The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

These are just my personal notes about the book "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be insanely great in front of any audience" by Carmine Gallo. Things that are important to me may not be as significant to you, and vice versa. If you are interested in the book, you can buy your copy here.

Create the story

1. Plan in analog

Remember, it's the story, not the slides, that will capture the imagination of your audience.

With a completed script in hand, you'll be ready to sketch and produce the experience. The script, however, must come first.

Planning points for the script:

• Headline: what is the one big idea you want to leave with your audience? It should be short (140 characters or less), memorable, and written in the subject-verb-object sequence. When Steve Jobs unveiled the IPhone, he exclaimed “Today Apple reinvents the phone!”. That's a headline. Headlines grab the attention of your audience and give people a reason to listen.

• Passion statement: Spend a few minutes developing a passion statement by filling in the following sentence: “I'm excited about this product/company/initiative/feature because it ________”. One you have identified the passion statement, don't be bashful, share it.

• Three key messages: your listeners can recall only three or four points in short-term memory. Each of the key messages will be followed by supporting points.

• Metaphors and analogies: as you develop key messages and supporting points, decide on which rhetorical devices will make your narrative more engaging.

• Demonstrations: does your product lent itself to a demonstration? If so, script it into a presentation. Your audience wants to see, touch and experience your product or service. Bring it to life.

• Partners: share the stage with key partners.

• Customer evidence and third party endorsments: offering customer evidence or testimonials is an important part of the selling cycle.

• Video clips: use video clips in your presentations, but avoid clips that run much longer than two or three minutes.

• Flip charts, props, and show and tell: there are three types of learners: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Find ways to appeal to everyone. A presentation should comprise more then just slides.

You will win over your audience by spending more time creating the plot than producing the slides.

Use a notepad or whiteboard to script your ideas. It will help you visualize the story and simplify its components.

2. Answer the one question that matters most

Your audience wants to be informed, educated, and entertained: informed about your product, educated on how it works, and entertained while learning about it. Above all, people want to know the answer to one question: why should I care? During the planning phase of your presentation, always remember that it's not about you. It's about them. The listeners in your audience are asking themselves one question: ”Why should I care?”. Answering that one question right out of the gate will grab people's attention and keep them engaged. If your product will help your customers make money, tell them. If it helps them save money, tell them. If it makes it easier or more enjoyable for them to perform a particular task, tell them. Tell them early, often and clearly.

Ask yourself, if there is only one thing that you want your listener to take away from the conversation, what would it be? Focus on selling the benefit behind the product. Make this one thing as clear as possible, repeating it at least twice in the conversation or presentation.

3. Develop a messianic sense of purpose

What you are selling is not a product or service, but what it can do to improve the lives of your customers. It is the dream of a better life.

4. Create Twitter-like headlines

Create your headline, a one-sentience vision statement for your company, product or service. The most effective headlines are concise (140 characters maximum), specific, and offer a personal benefit.

Consistently repeat your headline in your presentation.

Remember, your headline is a statement that offers your audience a vision for a better future. It's not about you, it's about them.

5. Draw a roadmap

Create an easy-to-follow story by clearly outlining three or, at most, four main points before filling in the details. If you have more, categorize the list until you are left with only three major message points. This group of three will provide the verbal road map for your presentation.

Revealing the narrative in groups of three provides direction for your audience. It shows people where you've been and where you're going.

So: headline - introduction - three points - conclusion.

Outline three (or four) points, return to the first one, explain each one in more depth, and then summarize each point. This is a simple recipe for ensuring your audience will retain the information you are sharing.

6. Introduce the antagonist

Introducing the antagonist (the problem) rallies the audience around the hero (the solution).

Nobody really cares about your product, what people care about is solving problems and making their lives a little better. Describe the pain your audience is feeling, give them a reason for their pain, and offer a cure. Spend some time describing the problem in detail, make it tangible, build the pain.

