A New Edition of the Timeless Book, Presenting to Win, Explores the Content Marketing Component of In-Person Persuasion.

Whatever audience you must persuade, you need to engage them with compelling content in the form of stories. That’s easy to say, but hard to do.

As Jerry Weissman, author of Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, puts it, "The problem is that no one knows how to tell a story and no one knows that they don’t know how to tell a story."  Fortunately, you’ll come away from reading this book armed with the necessary tools to tell those all-important stories brilliantly.

Presenting to Win, in its new expanded edition, teaches you to communicate with a purpose–whether you are convincing employees of the need to change, persuading prospects that you have the best solution to a problem or leading skeptical community groups to support your cause.

Presenting to Win overflows with practical advice on how to engage an audience by telling your story with a focus on what’s important to them. You become an "audience advocate," showing concern for your listeners’ needs that puts them at the heart of your presentation. By following Jerry’s detailed roadmap, we can learn how to tell stories that move and motivate listeners by keeping them engaged, from a compelling start to a big finish.

Jerry’s first career was as a Hollywood producer and screenwriter. His friendship with venture capitalist Ben Rosen led him to his second career as a presentation guru. In 1988, he launched a business that taught high-tech executives to move from feature-laden, techno-speak dissertations to engaging, listener-centric presentations. Yahoo!, Intuit, Cisco, Microsoft and Intel are among his clients.

Jerry offers plenty of real-world anecdotes, how-tos and helpful graphics that convey ways to grab and keep your audience’s attention. His "opening gambit" concept typifies his own story-telling approach in the book: He offers a rationale, supports it with multiple success stories and describes a broad range of gambits.

An opening gambit must pull the audience out from a possible state of disinterest or suspicion about you and your presentation. Posing questions to an audience is one of seven strategies discussed, and Jerry cites an experience by Scott Cook as an example. In 1993, Cook, founder of Intuit (maker of Quicken and QuickBooks), faced a jaded audience of investment bankers. Rather than launch into a feature-packed discussion of a new product, he asked two questions: How many of you balance your own checkbooks? How many enjoy doing it?

After a round of chuckles, he continued, "You’re not alone. Millions of people around the world hate balancing their checkbooks. We at Intuit have developed an easy-to-use, inexpensive home-finance tool, Quicken." With this "aha" moment, Cook was off and running.

Equally insightful chapters on presentation essentials provide a level of detail and clarity that leaves nothing to chance. Jerry demonstrates that even those of us who aren’t presentation naturals can present to win.

Learning what he recommends requires significant effort because his approach contains a broad range of interrelated elements that can vary, depending on purpose, topic and audience. You’ll need to devote time and effort to perfecting his method, but as leaders of Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Intuit and Yahoo! have learned, your effort will be well worth it.

Click here to buy it on Amazon.com. You can also get the Kindle edition.

It is so hard, but so important to explain what it is that you do and how it will benefit the person to whom you are communicating. Not at length.  But so concisely that it can be communicated in less time than it takes an elevator to go up a few floors. And, so compellingly that your listener will remember and repeat it to others.

Actually, Nick Morgan is even more precise than this.  He says your elevator speech must be a single sentence.

I have just begun to read his wonderful book, Give Your Speech, Change the World. It is absolutely must reading, even if the only speeches you give are internal presentations within your organization.

Nick is the founder of Public Words, a communications coaching company. So he gives speeches–and teaches people how to give speeches–for a living. It’s obvious from reading his book that he is a very, very good at it. Listen to what he has to say about that all-important elevator speech.

To communicate the importance of an elevator speech as the core of any presentation, he imagines a scenario in which he is in an elevator with a convention attendee who has the choice of spending an hour listening to Nick’s talk or spending quality time in the sunshine with his golf clubs.  In response to this golfer’s imaginary question: “I’m a golfer, and there is a PGA class golf course outside.  So tell me, why should I attend your speech?”

Here is Nick’s response:

Because, if you attend my speech, you will learn how to give presentations without fear, presentations that move your audience to action every time.

Unless this golfer is a complete loser, he will be attending Nick’s speech.

As Nick explains it, there are three essential elements to this and every effective elevator speech:

1. it must contain a benefit for the potential member of the audience, that is, his imaginary elevator companion.
2. It must contain the word you, meaning the audience.
3. It must contain some reference to emotion, because emotion is more engaging and memorable than intellectual information.

The power of his elevator speech formula is that it conveys a genuine benefit to the audience in an engaging and compelling way, but then it all forces you to focus on one idea and one idea only.

Excellent Elevator Speech + Great Content = Intense Customer Engagement

Nick is right about speeches.  But I’m convinced that his advice applies equally to our content marketing efforts.  Our customers are always asking (even if it’s subliminal), “What’s in it for me?”  In answer to their question we need to be ready with content that is driven by a tightly focused brand promise that can be distilled into a Nick Morgan-style elevator speech.

Of course, if you want to learn how to become a successful speaker, start by visiting Nick online at: PublicWords.com