Presentation Skills That Will Take You to the Top (Collection), 2/e

The Art of Telling Your Story

Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital, the legendary venture capitalist who introduced me to Cisco, sits through thousands of presentations every year, most of them made by shrewd entrepreneurs in search of funding for their new business concepts. Don is continually shocked by the failure of most of these presentations to communicate effectively and persuasively.

He once summed it up to me this way: “Jerry, the problem is that nobody knows how to tell a story. And what’s worse, nobody knows that they don’t know how to tell a story!”

The overwhelming majority of business presentations merely serve to convey data, not to persuade.

This problem is multiplied and compounded 30 million times a day, a figure which, according ...