The Presentation Playbook: Be a Most Valuable Presenter (MVP), Volume 1: Analyzing Your Scouting Reports

By Andy Saks

AS IN SPORTS, great presentations start with great preparation. The Presentation Playbook: Be a Most Valuable Presenter (MVP), Volume 1: Analyzing Your Scouting Reports invites you into a truly unique, in-depth preparation process that will change your perception of speaking itself. You’ll know how to calculate the vast value of every audience members, prevent and respond to disasters in your speaking environment, outsmart your speaking competitors, and turn any audience into your loyal fans. You’ll position yourself to build and run the right play for every speaking situation.

“Andy Saks’s helpful guide for business speakers, The Presentation Playbook Series, breaks down the essentials for successful public speaking and explains them in a way that’s not only fun, but also foolproof. This is a must for anyone who has ever had to white knuckle it through a corporate speech in a crowded conference room.” Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays with Morrie and other international bestsellers, columnist, radio and TV personality

“When you present poorly, the only compelling message your audience yearns for is, ‘The End!’ Present well and you create confidence, credibility, and leave your audience wanting more. Andy’s book will empower you to create robust and effective presentations.” Thomas C. McGraw, CEO, FNB Bancorp & First National Bank of Northern California

“The Presentation Playbook Series is a comprehensive flight plan for delivering your best from any platform. Packed full of easy-to-implement tools and techniques, this book is a must read for anyone looking to elevate their speaking skills to engage any audience to take action.” Rob “Waldo” Waldman, Hall of Fame Speaker and author of the national bestseller Never Fly Solo

“Don’t just read this book...hoard it and study it!” Ken Lizotte CMC, author of The Expert’s Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn to Every Time (McGraw-Hill)

Andy Saks is the owner and lead speaker of Spark Presentations. With a unique approach that incorporates fun and focus into training, his strategies ensure presenters deliver compelling messages reaching more people. Participating in nearly 300 events, Andy has consulted for a broad spectrum of organizations, from trade show booth staff at Bank of America, to scientists at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, to retail salespeople At Best Buy, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Saks
• Release date: Mar 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780991436323

Andy Saks

Andy Saks is on a mission. He’s creating a world where business presentations are fun to give and enlightening to watch, through his presentation and tradeshow training and speech coaching programs for executives, salespeople, marketers, technical staff, and trade show booth staffers.Andy is founder of Spark Presentations, a unique presentation design, delivery, and training company. Spark helps its clients have greater impact by delivering compelling messages in a more engaging way and getting them out to more people.Over the years, Andy and his team have worked with all aspects of personnel within a broad spectrum of companies and industries from trade show booth staffers at Bank of America, to scientists at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, to retail salespeople at Best Buy.Spark also speaks for its clients, by emceeing events, presenting products, hosting game shows, running auctions, and performing in training videos, TV spots and radio ads. Participating in nearly 300 live events, Andy and his team have played these roles for dozens of companies, including FedEx, Samsung, Hyundai, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony and Volvo.Now, as author of The Presentation Playbook series, he offers a way to help everyone build and run the right presentation “play” for your speaking situation, just like a coach runs the right play in a game.

Book preview

Foreword

As representatives of an IT services company, my employees and I face a common dilemma: to ourselves, we’re special, but to our prospects, we’re often indistinguishable from thousands of competitors. How do we stand out from the crowd and differentiate ourselves from the competition? How do we articulate our unique value proposition?

This is no idle challenge; it’s a central test of our modern economy. Today, simply knowing, building, and delivering your solution isn’t enough. Cutting through the marketing clutter with a clear message about who you are and why you’re worth it isn’t a competitive advantage, it’s a survival imperative.

Since our inception a quarter-century ago, I’ve been tasked with conveying that unique value proposition. To do that, I had to conquer my own public speaking fears—which dated back to high school English class—and become a student of speaking. I drew on my background teaching in the military, and over time, I learned to shape and deliver business speeches. As a result, we won many sales over the years because I could out-present our competition.

As our company grew, we realized I couldn’t give every presentation. My sales team had to learn to take our complex messages, distill them down to their most compelling forms, and convey them to an audience with enthusiasm and authority. Moreover, I wanted us positioned not as just salespeople, but as true thought leaders, trusted advisors who wrap our distinct work in a distinct, captivating, relevant message that speaks to our industry’s big picture and its future.

Over time, we made thought leadership our key differentiator. And the primary platform for thought leading became the group presentation. In sales pitches, at industry conferences, even producing our own IT seminars, we would stand in the spotlight and make our audience members feel like the stars of our show.

It was while preparing for one of those thought leader presentations that I first hired Andy Saks as my personal presentation coach. And through his coaching, Andy quickly differentiated himself with a positive, constructive style. He tempered my lingering speaking anxiety with a new I can get through this mindset and a clear path to improving. Together, we worked through my presentation content, outlining it on giant sheets of paper pasted to the walls, then adding, removing, rearranging, refining. As I rehearsed my new speech, instead of pelting me with criticism, Andy asked probing questions that helped me coach myself, then added his own insights (the best I’ve ever heard from a presentation coach). The process proved wonderfully empowering. I became an Andy fan.

We passed Andy on to coach two other Atrion executives for their own presentations. Then we hired him to deliver a two-day presentation skills training program to my whole sales team. That was something to see.

Step by step, Andy showed us how to create a deliberate, well-thought-out presentation. With him, we moved our sales message away from technology and focused it directly on our prospect’s major challenge and our unique solution. Andy helped us swap our passive presentation style for an interactive, participatory experience that emphasized engaging questions and compelling stories. He eschewed complex theory for simple models we could actually follow, and formal instruction for fun exercises that let us practice as we learned. And unlike many trainers, he led by example, embedding his speaking tools and techniques in his own program.

