen for the repeated phrase, “Rocks, just layin’ around,” starting at about minute 4:40)

Transcript:

The five components of a story HGOMM, hero or H stands for hero, G stands for goal, O stands for obstacle, the first M stands for mentor, the second M stands for moral. HGOMM, the five components of the story.

Usually the first four, the hero, the goal, the obstacle, and the mentor will be pretty clear and pretty easy for people to pick out. If they’re clear for you, the storyteller, they will generally be clear for the audience too.

But this last one, the last M, the moral, that’s a danger point because the audience is often not nearly as clear on the moral of the story as you are, you being the storyteller.

For you, the moral of the story, why you’re telling the story, what is your point, in your mind, that’s usually abundantly clear.

But for your audience, it might not be nearly as clear. They might be sitting out there listening to you tell your story and wondering what is the point of this story, why are we listening to this guy, what’s he trying to say.

With this last one, the moral of the story, it is especially important that you go the extra mile in terms of closing the gap between what’s in your head, the vision that’s in your head, and the vision that may or may not exist in the heads of your audience.

There are a couple ways that you can go about that.

One is to have a key phrase that is either your moral or is very closely related to your moral. Actually come to think of it, ideally that phrase is your moral and I’m going to link to a speech, a Jesse Jackson speech from the 1980s where he does this very well.

The second thing that you can do is you can end your story with that same key phrase. People are generally very good at remembering the last thing that comes out of your mouth. If the last thing that comes out of your mouth is the moral of the story, then when you shut up, when you stop talking, that last phrase is probably the one that they’re going to remember.

If you can combine those two techniques, that’s the best of all scenarios. That’s it for now. Thanks for listening. Talk to you later.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Go slow and speak less.

Yes, I know it’s counterintuitive. I can barely believe it myself, even though I see it happen almost every day.

Here’s an example:

These days I’m helping a client prepare for a speech at a major committee meeting. It’s an important meeting, and an important speech, but it’s a short speech — about 8 minutes.

When he first started practicing, it was almost impossible to cram everything into his 8 minute time limit. He was rushing, and the words alone were taking 10 minutes, and then there was a video too, and some slides, and it just didn’t look possible.

So I listened to the little voice in the back of my head, the one that was saying “Tell him to go slow and see what happens.”

He did, and within three practice rounds the speech had fallen to 5-1/2 minutes. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling of surprise and amazement that I had, sitting behind the camera, listening to the final few words fall out of his mouth, watching the timer: 5:19, 5:20, 5:21, 5:22, 5:23, press stop.

I think what happens is that when the speaker slows down, the mind clears. The brain focuses, and the fat is cut, naturally and easily.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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One of our readers had an excellent question about HGOMM…

(HGOMM: the five elements of a marketing story, outlined here: https://krauseenglish.com/hgomm/)

His question: Can you send an example of a short marketing story with these 5 components?

Yes, of course. An example…

There was a guy, Can. He was making the rounds, speaking at Rotary clubs, hoping to spread the word and generate some business. But he wasn’t getting the results he wanted — his audience seemed to be falling asleep whenever he would talk. So he called us. We helped him restructure his speech and work on his delivery techniques. They weren’t easy changes for him to make, they were a little bit out of his comfort zone. But it worked, and now when he speaks he gets the results he wants.

Hero: Can
Goal: Wants to use speaking to get more business.
Obstacle: People are falling asleep at his speeches.
Mentor: Us
Moral: If you want results you haven’t gotten before, you’ve got to do things you haven’t done before.

The first four, HGOM, are usually pretty easy to express. But that last M, the moral, is more difficult. Different audience members will see different morals, and sometimes it’s hard for the speaker to express the moral (as he sees it, at least) clearly. Here are a couple tips for getting over that:

https://krauseenglish.com/the-moral-of-the-story/

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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One of our correspondents had a very good question.

She watched the Feel Sense Describe video, and asked, “That’s nice, but how do I do that when I’m talking about numbers?”

Good question. Here’s a voice response with two suggestions:

By the way, we love to get followup questions, we answer all of them, and sometimes we even record our answer (like this) for all to hear. So if you have a question, don’t be shy, ask us. We promise we won’t use your name in the recording, unless you want us to!

Transcript:

One of our tips and tricks subscribers emailed me. She watched this video Feel Sense Describe. And she asked me, “Okay, Matt, that’s nice but how do I do that when I’m talking about numbers?” And that’s a very good question. We get that question a lot. It’s a very common question. And I’ve got two things to suggest.

