Weekend Language: Presenting with More Stories and Less PowerPoint

Think about it: on weekends, we’re all great communicators because our default is storytelling. When we go to a party on Saturday night, we don’t talk about how we optimized our calendar last Wednesday to monetize our mission-critical, best-of-breed, seamless-solution-provider business. (If you do, that’s probably why you haven’t been invited back to many parties). No, on the weekends our speech is conversational, simple, clear, and interesting. We speak in examples, anecdotes, and analogies. But then Monday morning hits. We step into the office and suddenly we’re full of feature lists and ten-point plans, “high level” terms and nonsense. As if that wasn’t bad enough, we beat the snot out of our audiences with 118-slide PowerPoint presentations chock-full of text. Audience members typically don’t remember anything from those types of presentations. But they do remember stories. The approach and techniques found in this book are designed to help you replicate your existing strengths as a weekend storyteller so you can drag them into your weekday presentations to and conversations with customers, partners, employees, and investors. That way, you can be a great communicator every day of the week.

ANDY CRAIG Andy teaches executives to talk more on the weekdays like they do on the weekends — when they are at their best as storytellers — and has hundreds of successful sessions to prove it. He also talks regularly to sales organizations and various associations about the power and importance of elevator speeches and meaningful presentations. Before co-founding Elevator Speech, Andy was general manager and senior vice president of the Weber Shandwick in Austin, and vice president at Fleishman-Hillard. He began his career as press secretary for the Office of the Missouri State Treasurer. DAVE YEWMAN A friend of Dave’s 11-year-old son Aaron asked, “What does your Dad do?” Aaron thought for a minute, then said, “He teaches people how not to say ‘um.’” That’s a pretty good elevator speech for a presentation coach. Dave likes to think there’s a bit more to presentation coaching than that — but it’s a great place to start. In the past 10+ years Dave’s coached CEOs, professional athletes, tech startup founders, engineers, creative designers and pretty much everyone in between. Dave Yewman is a strategic communications expert with more than 15 years of experience. A former newspaper reporter and columnist, he speaks regularly to about how to use clear, concise, compelling language as a strategic weapon when dealing with reporters, employees, sales prospects, shareholders, and consumers.