Mastering Presentations: Be the Undisputed Expert when You Deliver Presentations

Chapter 3

Add Tremendous Impact to Your Presentations and Become the “Go-To” Expert

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

—George Patton

If you want to be seen as the expert, then you can’t just do what everyone else is doing.

We already know that if we run our businesses just like everyone else, we will quickly be swallowed up by the competition. But when we design our presentations, we often totally disregard our own advice. Be different. Stand out from the crowd. Do something to help your audience better understand your content, but also make your presentation more memorable. When you finish your presentation, you want your audience to be thinking, “Man, that presenter really knows his [or her] stuff.”

Any magician will tell you that the magic tricks themselves are fairly irrelevant to the success of the magician or the show. What’s more important is what they call the patter. The patter is the running commentary of the magician that accompanies the trick. It is the showmanship that temporarily gets the audience’s attention off the trick and focused somewhere else. Magicians like Penn and Teller will use jokes and funny stories as their patter. Magicians like David Copperfield or Siegfried and Roy rarely use verbal patter, but instead rely on stunning visuals like a pretty assistant dressed very seductively or albino tigers. Regardless of what type of patter a magician uses, it’s the patter that creates the show. Most of these magicians are going to ...