Manage-Wise

Persuasive presentations

In November 1995, President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress failed to reach agreement on a federal budget. Without congressional money came the first of two federal government shutdowns that temporarily curbed government services and sent almost 800,000 workers home without pay. The shutdowns were a huge embarrassment for the Clinton administration, but polls at the time blamed the impasse on the Republican Congress.

Smart presentation

Clinton fought back by sharing a persuasive story during his next nationally televised State of the Union Address presented to the full Congress. He began by introducing a man sitting next to his wife, Hillary, in the First Ladies Box:

His name is Richard Dean. He is a 49-year-old Vietnam veteran who’s worked for the Social Security Administration for 22 years now. Last year he was hard at work in the Federal Building in Oklahoma City when the blast killed 169 people and brought the rubble down all around him. He re-entered that building four times. He saved the lives of three women. He’s here with us this evening, and I want to recognize Richard and applaud both his public service and his extraordinary personal heroism.

The entire Congress, led by the Republican majority, gave Dean an enthusiastic standing ovation. Clinton continued his story, but with a zinger:

But Richard Dean’s story doesn’t end there. This last November, he was forced out of his office when the government shut down. And the second time the government shut down he continued helping Social Security recipients, but he was working without pay.

On behalf of Richard Dean and his family, and all other people who are working there every day doing a good job for the American people, I challenge all of you in this chamber: Never, shut down the federal government down again.

Regardless of your own political viewpoint, you can see how this was a smart presentation strategy that Clinton used to turn the tables on his political rivals. After his speech, Clinton later wrote in his autobiography, “I didn’t think I had to worry about a third government shutdown. Its consequences now had a human heroic face.”

The magic

Stories are great persuaders because they create a sympathetic emotional response with an audience. If you tell an audience about the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you, every audience member, on some level, will be thinking about an embarrassing moment of their lives or how they feel if put into your situation. Clinton’s story had huge impact as a national audience imagined what it could feel like to be a true patriotic hero like Richard Dean, suddenly tossed out of his job by a frivolous Washington power game.

Listening to a professional speaker like Emory Austin, president of Emory Austin and Company, can be intimidating. Austin is a master storyteller who inspires and motivates audiences as a professional speaker. Everyday events just seem to happen to her that result in fascinating stories. Most of us just don’t lead as interesting lives. Or do we? I hope you will soon see that your own personal stories carry a unique persuasiveness. Assuming you have earned the right to stand before an audience, you have a lot to share that could be presented more dynamically in the form of a story. Also, much of a story’s persuasiveness comes from how it is structured and delivered, not in how universally entertaining it is.

An executive once told me he that he did not have time to include stories in his presentation because he had so many charts and statistics to share. While a good statistical chart can be a good way to make a point, it is rarely a good point to make a point memorable or connected to an emotion.

Identifying stories

Stories are emotional persuaders. To use them you need to think about the emotional response you want from your audience. Do you want to elicit pride in going along with your program, anxiety at the possibility of going with a competitor, excitement about choosing a groundbreaking course of action?

A well-told story can bring out any one of these feelings, but not all of them. You need to choose one emotion that will help your persuasive objective.

Persuasive stories are all around us. But we may not recognize them as such. They begin as everyday incidents that have a message, lesson, or humor. A persuasive storyteller recognizes the value of these incidents and will organize and structure them into a story with impact.

Recently a client confronted me with the news that a direct competitor, whose business was poor, had offered him dramatic discounts. I was able to overcome the possibility of losing business to this competitor by sharing a story. But my use of the story actually began more than five years earlier.

Back then, I was selling in the same industry but to a different account, ABCDigital Corp (not their real name). Again, I was in a competitive situation against a desperate discounting competitor. This time I lost the bid and ABCDigital began buying from this competitor. The more ABCDigital bought, the lower the prices went until eventually ABCDigital made this competitor their sole supplier. But when this supplier went bankrupt, ABCDigital started having major delivery problems. For six months they had shipping delays, and customer satisfaction dropped sharply. Several aggressive competitors took advantage, and they stole ABCDigital’s five biggest customers. ABCDigital never recovered. They lost momentum, and two years later they filed for bankruptcy. At the time, I filed this instructive incident away and made it into this story.

When I shared this story recently, it had a huge impact on my audience. This was an industry-specific story, and most in my audience knew about ABCDigital, with several even knowing people who had lost their jobs when it went down. After my ABCDigital story, no one in that room was enthusiastic about taking a chance on another risky discounter. The most persuasive stories are ones that involve people, places, companies, or organizations with which your audience is familiar.

Excerpt from ‘Presentations That Change Minds’ by Josh Gordon. Reproduced with permission © 2007, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. Price: Rs 250. Vishwanath_Ghanekar@mcgraw-hill.com