One is, don’t think of the numbers themselves. It’s almost impossible to get emotionally excited about those numbers. You know, when you say a number like 1,263, or 9,300,200 and blah, blah, blah … it’s almost impossible to get emotional about that. Instead, think about the humans or think about the people behind those numbers. Think about, you know, the kid who went to a funeral, or think about the graduating student who just graduated from university, and she paid for university because her father had a life insurance policy, or something like that. So think about the humans behind the numbers. That’s suggestion number one.

Suggestion number two is about mirror neurons. And mirror neurons are very strong in any social animal, like humans. By mirror neurons, here’s what I mean. Some years ago, there were some researchers, and they had, let’s say, five groups of monkeys. And they had all of the monkeys, they were wired up to some computers that showed their brain waves or whatever. And so anyway, monkey group number one did something. I don’t know, they picked up a stick, or they picked up a piece of food, or something like that. And the researchers looked at the electronic brain waves that were happening in these monkeys, and they saw the electronic brain waves happening. The thing is that the researchers also noticed that the monkeys in groups two, three, four, whatever, those monkeys they weren’t actually doing anything, they were just sitting there watching the monkeys in group number one. And the exact same electronic brain activity that was happening in group one, was happening in groups two, three and four also.

And what the researchers realized was that, just by watching other monkeys feeling an emotion, the monkeys in groups two, three and four, they also feel those same emotions. And so, one way you can use that in a presentation is whatever emotion you want your audience to feel, dig deep into yourself and find the source of that emotion, and display that emotion yourself. So if you want your audience to feel excitement, then dig deep into yourself and find something that excites you. If you want your audience to feel happy, or sad, or angry, or patriotic, or whatever, dig deep into yourself and find the source of that emotion.

And that brings me to point number three. I’ll finish here with point number three. Point number three is kind of a bonus point. I hadn’t planned on mentioning it. But point number three is that, whatever that source of emotion is in you, you don’t actually have to talk about it. You don’t actually have to mention it in your presentation, cause the point is not to mention it, the point is just to show the emotion on your face. So, if you show the emotion on your face, even if you’re not talking about why you’re feeling that emotion on your face, your audience members will see that emotion on your face and then they’ll start to feel that emotion too.

And then point number 3.5, and then I promise I’m going to finish up. I could go on for hours about this subject but I promise I’m going to stop. So point number 3.5 is make sure that the emotion that you’re showing on your face or in your body language, or whatever, make sure that its real. Dig deep until you find a real, genuine source of that emotion in yourself. People are really, really good at seeing fake emotions. And so, if you try to fake an emotion, your audience is going to see that and there is no way that they are going to feel that emotion too. In fact, they’ll probably think you’re not worthy of trust or something like that. So make sure that whatever emotion you want them to feel, dig deep until you find a real and genuine source of that emotion in yourself, and then connect with that emotion.

Okay, so I promised I would stop there. So I’m going to stop there. I love these questions. Whenever you have a question about anything that we send to you, just email us, or call us, or whatever, and ask us the question. We’ll answer the question and, if it’s a good one, we may even do like here, do a recording. Okay, over and out. Take care. Bye-bye.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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In another blog post, we mentioned that stories happen in the listeners’ heads. In presenting, do not underestimate the power of this dynamic. It is a special talent pretty unique to humans. It allows us to organize into groups of millions (nations), or even billions (religions).

Your job as a presenter is not necessarily to describe your idea, it’s to plant your idea into the heads of the audience members. It is to plant a seed in the heads of your audience, a seed that will grow into something larger than you alone could make it.

Your audience members, if they are humans, have a special power. Let that power work for you.

More on this dynamic (the revolutionary ability of humans to see and develop the ideas of other humans, even when those ideas are abstract) is in this great TED speech:

A key part of the speech:

“What enables us alone, of all the animals, to cooperate in such a way? The answer is our imagination. We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values.

“All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality. A chimpanzee may say, “Look! There’s a lion, let’s run away!” Or, “Look! There’s a banana tree over there! Let’s go and get bananas!” Humans, in contrast, use their language not merely to describe reality, but also to create new realities, fictional realities. A human can say, “Look, there is a god above the clouds! And if you don’t do what I tell you to do, when you die, God will punish you and send you to hell.” And if you all believe this story that I’ve invented, then you will follow the same norms and laws and values, and you can cooperate. This is something only humans can do.”

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Three tips for working a conversational style into your presentation:

1. In the first 30 seconds of your presentation, ask a couple audience members a simple yes or no question related to your topic (If you are speaking about nutrition: “Murat, did you eat breakfast this morning?” “Ayşe, how about you, did you eat breakfast this morning?”).

