What's the big idea? What pro presenters do.
Your audience will remember one thing from your presentation. Pro presenters decide what that thing is. Everyone else leaves it to chance.
Remember that presentation you sat through last week?
Exactly.
Neither can anyone else.
Which means it’s not featuring in anyone’s decision-making.
Wheels are spinning. Projects are bogged.
How to make ideas stick
The hint’s in the subhead above: the word ‘ideas’. Plural.
Your ideas are competing with all the other ideas drowning your audience. Their brains are full.
Too many points will make your presentation pointless.
But one idea, presented well, and more than once, in different ways, will stick.
Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman found the easier something is to process, the more we trust it.
Or as we say, ‘Complexity kills trust.’
There can be only one
Quick: What’s 6 x 7?
You remember your times tables because of repetition. You wrote them out many times.
And your audience will remember your big idea if you keep linking back to it.
Repetition is why you’ve heard this:
- Tell them what you’re going to tell them (like an executive summary at the start).
- Then tell them.
- Then tell them what you told them (wrap it up with a summary).
So, what’s your OBI One … Big Idea? (Obi-Wan had one mission. You get one main message.)
So what? So what? So what?
Comms expert Dianna Booher put it perfectly:
‘If you can’t write your message in a sentence, you can’t say it in an hour.’
If you only had 30 seconds with the decision maker, what would you say?
You’d be wise to avoid the stuff you care about. Talk about what they care about.
Imagine them asking, ‘So what?’ about your major points. Why should they care?
BEFORE
‘I’ll take you through our platform review.
We’ve mapped 40 integration points, benchmarked three vendors and built an 18-month roadmap.’
Let’s workshop that:
‘We benchmarked three vendors.’
So what? One can deliver in nine months, not 18.
So what? We stop propping up the old system.
So what? That saves $1.4 million a year – and avoids one outage a month that stops customer payments.
AFTER
‘Our platform fails monthly and costs $1.4 million a year to keep alive.
We can replace it in nine months, and it pays for itself in two.
I need your approval today.’
All this takes work. Thinking work.
In ‘Confessions of a Public Speaker’, Scott Berkun said:
‘All good public speaking is based on good private thinking.’
Thinking is cheap before you present. Expensive after you get a ‘no’.
Try this before your next presentation
Write your One Big Idea on a sticky note. One sentence. If you can’t get it to one, you haven’t found it yet.
Stick it on your monitor while you build the deck. Then make every slide earn its place against it. Anything that doesn’t serve the One Big Idea doesn’t belong in the presentation.
This is the first of eight habits that separate pro presenters from the rest. Habit two is about the thing that stops most people before they open their mouth.
Sat through one lately?
Think about the last presentation you sat through. Can you name one thing you took from it?
Be honest. Most of us can’t.
The ones you do remember – what made them stick?
Need more?
Want to go deeper on all eight habits, for yourself or your team? Our presentation skills training covers the lot.