Russ Peterson Jr.Visual Storytelling | Russ Peterson Jr.

iSpeak teaches workshops on Professional Selling to help sales leaders gather the most important data and then use that information to create the right message. Are your sales presentations closing eyelids or deals?

Russ Peterson Jr. is the co-founder and Managing Director of iSpeak, Inc. – An award-winning professional development training company. Russ is a speaker, international trainer, and published author on Professional Sales Communication and Business Communication. He delivers workshops, keynotes, and personal communication coaching services to business professionals in the US and around the world. His leadership blog assists leaders in giving voice to their vision. You can connect with Russ directly through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

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How Some Executives Have Ruined Presentations

RPjr — Sun, 23 Sep 2018 11:02:51 +0000

and what they should do different to fix it!

“Our executives don’t want us to tell stories.” After the student made the comment another jumped in, “No way! He’s right! You don’t ever want to tell a story to our executives. They hate stories.” I found the response a little sad and the worst part… this wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like this.

These types of comments tell me something about the company and the executives. It tells me they’re creating a culture of mis-led communicators and unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse for the executives.

The Demands of an Executive

I’ve sold to executives and I’ve coached them. I’ve had the distinct honor and privilege to meat some amazing ones! Why do I think they’re amazing? Because they understand how to change a situation permanently by fixing a problem instead of a symptom.

When you’re presenting to your executives, have they put rules in place? You know what I mean. Have the executives outlawed certain types of presentations or certain tools? I’ve heard plenty of these rules from students over the past 20 years.

Never tell stories to the executives when presenting. It’s a waste of their time.
Never use animations in a powerpoint presentation. It’s childish and demeaning to executives.
Never use more than 4 slides for your presentation. You’ll end up taking too much time.
Put everything you want to say on one slide. This will prevent you from wasting executive time.
Always give the executive summary at the start. This way the executive can drill down on their personal areas of interest.

I guess what bothers me with wet-blanket rules like this is two-fold: Number one, they’re just solving a symptom at best. Number two, the executives actually think they’re solving the problem but they’re actually perpetuating the problem by creating an army of presentation foot-soldiers who only know how to present a message one way. They’re not being taught to think for themselves on how best to construct a message for any audience in any situation for any reason!

The Problem with the Quick-Fix

In reality, when executives are dissatisfied with the presentations being given to them, instead of focusing on how to develop the communication skills of the presenters, they go for the quick fix based on what they personally like and don’t like.

If the executives get burned a few times by presenters using too many animations for the wrong reasons, they will ban all animations.

If the executives get burned by someone using 47 jam-packed slides full of text for a 10-minute presentation, they ban anything more than 3 slides for a 10-minute presentation.

If they’ve been burned by one presenter telling a funny story to kick off a presentation because he read somewhere you should start with a joke, they ban all stories from future presentations.

These all fix a symptom, not the problem.

Let me ask you something…

If a chef puts way too much salt in your food and it tastes awful, would you ban the chef from ever using salt again when cooking for you?

Or would you tell the chef they can only use one teaspoon of salt no matter what he’s cooking?

Or would you tell the chef she could only put the salt in first, but never again after that?

Or…

The Proper Solution

Would you train up the chef to know the best times to use salt in a recipe and how much salt to use depending on the meal being prepared?

If you really care about fixing the issue then… solve the problem not the symptom!

Have a great week,
Russ

Let’s connect…

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Are you Killing your Audience Softly?

RPjr — Sun, 16 Sep 2018 11:02:09 +0000

3 Methods to Improve Your Presentations and Your Results

The audience began to shift in their seats at the 5 minute mark of the presentation. So far the presenter had successfully bored the audience with 6 slides of solid text and a mouthful of insincere pleasantries. After 10 more minutes of words on slides and a presenter reading the slides, two people walked out and several others were jumping on their phones checking email or facebook!

Have you been in this presentation before? The sad truth is that we can all relate because we’ve all been there. And… if we’re all willing to admit it… we’ve probably all been this presenter at some point in our career too.

The Problem

Most presenters claim they don’t have time to create effective presentations so they just do a brain dump of data and information on each slide, never construct an appropriate message, and proceed to read the slides to the audience because there was no rehearsal either.