Explanations of new products or services require context, a relevance to a problem in your customer's life that is causing that person pain. Once the pain is established, your listener will be much more receptive to a product or service that will alleviate the pain.

Introduce the antagonist early in your presentation. Always establish the problem before revealing your solution. You can do so by painting a vivid picture of your customers’ pain point. Set up the problem by asking yourself “Why do we need this?”

7. Reveal the conquering hero

Once you have established the antagonist - your customers’ pain point - describe how your company, product, or service offers a cure for that pain.

Deliver the experience

8. Channel their inner zen

• Bullet points are the least effective way to deliver important information, so they should be avoided on presentation slides.

• Pictures are superior. Focus on one theme per slide, and complement that theme with a photograph or image. Learn to create visually aesthetic slides. Learners can more easily understand material when it is presented in both words and pictures. Having too many words to process overloads the brain. Your ideas are much more likely to be remembered if they are presented as picture instead of words.

• By removing clutter - extraneous information - from your presentations, you will achieve the ultimate goal: ease of use and clarity. Keeping your slides simple and free of extraneous information is the best way to engage your audience.

• Shorter presentations with more relevant information are more consistent with cognitive-learning theories. In sum, adding redundant or irrelevant information will impede, rather then aid, learning. Dense information and clutter requires too much effort for your audience. Simplicity is powerful. Empty space implies elegance, quality and clarity.

• Simplicity should apply to your slides as well as the words you choose to describe your products or services. Simple sentences are simply easier to recall. Everything you say in a memo, email or presentation can be edited for conciseness and simplicity. Remember that simplicity applies not just to the words on the slides but also to the words that come out of your mouth.

9. Dress up your numbers

Rarely do numbers resonate with people until those numbers are placed in a context that people can understand, and the best way to help them understand is to make those numbers relevant to something with which they are already familiar. You have to make your numbers specific, relevant and contextual.

The more complex the idea, the more important it is to use rhetorical devices such as analogies to facilitate understanding. Comparing the number to something your listener can relate to will make your message far more interesting, impactful and ultimately persuasive.

Use data to support your presentation. As you do, consider carefully the figures you want to present. Don't overwhelm your audience with too many numbers.

10. Use amazingly zippy words

The words you choose to announce your product or service should have three characteristics: they should be simple, concrete and emotionally charged:

• Simple: free of jargon and with few syllables.

• Concrete: very specific phrases. Short, tangible descriptions instead of long, abstract discussions.

• Emotional: descriptive adjectives.

Your listeners and viewers are attempted to categorize a product - they need to place the concept in a mental bucket. Create the mental bucket for them. If you don't you are making their brains work too hard.

Unclutter your copy. Eliminate redundant language, buzzwords, and jargon. Edit, edit and edit more.

Have fun with words. It's OK to express your enthusiasm for your product through superlatives and descriptive adjectives. Delight your customers with the words you choose - stroke their brains’ dopamine receptors with words that cause them to feel good whenever they think of you and your product. People cannot follow your vision or share your enthusiasm if they get lost in the fog.

11. Share the stage

Upon release of a new product or service, if possible make sure you have customers who tested the product and are available to back your claims.

Incorporate testimonials into your presentation.

Publicly thank employees, partners, and customers.

12. Stage your presentation with props

Good demos are as follows:

• Short

• Simple. It should be easy to follow and communicate no more then one or two key messages.

• Sweet. It should differentiates your product from the competition's.

• Swift. Never do anything in a demo that lasts more then 15 seconds.

• Substantial. It should demonstrate how your product offers a solution to a real world problem your audience is experiencing.

Don't forget to have fun with demos.

13. Reveal a “holy shit” moment

The secret to creating a memorable moment is to identify the one thing or theme that you want your audience to remember after leaving the room. Think about ways to add the element of surprise to your presentation. Create one memorable moment that will amaze your audience and have them talking well after your presentation is over.

