If I offered you the chance to sit through a presentation from the Finance Director or the Chairman from a FTSE 100 company which would you instinctively prefer? When we apply our Achieving Yes approach to improving presentations a very common issue is that there is not much story and not much emotion. Yet stories and the emotions that go with them are part of the fundamental way that the human psyche understands and evaluates messages.
We distinguish four different styles of presentation that, when combined together correctly, significantly increase the chances of your audience taking the action you want. The four styles come from two ways of dealing with information and two ways of working with emotion.
When dealing with information you can merely inform – i.e. just present the facts or you can use the facts to convince. Convincing your audience involves using the facts as part of cogent argument (think business case) that takes your audience on a logical journey that ends up with them thinking they must act now.
When working with emotion you can just entertain – tell a joke or a scary tale for example or you can take your audience on an emotional journey. That emotional journey provides the motivational juice that gets your audience to feel that they must act and, most importantly, act now.
Combining the emotional motivation with the convincing logical argument is what ultimately gets your audience to act, to say YES to you and YES to your message - that’s what Achieving YES is totally focused on. Just the emotional side and you are often left feeling that there is something but you can’t quite pin it down. Just the logical side and you know you should act but somehow you are left cold. Even more powerful is intertwining the two so that they become one in the final presentation delivery.
I suspect that most of you would prefer to listen to the Chairman and not the Finance Director because instinctively you feel there is more chance of an emotionally and intellectually interesting story from the Chairman.
What do you think of the following presentation on YouTube? Would it achieve YES from you?