The reason: This signals to the audience that they need to listen, that this presentation is going to be like a conversation, and they might need to talk at any time. If you don’t do this, the audience might quickly go into a passive listening mode (or actually, a non-listening mode, where they’re thinking, “Oh thank god, I can go to sleep now, the speaker is going to do all the talking.”). Later, when you need them to start answering questions, they’ll be asleep.

2. If you are going to ask the same question to multiple people, sprinkle your question randomly through the audience. Instead of starting at one end of the room/table and moving predictably from person to person, mix the order up and point at random, unexpected people.

The reason: If you follow a predictable order, your audience will often stop paying attention. The ones who haven’t spoken yet will start silently rehearsing in their heads (“There are three people ahead of me, I better figure out what I’m going to say.”). The ones who finished speaking will be thinking, “Thank god that’s over, I wonder if I did okay?” The only ones paying any attention will be you and the current speaker.

3. If you use a conversational style, you need to focus your message much more.

The reason: You’ll have less time to talk. If your normal talk time is 20 minutes, for example, you might only have 10 minutes to deliver your message. Plus, you’ll be busy steering the audience (letting them talk freely, but not going too far from your topic). If you don’t focus your message, it’ll be like you’re juggling with too many balls in the air.

If a presentation is part of your sales funnel, a conversational style will often double your conversion rate for that particular stage. You’ve already been practicing this skill in one-on-one situations all your life, but transferring this skill to a presentation environment requires a lot of deep practice. It definitely pays off though (no pun intended).

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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At about minute 34:45 in this speech…

…Kevin Spacey makes a very good point: Many people complain about their audience’s shrinking attention span, and yet people still find 12 hours to binge-watch a TV show.

So instead of trying to trim things until you can meet an impossibly short standard, think of it this way:

There’s a lot of crap out there, and people are really good at sorting through it quickly. Attention spans are not shrinking, not at all. In fact, people have almost unlimited attention spans for things that are important to them.

If your audience is looking at their phones, the problem is probably not their attention spans. The problem is probably that you didn’t find out what was important to them before you opened your mouth.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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You don’t always need to start with a joke. After all, you are probably not a professional comedian, and no one expects you to be. And starting a speech with an irrelevant joke, no matter how funny it is, like “Two men and a dog walk into a bar…” is almost guaranteed to make you look like a fool.

But if your natural sense of humor wants to come through, let it. Especially if the joke applies to you or to your immediate surroundings, and especially if you are making fun of yourself, like Guy Kawasaki is here.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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American author Kurt Vonnegut diagrams some basic, but very classic, story structures…

Believe it or not, the structures he outlines here even work for speeches about corporate debt and global financial crises.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Videos can make an excellent addition to your presentation. Most of the time they work, but every once in a while they don’t, and then you’re left there on the stage feeling embarrassed and saying something lame like “Hey, there’s supposed to be a video here, but I guess Murphy just walked into the room.”

So how can you avoid that embarrassing moment?

Insert a black slide before the video slide. Then insert the video slide. Then insert another black slide.

So the sequence looks like this: slide #1: black; slide #2: video; slide #3: black

If the video works, great! If it doesn’t, slide #2 will be black. You’ll have three black slides, and the audience won’t even know there was a problem.

Pro tip:
The standard way to introduce the video goes like this, for example: “Mountains are beautiful, here’s a video about that…” [switch to the video slide, and pray that the video works]

But even better, just say, “Mountains are beautiful…” and then switch to the video slide. Notice that you didn’t announce the video, so if the video doesn’t work, you can just stand in front of a black screen and tell a story about going to the mountains when you were a kid, and the audience will never know there was a video problem.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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A common issue we see is people speaking too fast, trying to cram too much content into too little time.

Fortunately, there’s a very natural way around this. It’s something we’ve been practicing our entire lives, and we do it so naturally we don’t even realize we are doing it.

That is, watch your audience, talk to them, find their rhythms. For some reason, when people get onto the stage, they think they’re supposed to do all the talking. If someone spent the entire time at a party talking, you’d probably think, “What a jerk!” Why do we think that’s acceptable behavior when we get on the stage?

The best way to slow down is to shut up and let your audience do some talking, too. Make them answer questions, let them voice their opinions. Pause and smile at someone, they’ll probably smile at you too! (humans tend to do what they see other humans doing)

Do the same things you do when talking to people at a party or chatting with them in the hallway at work. Finding the rhythms of other humans and matching those rhythms is something you’ve probably been practicing your entire life. Use the same exact skill when you get up onto the stage.

