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Complex to Simple: How we helped a nervous speaker explain 2 years of research in 30minutes to 1,000+ people
In 5 x 90min sessions, we helped the Founder of a leading Market Research firm:
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Overcome stage freight on a stage in front of 1,000+ people
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Condense 2 years of research into 30 minutes
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Gain 500+ genuine leads, each worth over $50,000 of annual business
We did this by applying our Audience-centric Communication Model to provide him with a winning strategy, script, slides & coaching.
About the client
We received a referral from a previous client. The referral was the Founder of a Marketing company with 20+ years experience innovating new ways to sell supermarket products.
His team had spent the last 2 years collecting an enormous amount of valuable information on how the top 50 supermarket supplier companies had approached innovation.
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The founder was invited to present their research at an annual convention for 1,000+ supermarket suppliers.
The Problem
The founder told us that these were the problems he wanted us to solve:
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Public speaking always made him nervous and he wanted to enjoy himself up on stage
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He was passionate about the research his team spent 2 years collecting and wanted to make something valuable and useful out of it
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He believed if it was done right, the presentation could accelerate growth for his company
Our Strategy
Our Solution
Managing speaker fear
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Our client wanted to enjoy the presentation and the lead up to it. One way of achieving this is to not insist that the client memorize a presentation, especially an important one that is lengthy and technical. This is a good way to maximize stress & dread.
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Although not often recognised, many incredible speeches have been delivered from behind a lectern from a script (Rowan Atkinson & Stephen Fry speak this way more often than not). The focus is then on how to craft an engaging script and delivery. A much more enjoyable process.
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Complex Content made Simple & Memorable
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What makes presentations so valuable is the ability to save so many people so much time. The distillation of content into 30 minutes or less, from content that takes years or multiple lifetimes to collect.
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Therefore, it is not advisable to deliver the content chronologically - which is the same painstakingly long way it was collected. Rather, massive amounts of information can be more quickly delivered by leveraging information which is already familiar to the audience, and using that to reveal new information.
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To use an analogy, imagine the audience knows 10,000 things about how supermarkets work - after all, they have visited them many times. With this familiar information in mind, we might say “imagine if instead of putting the ingredients for a cake in separate aisles (flour aisle 1, eggs, aisle 2, sugar aisle 3, etc)… we put those ingredients together in the bakery section next to home made cakes and a Coles recipe book…”.
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Now, the audience is empowered to know 10,000 things about this new innovative idea - because we used the 10,000 things they knew about a supermarket to explain a new idea.
Selling from the stage without selling from the stage.
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Most conferences do not want speakers to sell directly to the audience (and rightly so). It is very uncomfortable and betrays the original invitation of attending (to hear expert ideas).
However, hearing expert ideas often leads audiences to want to know more or start a conversation with the speaker about the work they do.
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How best to facilitate that conversation, without detracting from the event?
More on that later - but the formula includes:
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Audience becomes aware of a problem a strategy and a solution
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Those things are well enough understood, sufficiently valuable, and the audience can continue that line of thinking favourably (“I can see how that would work”)A means of taking action quickly & simply.
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A means of taking action quickly & simply.​​
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To solve the above 3 problems, we used our Audience-Centric Communication Model to strategise, script and coach the client to solve the 3 problems:
The Results
