Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [21]
The lesson for presenters is to find examples of human interest stories that help illustrate your own stories. After all, the story every president wants to tell in that annual—and constitutionally mandated—message to Congress and the nation is that the state of the union is strong. What better way to illustrate strength than to personify it with anecdotes of heroic efforts?
What better way to illustrate the strength of your business story than to personify it with anecdotes of satisfied customers, partners, or investors? Find your own “Skutniks.”
In a footnote to history, National Airport in Washington, D.C., has since been renamed Ronald Reagan National Airport.
24. Human Interest Stories: A Double Advantage: Two Ways to Use Anecdotes
Ronald Reagan was the master of the human interest story that preceded and followed the Lenny Skutnik story that you read in the previous chapter. Mr. Reagan had developed his talent for the human touch in his early days in radio, but he perfected the art of the anecdote during his presidency. Whenever Mr. Reagan spoke, he rarely missed an opportunity to refer to a dedicated student, a brave soldier, or a kind senior citizen, often by name. Presenters would do well to emulate The Great Communicator and intersperse their presentations with brief stories of people who are involved with their business’s product or service.
One of my frequent tasks as a presentation coach is to remind my clients to insert such descriptive examples in their presentations. I often do so during a run-through by interrupting their forward progress with the words, “For example ...” This usually brings a smile to the person’s face, and they immediately come up with an illustrative case study. More often than not, I have to make this prompt to people in the Life Sciences sector whose companies are involved in either drug development or medical devices. Their tendency is to make a deep dive into their esoteric technology, at which point I interrupt them and say, “Do you have any patients?” This brings that same smile to their faces, and they, too, come up with an illustrative case study.
You can employ such anecdotes in two ways: as supporting evidence for a particular point or to make the human interest story the through-line for the entire presentation.
Let’s say that you work for a drug company and you have a patient named John Smith. You can describe the illness John Smith has contracted, how many other John Smiths in the world have the same illness, how much money is spent on all those John Smiths, and how long they’ve suffered without a cure. Then you can talk about how your company’s drug cured John Smith, the patents you have on the drug, its regulatory status, its clinical status, its cost of manufacturing, its average selling price, and its potential profit margin. Finally, you can describe how John Smith was rehabilitated and reimbursed, thus explaining how your drug will sell in the managed care environment. The story of John Smith organizes and humanizes all the details of your company’s entire story.
John Smith is every man—and so is your audience.
Section II. Graphics: The Correct Way to Design PowerPoint Slides
25. The Presentation-as-Document Syndrome: Never the Twain Shall Meet
In the many years since the publication of the first edition of Presenting to Win, I am proud to say that it has made a significant impact upon readers, selling more than 100,000 copies in 12 languages and named by Fortune Magazine as one of eight “must read” books. By the same token, I am surprised to say that the book has not had as great an impact upon the presentation trade. Despite the book’s extensive