Another perspective on speaking slower…

The Fastest Way To Say More.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Guy Kawasaki speaks at TEDxBerkeley, about the 10 points of innovation…

Notes:

1. Local references: In this speech, he makes a lot of references to local universities [Stanford, Cal (local nickname for University of California Berkeley), USC (University of Southern California)]. In fact, his very first sentence is about graduating from Stanford (a university near San Francisco). He is speaking in Berkeley (a city, also near San Francisco), and the audience is probably filled with university professors and students, or at least people close to the community. They will understand any university references very quickly, and they will feel a bond with him because of that.
2. Self-effacing humor: At 0:20, he tells a joke/story. In this joke/story, his wife gives him a friendly, funny insult. So, within the first 30 seconds, he establishes a bond with his audience (the university comments) AND he makes them laugh.
3. Body language, smiling: Guy Kawasaki smiles a lot during this speech, but that is typical body language for him. It is good to smile at your audience, to be conversational and friendly with them. But don’t think you need to smile as much as Guy Kawasaki. That’s just his normal, personal style — he smiles a lot whenever he talks.
4. Outline the speech: There are many ways to open a speech. One way is to tell the audience what you’re going to tell them. Here, Guy Kawasaki tells the audience there are 10 points to innovation, and I’m going to tell you what they are. In the introduction, he doesn’t tell the audience what those 10 points are, he just tells them there are 10, so they can track the progress of the speech.
5. Speaks quickly: He is speaking to an audience that:
   • probably already knows him,
   • probably has even seen him speak before,
   • probably already knows the topics he speaks about,
   • and probably lives in one very small area (towns near San Francisco).

   Since the audience is already very familiar with him, and with his topic, he can afford to speak very quickly. In fact, it sounds like he is taking a 30-40 minute speech and trying to cover all the material in 20 minutes. In most situations, this would probably be a mistake. But in this situation it works okay.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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As a speaker, there are a couple numbers you should know.

One is your average WPM — how many words do you speak per minute (the average human speaks about 120-130 words per minute). You do that so when you are writing a speech, you know about how many words you have to express your idea (for example, “I speak about 120 wpm, and my speech is 5 minutes, so my speech needs to be about 600 words).

Another number you should be aware of is what grade level do you typically speak or write at? Can a university student understand your speech? A high schooler? A middle schooler?

Speaking only so highly-educated people can understand you is not necessarily something to be proud of. In his famous product keynote speeches, Steve Jobs spoke at a middle school level, and sometimes even lower.

How can you get “your number”? Do a Flesch-Kincaid test. They’re free and easy. Go to Google and type “Flesch-Kincaid test” — you’ll get a results page filled with free F-K calculators, like this one:

perrymarshall.com/grade

Copy/paste your text into the calculator, hit enter, and watch the score magically appear.

I love Flesch-Kincaid tests so much that sometimes I paste in a speech, just for fun…

I grabbed the transcript from one of my favorite speeches, a Ken Robinson TED speech, and checked it out. What did he get? 5.7. This is one of the best speeches ever, but even a 6th grader could understand it.

Then I grabbed a Wikipedia article on nuclear fusion. Its score? 13.5. Oh, no wonder my brain hurts! You’ve got to be a university student to understand this one!

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Here’s a tip for those times when you’re speaking to a potentially hostile audience, or coming dangerously close to a hot, explosive topic:

In your opening sentences, remind the audience you share common ground with them, but also acknowledge the debate.

It’s important to do both.

Remind the audience of your common ground, so they remember you ultimately have the same goals as them. Remind them that you are their friend and ally.

Acknowledge the debate, because often, about half of a person’s hostility comes from simply wanting to be heard. Often, only about half of a person’s hostility comes from the debate topic itself. Acknowledging the debate won’t make it go away, but it will reduce the strength of the hostility in the room. People will know you hear them, even when you don’t agree with them.

Here’s an example of how you can start a speech like that:

“Thank you for inviting me today. Common ground, blah blah blah, paint a picture of the common vision, blah blah blah. Yes, there are debates, debates about whether to A, or B, or C, but in the end we want similar things for our company. That said, today I’d like to stick to… (begin discussing your topic here).”

Sometimes, the purpose of your speech is to try to resolve the debate, and then you probably have no choice but to run towards the bomb and let it explode.

But sometimes the resolution is for another speech, at another time, or maybe for another person, and you just don’t want the bomb to explode in your face while you’re on stage talking about your thing. This technique is for that.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Yes, you compete with your slides for the audience’s attention. When the audience is looking at your slides, they aren’t listening to you. So we preach, over and over, keep your slides simple, keep your slides simple.