Since that training (and others that followed) our sales team has undergone a remarkable change. Where once, only a few could dependably articulate our core message, today we have upwards of fifteen Atrion staffers who can take any stage, speak as thought leaders, and actually enjoy doing it.

That isn’t just a matter of pride; it’s production. We’ve seen a direct correlation between our team’s ability to speak and its ability to produce. Through six years of recession and economic instability, as many of our lookalike competitors have withered, we’ve nearly tripled our sales, tipping north of $100 million. And we’ve done it without increasing our sales staff. Andy’s coaching and training contributed greatly to that achievement, teaching us to use presentations as platforms for the crucial differentiation we needed to show the world. He helped speaking become one of our competitive advantages.

And now Andy has taken what he taught us and given it to you in these books, plus a whole lot more. If you’ve found other presentation books wanting, here’s your antidote. Each chapter reads like a fun, fulfilling conversation with the coach himself.

He starts you in the preparation stage that few speakers ever consider, and moves you through a complete process that’s equal parts logical and audacious. He helps you build your own stable of compelling stories, questions, and key claims. He gives you these cool plays to run and shows you when and how to execute them. Then he douses the whole thing in sports references that resonate for anyone who’s ever belonged to a team or competed for a prize in any realm of life.

As a CEO, I believe the single greatest business skill is communication, and excelling at public speaking is the holy grail of communication. With The Presentation Playbook Series, you’ve chosen the right speaking guide for unleashing your own speaking potential. But that’s only half the challenge.

As you begin, make double sure you’re committed using this guide to change how you communicate. If you lead a team or a company, don’t just give the books to your staffers to raise their games; undertake the process with them, as I did with my staffers, and raise your own game too. Make these books your organization’s key differentiator, and you’ll find yourself better prepared to own any stage than ever before. Get started and see for yourself.

Tim Hebert

CEO, Atrion Networking Corporation

Introduction

(Why a Playbook?)

"Oratory should raise your heart rate.

Oratory should blow the doors off the place."

—Rob Lowe as Sam Seaborn, The West Wing

Presentation Domination

When corporate titans like Apple and Microsoft unveil a new product, what do their executives give live on stage to tell the world about it?

When trade show exhibitors need to attract maximum leads in minimum time, what do their hired speakers deliver from their booth theaters?

When marketers want to reach far-away prospects quickly and powerfully, what type of speech do they deliver online?

The answer for these and so many other pivotal business situations is the very same: a presentation. Presentations are used far and wide to attract, educate, inspire, and motivate. It’s the go-to communications medium that makes the instant impact companies need and other media can’t deliver.

That’s why every day around the world, countless businesspeople give presentations. They speak to audiences of all sizes and shapes, weave together facts, questions, and stories, and employ tools like slides, handouts, and whiteboards. In every circumstance imaginable, they stand up and advocate for their cause.

And sometimes, one of those presenters is you.

Executive or engineer, salesperson or scientist, marketer or manager, at some point circumstances demand that you stand up and advocate for your cause. You might pitch leads in a conference room, prospects in a webinar, or attendees at a trade show. You might promote your company at a press conference, your services at a networking event, or yourself at a job interview. You might educate your peers at an industry seminar, your customers at a training session, or your co-workers at a staff meeting.

Presentations like these (and many more) deliver the prospects, leads, clients, press, investors, and employees who serve as the lifeblood of any organization, and every business in it for the long haul needs a constant stream of them in the pipeline. Moreover, as online presentation formats like webinars, teleseminars, and teleconferencing come of age, and more executives recognize the importance of communication skills in every employee, the value of good speaking skills continues to appreciate.

You’d think with all this vast potential to connect, share, and persuade through all these avenues, businesspeople would fall over each other for speaking slots in a no-holds-barred stampede to the stage. Yet prime speaking opportunities are squandered constantly in the business world. Given the opportunity to speak, most people don’t run to the stage; they break for the exits. As a result, the emotional distance between the front row and the stage widens into a yawning chasm, a line of death that all who value their lives dare not cross. Let others embarrass themselves in the spotlight, they decide. I’ll be in the back near the snack table, safe and sound.

Their resistance—and maybe yours—likely arises at least in part from a lack of presentation strategy and direction. You’re told to answer the call and give the speech, but not told how to give it to get your best results (and avoid humiliation). What should you talk about? Which stories should you tell? What slides should you show? What if you get a question you can’t answer? What if you run out of time? How good is good enough? Without explicit guidance on each topic, your speaking task can seem so amorphous and daunting that retreat becomes your best bet.

Meet Your Playbook

If the speaking world worked like the sports world, this information vacuum wouldn’t exist. That’s because many sports teams use an invaluable tool called a playbook, a written set of step-by-step instructions describing exactly what each player should do in various game situations. A coach bestows a playbook upon his or her players like a parent handing down a precious family heirloom. Players digest each play thoroughly and practice it to perfection, so when the game is on the line they can run it without hesitation.

A playbook’s value lies in how it removes the burden of strategizing from scratch under extreme pressure. It says, "Don’t worry, I’ve already thought this through, and I know what to do. Just follow me." Fourth-and-two on the other team’s 40-yard line with 15 seconds left in the fourth quarter, no timeouts and you’re down by two? Don’t panic. The playbook whispers knowingly in your ear, Your best bet is to run a 20-yard sideline pass to get the first down and step out of bounds to stop the clock, then kick a 32-yard field goal as time runs out to win the game. It speaks,