Audiences check out very quickly and they have every right because it’s obvious the presenter does not respect their time. Our most precious resource is our time. When a speaker delivers a poor presentation like this it becomes obvious she invested none of her own time to make the message more engaging or succinct. She’s too busy and didn’t want to waste her own time, so instead she’s going to waste ours. Nothing could be more rude.

Three-Step Solution

Now maybe the presenter has the time but just doesn’t know what to do. That is fair. Let’s take care of that right now by giving you three simple steps you can implement to create more engaging presentations for your audience.

Audience’s know when the speaker is unprepared. It sends a strong signal to each person in the audience, and most of the time it’s not a good one. Here are three simple tasks you can do to improve your messages.

1. Engage them from the Start

“Hi, my name is Claude Miller. I’m your ABC Sales Rep and today I’m going to tell you about our firm’s history and our service capabilities.” While I’m not going to say this opening to a presentation is absolutely wrong, I will say it could be much improved! This opening gave the audience two things (but not very well). The two items the speaker just offered is a credibility statement (he’s a sales rep) and a preview of the tour he’s about to deliver (history and capabilities.)

The two pieces most business presenters leave out are the two pieces the audience most wants. We call them the Attention and the Audience Benefit.

Attention

There are many ways to gain attention. In a sales presentation you could ask a thought-provoking question you know is on their minds or quote someone in the audience.

“If you had to scale up your distribution in 3 months without increasing costs, where would you start?”

“I was speaking to Jeremy before we started today and he told me…”

Audience Benefit

Deep down we all know our time is our most valuable resource. So when a speaker expects us to sit and listen, we are investing our time. We all want to know what our return on this investment is going to be. As a presenter, offer the benefit (“What’s In It For Me” WIIFM) at the start of your presentation.

“Today you’ll learn more about the finance tools we offer so the next time you need to scale your production lines, you can implement faster.”

2. Build a Structured Message

When the audience cannot follow your message they will get annoyed (because you’re wasting their time) and they will get tired or bored. Either way, each person will begin to check out and focus on something else. The message must have a structure and a flow to it. While there are many ways of structuring different types of messages, one of the most powerful and widely used structures we have found is called What-Why-How.

WHAT – Is the issue? What is the Problem? What is the focus? What is the situation?

WHY – Why did this happen? Why is it happening? Why is it important? Why do we need action now?

HOW – How are we going to move forward? How are we going to correct? How are we going to implement?

3. Build Graphical Slides

The use of pictures is more than just dropping a photo of a smiling customer on a slide with 8 bullets of text. Pictures and graphics with animations can create both focus and simplicity for the audience. The problem with so many slides is the sheer amount of information placed on each slide. The first thing the audience does when they see a new slide is they begin to explore with their eyes.

They are trying to make a discovery. In other words, what am I supposed to look at here and what am I supposed to see? If we cannot get to our first discovery within 3 seconds, we start to get frustrated. You may have been in an audience with a senior executive who felt this frustration and she just shouts out to the presenter, “What am I looking at here?” or “Where am I supposed to be looking?”

Creating a visual representation of your message does not have to be Hollywood production. It doesn’t have to take 3 weeks to create either. There are simple techniques you can implement using builds and animations to guide the audiences focus through the storyline.

You can also engage a company like BrightCarbon to assist in the development of your slide deck or to teach you better design techniques you can do yourself in PowerPoint. I’ve had the pleasure of working with this company before and they are absolutely amazing at what they can create and teach to you.

Don’t let your audience down and don’t waste their time!

Thinking about my next storyline…

Have a great week,
Russ

Books referenced in this post:

Corporate Ovations: Your Roadmap to More Effective Presentations, By Kevin Karschnik and Russ Peterson Jr.

How to Make the Ultimate Sales Presentation, Blog post by Joby Blume, BrightCarbon

Let’s connect…

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5 Ways Engaging Speakers Engage You

RPjr — Sun, 26 Aug 2018 11:02:25 +0000

It's all taking place in your brain!

After the conference one of your friends poses the question, “Which keynote speaker did you like the best?” As soon as one person answers everyone else immediately jumps in and says, “YES! Me too! She was so good. Why do you suppose we all loved her so much more than the others?”

