book of the month

Make It Compelling

>>We've all sat through presentations that seemed to drag on forever and ended nowhere. What's worse, we've probably even given a few.

As Jerry Weissman, author of Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, puts it, "The problem is that no one knows how to tell a story . and no one knows that they don't know how to tell a story."

Weissman boils it down to telling a compelling story. That's easy to say, but hard to do. With this book's guidance, you can become an effective communicator, whether convincing employees of the need to change, persuading prospects that you have the best solution to a problem or leading skeptical community groups to support your cause.

Presenting to Win overflows with practical advice on how to engage an audience by telling your story with a focus on what's important to them. You become an "audience advocate," showing concern for your listeners' needs that puts them at the heart of your presentation. By following Weissman's detailed roadmap, we can learn how to tell stories that move and motivate listeners by keeping them engaged, from a compelling start to a big finish.

Weissman's first career was as a Hollywood producer and screenwriter. His friendship with venture capitalist Ben Rosen led him to his second career as a presentation guru. In 1988, he launched a business that taught high-tech executives to move from feature-laden, techno-speak dissertations to engaging, listener-centric presentations. Yahoo!, Intuit, Cisco, Microsoft and Intel are among his clients.

Weissman offers plenty of real-world anecdotes, how-tos and helpful graphics that convey ways to grab and keep your audience's attention. His "opening gambit" concept typifies his approach; he offers a rationale, supports it with multiple success stories and describes a broad range of gambits.

An opening gambit must pull the audience out from a possible state of disinterest or suspicion about you and your presentation. Posing questions to an audience is one of seven strategies discussed, and Weissman cites an experience by Scott Cook as an example. In 1993, Cook, founder of Intuit (maker of Quicken and QuickBooks), faced a jaded audience of investment bankers. Rather than launch into a feature-packed discussion of a new product, he asked two questions: How many of you balance your own checkbooks? How many enjoy doing it?

After a round of chuckles, he continued, "You're not alone. Millions of people around the world hate balancing their checkbooks. We at Intuit have developed an easy-to-use, inexpensive home-finance tool, Quicken." With this "aha" moment, Cook was off and running.

Equally insightful chapters on presentation essentials provide a level of detail and clarity that leaves nothing to chance.

Weissman demonstrates that even those of us who aren't naturals at it can present to win. Learning what he recommends requires significant effort because his approach contains a broad range of interrelated elements that can vary from one another, depending on purpose, topic and audience. Taking on and applying his method might take a little work, but as leaders of Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Intuit and Yahoo! have learned, the effort is well worth it.

-Newt Barrett, CEO of Succeeding Today.

Contact him at newt@succeedingtoday.com.