How Many Points Should Your Presentation Cover?

• 00:05 So you brainstormed on all your different message points that you might want to
• 00:09 include in this speech or presentation.
• 00:11 That's great.
• 00:12 Maybe you have ten, maybe you have 40, 50, 60.
• 00:15 Fantastic.
• 00:16 But now it's decision time.
• 00:20 And this decision is going to have a bigger impact on your speech or
• 00:25 your presentation that almost anything else you do.
• 00:29 And there's kind of one of two ways of going.
• 00:32 Here's what most people do, they say wow.
• 00:36 More is more.
• 00:37 The more messages, the more topics I give people,
• 00:41 the less likely they are to accuse me, oh, you left this out, you left this out.
• 00:46 You know what?
• 00:46 I'll cover my you know what if I just cover all the messages.
• 00:51 If I say everything, I'll have covered everything.
• 00:55 Everyone will think I'm smart.
• 00:57 If they forget half of it or all of it, well, that's okay.
• 01:01 No one can accuse me of leaving anything out.
• 01:04 This is a very defensive, negative mentality when it comes to being
• 01:09 a speaker or presenter and it's not one that great speakers every use.
• 01:14 It is something that most executives do, a lot of students do,
• 01:18 other business people, but it's not effective at all.
• 01:24 Your goal when you're speaking is to communicate.
• 01:28 I have never yet seen an audience where you can just list lots and lots and
• 01:32 lots of facts, dozens of messages, and they remember it.
• 01:37 Now most of what I do is I teach small groups of executives
• 01:42 from six continents how to give better presentations.
• 01:46 And I always start off the day the same way, I'll look around the room and
• 01:51 I'll say I want you to think of the best speaker you've seen in the last year,
• 01:56 maybe the last five years.
• 01:58 Now, tell me every message point your remember from this speaker.
• 02:04 Remember, it's the best speaker you've seen in the last year or
• 02:07 the last five years.
• 02:10 Not somebody on TV, not somebody in your own company but
• 02:13 someone in your industry when you saw them speak.
• 02:17 And typically, Sam will say, well yeah I remember this guy and
• 02:21 he was really funny and he walked around.
• 02:23 Sam, I didn't ask about the style, I asked about the messages.
• 02:29 The actual content.
• 02:34 Sally, who can you think of?
• 02:36 Well, touche.
• 02:38 I can remember the speaker, but I can't remember anything she said.
• 02:44 Okay, Ed, how about you?
• 02:46 Well, TJ, yeah, there was this one speaker,
• 02:48 best speaker at the whole convention.
• 02:49 We saw 40 speakers, and I remember his one main point was, and
• 02:54 then he listed the point.
• 02:56 Now we go around the room like this and sometimes people remember zero.
• 03:00 Sometimes they remember one point.
• 03:04 Sometimes two.
• 03:04 Occasionally three points.
• 03:08 Every few months someone will remember four points.
• 03:12 And once every six months, one of my clients will remember five points.
• 03:18 Literally a handful.
• 03:20 And I ask this question every week, sometimes every day in a week.
• 03:24 I've never, ever had anyone remember more than literally five major points of
• 03:31 substance from the most important speech or the best speaker they've seen.
• 03:38 In the last year, five years, sometimes in a lifetime.
• 03:42 So I start off with the basic assumption that if you can communicate
• 03:47 a handful of ideas, you're going to be in rarefied company.
• 03:53 You're gonna be a great speaker.
• 03:55 And in fact, you're gonna communicate much more than those speakers do.
• 04:01 Cuz remember, it's not communication if it comes out of your mouth.
• 04:05 It's communication if people actually remember your ideas.
• 04:11 They've gotta understand it, but then they have to remember it so
• 04:15 they can take the actions you want.
• 04:17 If they don't remember it, you might as well be spouting off in a different
• 04:21 language or reading from the phone book.
• 04:24 You've got to get people to remember your ideas, that's what it's all about.
• 04:29 So if you just do this rifle shot approach bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
• 04:34 They're not going to remember anything.
• 04:38 And one caveat here, I'm talking about presenting in the adult world,
• 04:42 the business world, political civic world, anything other than in the classroom.
• 04:46 In a classroom you might be able to force your students to take notes because you're
• 04:50 going to test them in a week.
• 04:53 But in the real world, corporate world, government world, non-profit world, we
• 04:57 don't have the ability to test audiences listening to us in presentations.
• 05:02 So what I'm going to ask you to do now on this speech you're preparing,
• 05:06 you just brainstormed on all the messages.
• 05:09 I need you to now put them in order, and
• 05:13 I need you to come up with your top five messages.
• 05:18 Write those down.
• 05:21 Eliminate all the others.
• 05:22 Throw them away.
• 05:23 I know it's hard to do.
• 05:24 You wanna keep it.
• 05:25 You're passionate about your subject, but you have to do it.
• 05:30 Too many speakers, they're like an airplane.
• 05:34 At 30,000 feet, they're flying 600 miles an hour, bang, bang, bang,
• 05:39 all these points are covered.
• 05:41 And at the end of the 20 minutes, yeah, they've gone a long way.
• 05:46 They've gone a few hundred miles.
• 05:48 Great speakers aren't like that.
• 05:50 They cover one point, give examples, stories, case studies.
• 05:54 Another point, stories, examples, case studies, and at the end of the speech they
• 06:00 haven't gone that far, but the audience is with them every step of the way.
• 06:06 And more important, the audience is remembering the messages.

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