But in real life, you don’t always control the design, or even the timing, of your slides. Sometimes a committee does, or a board, or maybe your boss. You might feel like the slides are too heavy with data (charts, graphs, numbers, etc), but what can you do?

Here’s a tip:

When those data-heavy slides flash on the screen, there will be a moment, at the very beginning, where your audience will be confused. They’ll be thinking, “Oh my god, what do I do with all this information? And there’s this person speaking too! Where do I look, what’s important?”

Seize that moment of confusion. Tell the audience that you are going to stick with the big picture, and reassure them that the details, via handouts, will be available to them later. Try this:

“Thank you everyone for coming. Yes, I know this is a lot of data to absorb. But have no fear. I will stick with the big picture, and then, if you really want to dive into the details, don’t worry, you can take the slides home with you and spend all the time you want tonight looking at as much detail as you want.”

Right at that moment of greatest confusion and panic, when your audience is looking like deer in headlights, that’s when you grab them with this. A drowning man is so happy to have a floating lifesaver ring to grab onto. Be that ring for your audience, and they’ll listen to you, not the slides.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Here’s a body language tip:

It’s called the Sullivan Nod. When you are talking to an audience, and you are listing three or four or five options, smile and nod when you’re describing the one you want them to choose. Chances are pretty good that they’ll choose it.

The “Sullivan” of the Sullivan Nod is Jim Sullivan, a restaurant consultant. He says, “Whenever servers suggest a beverage, have them smile and slowly nod their heads up and down as they make the suggestion. Body language is powerful, and research shows that over 60% of the time, the guest will nod right back and take your suggestion!”

Sullivan doesn’t suggest that you excitedly jump up and down and frantically nod your head and scream, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” He just suggests that you subtly demonstrate the physical response you’d like the audience to take.

Humans are social animals, and they tend to mirror the actions of those around them. When we smile, people around us tend to smile. When we lean in towards another person, they tend to lean in too. And when we nod and say yes, they tend to nod and say yes, too.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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In this speech Jesse Jackson, campaigning for US President in 1984, speaks at a church. There are two things I would like to point out in this speech, and they both have to do with point #3 in overcoming the Curse of Knowledge (make it concrete — use simple words and clear imagery):

1. At 1:45, he discusses economic policies, but he does not use academic, brainy terms like “balance of trade,” “equilibrium,” or “investment deflection.” Instead, he uses simple words and clear imagery: cars, vodka, and airplanes.

He says:

“When you buy Honda and Toyota, that’s foreign policy. Russian vodka, that’s foreign policy. (unintelligible), that’s foreign policy. Mercedes-Benz, that’s foreign policy. As a matter of fact, we came here on a foreign policy [Matt: he’s probably referring to Airbus].”

2. At 4:48, he discusses election campaign tactics, and he starts mentioning numbers.

It’s easy for people to get lost with numbers — a number that is significant to the speaker might not be significant to the audience, and vice versa.

But Jesse Jackson punctuates the numbers with a simple image between each number:

“…[state, numbers, blah blah]…rocks, just layin’ around. [State, numbers, blah blah]…rocks, just layin’ around. [State, numbers, blah blah]…rocks, just layin’ around. [State, numbers, blah blah]…rocks, just layin’ around.”

What does this mean for the rest of us, those of us who are not running for US President?

Examine your words closely. Use the simplest, clearest imagery you can.

Think about how you would express your theory in pictures, and then describe those pictures.

When you are talking about numbers, make those numbers real — give them an image, and, if you can, repeat that image often. Most of your audience will forget the numbers, but they’ll remember the image.

By the way, in this speech Jesse Jackson speaks very quickly, but don’t worry: even though I am a native speaker there were words I could not understand, or had to listen to multiple times before I could understand.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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For you, as a listener, what’s easier to understand?

“I… went… to… the… store…”

…or…

“Uhhh, I, uhhh… went, uhhh… to, uhhh… the, uhhh… store, uhhh.”?

Which one was easier to understand? Probably the first one, right? Both of them took the same amount of time — the first one wasn’t any faster — but the first one was a lot easier to understand.

Your audience members don’t like “uhh’s.” We call them “filler words,” words or sounds that mean nothing. They make it hard to listen. If you use a lot of filler words, people describe you as “tiring,” and “hard to understand.”

So we’d love to get rid of those filler words, right?

But ask around, ask a bunch of people why they say uhh, and 9 out of 10 of them will say, “Because I need time to think.”