I can tell you one thing she probably did… She engaged your brain!

What exactly does “engage their brains” mean? It simply means this… keep their minds working with things they love to do. Now there are different ways to keep their minds busy. Remember, there’s a reason why reading a dictionary vs. watching the next Mission Impossible movie feels different. One of these would be difficult to do for even 10 minutes while the other can be done for over 2 hours and it seemed like 10 minutes!

So there’s got to be more to it than just keeping their brains busy. We have to look at how you’re keeping their brains busy. What are you asking their brains to do? Pick the right tasks and you can be more engaging too!

How can we engage their brains?

The best way to do this is to make the entire experience engaging! We do this by engaging different regions of their brains. Remember, don’t make these into huge engagements like the grand finale of a fireworks show. Most of these techniques are extremely subtle, but they’re still quite effective.

Here are 5 techniques you can use to engage your audience’s brains throughout your message.

1. Say the words “imagine…” or “picture this…”

I know, I know… this one sounds too simple! It’s crazy how effective this technique is with an audience. But just picture this… a speaker is on the stage. You’re in the audience listening. She pauses for a moment of silence as she looks down and away. Then her gaze comes back up to the audience and she says, “Will you all do me a favor? I want you to imagine something. Think about…”

When someone tells us to imagine, we immediately warm up our imagination to picture whatever she is about to tell us to imagine. That creative, imaginative part of our brain is quickly put to work. Creating scenery in our minds is something we’re good at and it’s something we love to do. By the way… did you see how I started this explanation by asking you to picture the speaker on stage? Engaging right?

2. Offer one line of dialogue

My manager popped his head in my office and asked me, “Hey Dave, would you have any additional headcount to support the Alpha project this quarter?”

This is an example of dialogue. When the speaker is actually quoting someone else, but they deliver it to the audience as if we’re all (audience included) hearing this line delivered for the very first time. It’s as if it’s being performed LIVE for us to relive the actual moment with the speaker. Our imaginations will create a scene in our minds as we watch the scene unfold. We construct that scene so quickly we don’t even know we’re doing it. It’s fun. It’s easy. We love doing it. It’s engaging!

3. Propose a tough question

But what happens if we invest in this upgrade and 18 months later, the software is obsolete? Is it worth the risk to save thousands next year?

Our brains love to solve problems. We love doing it on our own because we gain a sense of accomplishment, but if we can’t solve the problem on our own, we want someone to help solve it with us to remove the internal tension. Think about it. You know this is true. When someone proposes a really tough trivia question and you don’t know the answer, it can drive you crazy if you don’t know the answer. Luckily today we just turn to Google or Siri for the answer. Wa-LAH! Tension is gone! Give your audience a tough question to wrestle with to engage their problem-solving brain. Then lead them with your message to your proposed solution.

4. Generate a feeling

I’m sure you’ve heard it before. This quote is credited to Maya Angelou, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” I can prove this is true. Think about the 5 most memorable experiences in your life. I certainly hope there were more than 5, but we don’t have all day. Just pick five. Now… can you recall a feeling from each one?

Sharing stories or experiences can help generate both positive and negative feelings in your audience. They will remember how they felt when you finish speaking. As you saw in last week’s blog, we use feelings from memorable moments to reconstruct each memory. Engage them with a feeling you want them to have walking away… excitement, anxiety, fear, pride, confidence.

5. Give them candy for their 5 senses

We don’t like to just hear a story… we want to experience it! The way we experience a story in our mind is with our mind’s senses. When we hear someone talk about a loud clang or a bright flash of light, we use our mind’s ear and our mind’s eye, respectively, to internally recreate the sound or the sight. The regions of our brain that handle actual sound and sight are stimulated even when we are just imagining them through a recreation in our mind!

If you want to engage the audience’s brain, then describe parts of your story with words that will stimulate their senses.

The sandpaper feel of grandpa’s hands.
The warm sweet aroma of apples and cinnamon.
The loud tinging clash of the metal frame falling.
The salty taste of the ocean.
The yellow-orange haze of dawn over the meadow.

I’m not asking you to turn your next business presentation into story time, but I am challenging and encouraging you to stimulate their brains. The audience wants a logical presentation but they also want to love the journey.