Plan a “holy shit” moment. Something as simple as telling a personal story, revealing some new and unexpected information, or delivering a demonstration can help create a memorable moment for your audience. Build it into your presentation. The more unexpected, the better.

Rehearse the big moment. Do not make the mistake of creating a memorable experience and having it bomb because you failed to practice.

Refine and rehearse

14. Toss the script

1. Write your script in full sentence in the notes section of PowerPoint. Try to keep your ideas no more then five sentences.

2. Highlight or underline the key word from each sentence, and practice your presentation.

3. Delete extraneous words from your scripted sentences, leaving only the key words. Practice the presentation again, this time using only the key words as reminders

4. Memorize the one key idea per slide. Ask yourself “what is the one thing I want my audience to take away from the slide?”

5. Practice the entire presentation without notes, simply using the slides as your prompter. By the time you executed these five steps, you will have rehearsed each slide four times, which is much more time then the average speaker commits to practicing a presentation.

Obey the ten minutes rule. Max 10 minutes of speech, then move to a demo, video or something else.

When you are actually delivering the final presentation, if the notes give you peace of mind, keep them available. However, if you practice enough you will find that you don't need to rely on notes at all.

15. Master stage presence

• Research has discovered that eye contact is associated with honesty, sincerity and confidence. Avoiding eye contact is most often associated with a lack of confidence and leadership ability. Breaking eye contact is a surefire way to loose your connection with your audience.

• Keeping your hands at your sides will make you look stiff, formal, and a little weird. Extraordinary communicators use more gestures than the average speaker. Use hand gesture when appropriate to emphasize your point. Be careful, however, that your hand gestures do not become robotic or overrehearsed. Be yourself, be authentic.

• Nothing will do more to destroy all of the work you do into crafting a great presentation than to deliver it in a boring, monotone. Vary your vocal delivery by adding inflection to your voice, raising or lowering your volume, as well as speeding up and slowing down. Also let your content breath. Pause, and let your message take hold.

16. Make it look effortless

Record yourself. Watch your body language, and listen to your vocal delivery. Watching yourself on video is the best way to improve your presentation skills; it is not the most pleasant experience but it's essential. Record your presentation and play it back. As you watch the video, pay close attention to those areas:

• Eye contact. Commit most of your presentation by memory to avoid reading from notes (but you can use notes).

• Body language. It should reflect the confidence of your words.

• Filler words. Your words should not fill every pause between sentence. Pay attention if you use “um”, “ah” or “you know”.

• Vocal delivery. Volume, inflection, volume varied, cadence, speed. Pause for impact.

• Energy. Do you appear enthusiastic and genuinely thrilled to be sharing your story with the audience? We all enjoy being around people with energy.

Vote yourself on those areas. Then repeat trying to correct your defects. Raise your voice. Use broad gestures. Put a big smile on your face. Record it again and watch it. Repeat.

Anticipate the questions that people could ask you during the presentation:

1. Identify the most common questions likely to be raised.

2. Place the questions into categories. The point is to reduce the number of questions for which you must prepare. The majority of questions will fall into few categories.

3. Create the best answer you have for each category. The answer must make sense regardless of how the question is phrased.

4. When the question is asked, identify a key word that will help you isolate the correct category.

5. Look the person in the eye and respond with confidence.

Restless preparation is the single best way to overcome stage fright. The more you practice, the less nervous you will be. Practice, practice and practice more. Review every slide, every demo, and every key message. You should know exactly what you are going to say, when and how.

17. Wear the appropriate costume

Always dress a little better then everyone else, but appropriate for the culture.

18. Have fun

Treat presentations as infotainment. Your audience wants to be educated and entertained. Have fun. It'll show.

No matter how much you prepare, something might go differently from how you had planned. Never apologies. Do not call attention to the issue or let it ruin the rest of your presentation. Remember that nobody expect perfection except you. Your audience will forgive a blooper as long as you get back on your feet.

☺ My rating: ★★★★★