Thinking is good. There’s nothing wrong with thinking. Audiences love listening to people who think.

So what if there was a way to get rid of the uhh’s, but still give you time to think?

The answer is yes, there is a way, a couple of ways actually, and I’m going to show one of them to you right now.

It’s speak slowly. Breathe. Watch this example:

The point of this exercise is to become comfortable with pauses, comfortable with speaking slowly.

Of course, you’re not going to talk like this in real life, in front of other people. But this isn’t real life.
You’re just practicing alone. You’re alone in a room by yourself.

When one of our clients tries this we ask them, “How did it feel?”

Usually they look at us, and they’re unsure, and they say, “Boy, that felt really slow, I don’t want to sound stupid. I feel like if I talk fast, people will think I know my subject.”

But then we turn around, and we start asking the audience members, “How did that feel for you?” And pretty much every time, they say, “The slower version was so much easier to listen to, AND I felt like the speaker must know their subject really well, they seem like they’re in better command of their thoughts.”

Let me say that again: The speaker thought they sounded dumb. But the audience had the opposite reaction. The audience thought the speaker knew their subject better.

Remember, the audience is the one that matters. They’re the ones whose opinion matters the most.

So when you’re speaking, go slow. Breathe. Go slow. Breathe. Think during the silence; your audience needs you to give them time to think, too.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Have a friend video you while you’re speaking. And yes, watch it!

I’ve never met a person who liked to watch himself speaking. Not once. But there’s something magic about it. Every person who ever watches himself on video decides to become a better speaker. It’s like it lights some huge fire inside of people. It’s amazing.

How do they become better?

First, they become more aware of themselves.

You see, beginners tend to think they’re a lot better than they really are. They don’t realize what nervous habits they have. For example, they don’t realize that when they get on stage they pace back and forth like a caged animal. Or they don’t realize they stand ramrod straight, like an old tree.

When you’re speaking, time goes all weird too. For example, you might be thinking, I held my hand up forever. When you watch the video, however, you see you only held your hand up for a fraction of a second. Or you might be thinking, I stood still the whole time. In the video you’ll see that you were practically running in circles on the stage.

Watch yourself on video. You’ll become aware of what your body does, how your arms move, how your voice sounds, what your feet do. You’ll become aware of embarrassing quirks, weird little tics, like that weird thing you do with your hair for example. You’ll learn stuff about yourself that you would never, never, never learn if you just asked yourself, and others, afterwards, “How did I do?”

The second, and perhaps more important, benefit of watching yourself on video: You’ll start to learn one of the most useful, yet most difficult, lessons of public speaking: The audience is almost never thinking the same thing as you.

We see it happen again and again: Clients watch themselves on video and realize how radical is the difference between what’s going on in their heads and and what’s going on outside their heads.

And that’s just one step away from realizing that what’s going on inside your head is radically different than what’s going on inside your audience’s heads, and that’s just one step away from stopping listening to your own fear and nervousness, and listening to your audience’s desires instead.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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People are like dogs. If you stare at one long enough, he’ll attack.

When you are giving a presentation, if an audience member gets aggressive and starts challenging you, resist the urge to spend too much time looking at that one person. Address his questions, but look at the other audience members, too, while you’re doing it.

When you keep the larger group involved, most individual attackers calm down. Their challenging questions might not end, but their hostility often will. They will relax, and you’ll keep a stimulating discussion from turning into a knife fight.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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There are many ways to start a speech. One of them is outlining what you’re going to talk about. Watch how Guy Kawasaki does it in the first 90 seconds of his speech…

He tells us that he’s going to cover 10 points, and that telling your audience you’re going to cover X number of points signals to them that even if you’re boring, you’ll only be boring for a little while.

Starting a speech with an outline (“Here’s what I’m going tell you”) is common and familiar. However, personally, I think it’s kind of a weak way to start a speech. It’s like saying, “Honey, if the sex is bad, don’t worry, it will only last a few minutes.”

I like to see my clients take a little bigger risk, to challenge themselves a little bit more. But I understand why someone would start their speech this way. It’s safe. It’s logical. No one ever got killed for saying, “I’m going to tell you 10 things, and then I’m going to sit down.”

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Put politics aside for a second. Listen to the patterns in this guy’s speech, there are a couple things I would like to point out…

Below is an anonymized version of the email that points those things out…

Hi XXX,

I agree completely, you don’t need perfect language to be a good speaker. If you have something interesting to say, and if the audience wants to hear your opinions, you could probably send smoke signals into the air, or use some other incredibly inefficient communications technique, and they would still listen with great attention.