Engage their brains!

Have a great week,
Russ

Books referenced in this post:

Corporate Ovations: Your Roadmap to More Effective Presentations, By Kevin Karschnik and Russ Peterson Jr.

Let’s connect…

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Why Some Speakers are Never Misunderstood

RPjr — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 11:02:24 +0000

The metaphor technique used to make interpretation easier

Imagine each of these… you’re covered in mud and rolled in feathers, a baseball balanced on top of an upside down cup, you’re watching a dog swim from a goggle-wearing, breath-holding position under the water. All of these things took a split second for you to imagine. You’re good at this!

Of course you’re good at this. We all are! We don’t have any trouble imagining any of these things because their physical and they’re familiar.

We’re Experts at Imagining the Physical

We’ve experienced feathers, baseballs and swimming dogs before. So we can imagine these things quickly. In fact, you can even use your imagination of the real world to predict the future.

For example, imagine the baseball sitting on top of an upside down cup. Then imagine someone stands up from the table too quickly and he bumps the table with his leg. Everything on the table shakes and wobbles. What happened to the baseball?

If you imagined it shaking a bit and maybe even rolling off the top of the cup, you were predicting the future. You were playing a little game our brains love and we call it the “what if…” game. This game is actually a vital part of our success to remain at the top of the food chain. All because we can accurately predict cause and effect.

So, What’s the Hard Part?

Now try to imagine these things… imagine time passing, imagine love, imagine assertiveness, and imagine strategic initiative. Did you find this exercise a little more difficult? We all find this more difficult because we can’t actually imagine the thing itself. It’s too abstract. What you probably did in your mind was to imagine something physical and then adjusted it toward the abstract.

For example, when I said “Imagine time passing” you may have done the Twilight Zone thing and imagined an analog clock face with the hands of the clock spinning around. Or maybe you imagined a person sitting somewhere bored with their head in their hands as the time passed by ever so slowly. Either way, you imagined something more concrete and then adjusted it toward the abstract.

The tricky part for all of us is to try and imagine the abstract. That is difficult! And, this is where I’ve seen presenters and speakers drop the ball. They never provide the audience with assistance interpreting the abstract.

Don’t Burden the Audience!

When speakers deliver abstract and conceptual ideas, the audience will do their best to interpret and imagine it. But, if the speaker never gives a concrete or physical example for understanding the abstract, we will try to create that model ourself. That’s hard work!

The more complex or abstract an idea is, the harder it is for the audience to conceptualize it in a way that helps them understand, remember, and apply it to the future. When speakers don’t provide us with analogies or metaphors to assist us in our conceptualization, we get tired. It’s hard work! In fact, sometimes it gets so difficult to interpret the idea into something more useful than just words and we just quit!

So, What’s the Problem?

Everyone will create their own image of understanding. In fairness, there’s both good and bad in this reality. The GOOD is that each person in the audience will create a unique image to understand, remember and use your concept. If you want creative solutions, this is fantastic! Once you share your idea, you’ll gain a plethora of new ideas from everyone else because they each interpret the concept in their own unique way.

The BAD of the situation is actually the same thing… everyone will have their own idea on what you shared. If the goal of the presentation is to get everyone on the same page, you might be missing the mark. So, what can you do as a speaker to help your audience get on the same page when you need to share an abstract or conceptual idea?

Give them a Metaphor!

Knowing that each person in your audience is skilled in imagining physical items and manipulating those items with cause and effect to predict the future, we can provide our audiences with a metaphor to understand our abstract idea. I’m sure you’ve seen speakers do this before…

“Just like FedEx revolutionized overnight shipping with better logistics, we’re going to revolutionize custom furniture design.”

“A stool with three legs can stand. A stool with only two legs is much more likely to topple over. Our approach to this project will only work with all 3 regions in support.”

“Our plan is like a series of river tributaries all flowing into the Mississippi. We will take the strategic ideas from each region and mold them into one plan for the entire organization. But, just like a river flows in one direction, all our ideas will need to align for us to reach our ultimate corporate goal.”

Saying goodbye until next week is like eating your last scoop of ice cream and knowing you can’t get more at the store until next week…

See you next week,
Russ

Let’s connect…