As long as you have something they want, people will allow almost anything. That’s one of the most important jobs in good communication: find out what the other people want.

Of course, if everything else is equal, perfect language will win. But everything else is almost never equal, and, in fact, it’s almost always all of our jobs, no matter what our industry is, to make sure that everything else is never equal.

And actually, perfect language can get in the way sometimes, because audiences like to see effort and thought on the speaker’s face. Maybe the effort is coming from language, but the audience often doesn’t know that. The speaker might be digging deep for a vocabulary word, but the audience just thinks the speaker is thinking deeply.

That İbrahim Kalın speech you sent is a great example. He has lots of ahh’s and umm’s in there, but they actually add to his speech — the effect is “this guy is speaking genuinely, because he needs to slow down and think.” Having too many ahh’s and umm’s is usually a problem, but the magic number seems to be about 6 per minute — if you use a lot more than that, it makes the audience’s brains hurt, but if you use less than that, the audience thinks you are genuine/thoughtful.

Another thing he does very well is he doesn’t stress every word. He relaxes his stress for a few phrases, and only stresses a few words per sentence. The result? The audience gets a chance to relax too, and instead of getting tired because they have to listen to 10 words and decide which 10 words are important, İbrahim Kalın is already doing that work for them.

Matt

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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One of our clients asked what he called a “million-dollar question”…

He asked, “I feel very shy in front of a camera. How can I improve? Any tips?”

Here was my response:

“Here’s what I do, try this…

“Humans naturally relax and light up when they talk to other humans they know. So before you sit down in front of the camera, visualize the face of someone who relaxes you. Imagine them standing next to you. Talk to them (silently of course — otherwise other people in the room will think you’re crazy).

“Then sit down in front of the camera, and pause for a moment to make sure their image is still in your head. Imagine them sitting on the other side of the camera, right above the camera lens. Then talk to them, not the camera lens.

“Whatever is going on in your head will drive your facial expressions more than the outside environment. So your inner mental game and visualization skills are where to look for answers to the “camera shy” question.

Related to inner mental game and visualization: https://krauseenglish.com/feel-sense-describe-dont-just-tell/.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Transcript:

Rule number two.

Something to remember before you even start outlining your speech.

Rule number two or question number two is what do you want your audience to do at the end of your speech.

The other day somebody said, “Oh you mean, what’s my goal?”

I said, “No, that’s not the question.” What’s your goal is not the question.

The question is what do you want your audience to do.

The reason the question is phrased that way is because a good speech does not happen in your head.

A good speech happens in the heads of the audience members. Before you outline your speech, you need to ask yourself what do I want them to do? What do I want going on in their heads, and what words am I going to choose so that they take that action?

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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As presentation trainers we tell our clients over and over, “More eye contact, more eye contact.” But sometimes you’ve got other stuff to do, and it’s okay to look away. Not to read your slides or look at your shoes, no. But to visualize something you’re talking about.

Like when you’re telling a story. Sometimes in order to tell a story really well you’ve got to look into the distance and visualize it. See the people. Run your hands across the fabric on the furniture, or feel the grass. Remember what people said, hear their voices, see the dirt in the corner. Feel how you felt. And when you do these things, your audience will realize there is a reason you are not looking in their eyes. They will know it is because you have transported yourself to another time and place, and they will come with you.

Remember that the point of making eye contact is not just to make eye contact for eye contact’s sake. The point of making eye contact is to connect with your audience, to bring them into your head, into your heart. And if your head and heart are busy telling a story so vivid that your audience has decided to come with you, you don’t need to make eye contact. Look at your audience every once in a while to make sure they are as interested in your story as you are. But don’t feel the need to make eye contact just because experts told you to make eye contact.

When you are visualizing your story, it is highly likely that you are serving eye contact’s purpose better than eye contact would.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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The other day I was working with a client on her PowerPoint slides. We looked at the first slide, then the second slide, then the third slide. She asked me what I thought. “Should we add this?” “Should we take that out?”

The thing is, she had an even more basic problem: her slides were interfering with the story she was telling. The slides had all the graphs and data and charts you “should” put in a business presentation, but all that average, “should be there” data was drowning the story coming out of her mouth. It was a fascinating story, a story the audience would love to hear. It was a story of brilliance and creativity and hard work, but the slides were saying, “Oh, by the way, there’s nothing special here. I am giving you exactly what everyone else does.”

In a presentation, you have a huge opportunity. A bunch of people are sitting in front of you, waiting to hear what you have to say. If you are about to rock their world with a brilliant story, do not sabotage your story by wrapping it in a soggy noodle of an average slide deck.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Transcript:

People make a big deal out of being afraid of public speaking.

When somebody tells me that they’re afraid of public speaking, I just want to tell them, “You know, you’re never going to get over it.”

I’ve been going to Toastmasters meetings for 5 years or more, and I still am nervous as hell every time I get up there and speak.

You will never get over your nervousness of speaking.

The reason for coming to a Toastmasters meeting, or the reason for coming to a public speaking practice club, at all, isn’t to get over your fear of public speaking. It’s not to stop feeling the fear. It’s to train yourself to speak anyway. That’s why we come to Toastmasters.

Don’t wait for some magic day to come, when all of a sudden you’re not afraid of speaking anymore. Get up there while you’re afraid and speak. Then, get up there tomorrow and speak. Then, get up there the next day and speak.

Five years later, it’s okay if you’re still afraid of speaking, because you probably will be.

The thing that you want to accomplish is not eliminating that fear. It’s just training yourself to get up there and say what you have to say anyway. Because people want to hear what you have to say. You owe it to them.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Transcript:

Talk to the wall.

What does that mean? Sometimes when you’re doing a speech, before you’re even writing the speech, when you’re just at the very beginning and you’re outlining the idea, sometimes a real rational approach, a really well-thought out approach, works really well. A top-down thing. What do I want to say? What’s the moral of the story? Then you fill in the spaces later.

Sometimes, it doesn’t work that way, and sometimes you’ve just got to fill in the spaces first and let the shape come later.

That’s why I say, talk to the wall, because sometimes the best speeches come when you talk to an inanimate object. Talk to the wall or talk to the couch, or talk to the cat, or talk to a plant, or whatever.

For a couple of days, just tell a story and talk to whatever that object is. Somewhere along the way, the story will start to take shape.

When you first start out, it might feel awful and you might think this story is so uninteresting and it has no point at all.

I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to go through that for a couple of hours, feeling like that, before finally, something starts to take shape.

At the end, you’re going to end up with a speech that’s probably better than any one that you would have rationally thought about beforehand. It requires more creativity and patience at the beginning, but sometimes the results … You’ll get results that a rational approach won’t get you.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Transcript:

When you’re practicing and when you’re standing right there on stage, imagine the stuff that you’re talking about.

Visualize the things you’re talking about, see them.

When you’re talking about flowers, don’t just say, there were some pretty flowers and they were all nice colors and they smelled good.

See the colors, see the bright yellows and the reds and see the purple and describe those things to your audience.

See them while you’re talking.

When you’re talking about the smell, don’t just say, those flowers smell nice. Smell the flowers.

Doing these things will help you with a couple of things.

One is, the body language will come naturally. You will naturally show people a smile on your face when you look at all of these colorful flowers.

You will naturally … When you sniff in the smell, you will naturally have that expression on your face of imagining that smell going in to your head. You’ll have the body language and also the vocal variety.

When you are talking about how you’re seeing something or how when you’re smelling something, you will naturally slow down because it’s not your words doing the job anymore, it’s the senses. You will naturally slow down to show people what those senses are like.

Don’t just say, visualize what you see right there for your audience, because they will visualize along with you.

Cut.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Transcript:

This one is called, “Put Some Tuba in It.”

When you’re mentoring somebody, I recommend that you tell your mentee to put some of them into their speeches.

If their name is Ayşe, or Mehmet, or David, put some Ayşe in it. Put some David in it. Put some Alper in it. Put some Tuba in it.

The reason that I recommend that is that people see famous quotes from famous people all the time. A quote from Gandhi, or a quote from Abraham Lincoln, or a quote from Einstein, people see these quotes all the time.

You can go on Facebook, and you can see 900 quotes from famous people. People see those quotes, and they go, “Oh, yeah, that’s brilliant,” and blah, blah, blah, but then they’ve seen those quotes before, and they forget about them, and they move on, and there’s no change in their lives, at all.

When someone speaks to them from their own heart, and uses their own personality and their own words, even if those words aren’t as beautiful or as profound as the words that came out of Gandhi’s mouth, or Einstein’s mouth, just the fact that those words come from their heart and are stamped with their personality, will mean more to the audience than any famous person’s quote.

I highly recommend, when you’re working with one of your mentees on a speech, tell them, whatever their name is, Tuba, or Alper, or Gandhi, tell them, “Put some Tuba,” or, “Put some Alper in it,” and speak like that. Forget about the famous people. Forget about their quotes.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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