As a professional keynote speaker, I have the same tools at my disposal as every amateur public speaker: my voice, my subject, my slides. Those three elements are essentially all I bring to the conferences, events and summits where I speak. (I keynote 20 such events year, on the same topics I write about here for Forbes.com: customer service, customer experience, customer centricity and corporate culture.)
But the way I use these elements is different from most. See if making some or all of these five changes might help you as well at your next meeting or public speech:
1. I don’t overload an audience with information. This is harder to pull off than you might think, because all of us know a lot more about our topic of choice than we can jam into a presentation. But jamming a lot of information into a presentation isn't helpful to your audience's retention of the material. It's better to make fewer points, and make each of them in as memorable a way as possible.
2. Most of my slides have either zero words or only a handful–not the endless bullet pointed items that are the norm.
Instead...
3. I rely on unusual visuals–photos that I've take myself, rather than cliched images featuring stock photography models in predictable, hackneyed poses. My goal is to use imagery that won't be automatically ignored or dismissed by the audience’s mind–imagery that is fresh and unusual.
While stock photography with impossibly handsome (or impossibly generic-looking) models is easily ignored by your audience, the photos I take myself–often of either great or hilariously terrible service situations – are memorable and are hard for an audience to ignore or forget.
4. Once or twice in the course of each keynote speech I withhold an answer until the audience, by doing some small activity – analyzing a photo, taking a quick quiz – is able to figure the answer out on their own. This gets people involved more than simply handing them the answer without any investment on their part.
5. I use emotion, specifically:
–Humor: I sincerely can’t keep myself from being comical (I've tried, it's a bust.) This even though, or perhaps especially because, I talk about serious subjects to serious audiences (healthcare, retail, B2B, hospitality, etc.) for whom success truly rides on improving their customer service experience.
Humor is something I pay attention to and refine, which requires timing, learning to not laugh at my own jokes, and some other techniques you can learn from — not surprisingly — comedians. David Sedaris learned a lot from watching a Whoopi Goldberg video more than 75 times. You could do the same or, perhaps, watch or listen to the great Sedaris.
–Fear/urgency: This one is important. As Nick Morgan, the renowned communications coach, explains very well in his writings and in-person coaching, you need to start the audience off somewhere other than at the solution (even though your instinct as a subject matter expert is to solve things for your audience right off). And often that other place is a place of urgency or fear of what happens if you don’t pursue the solution. I feel comfortable doing this because, truly, if a business doesn’t get to work improving its customer serivce, customer experience, and corporate culture, it’s likely not long for this world.
–Poignancy: I used to shy away from examples that are potential tear-jerkers. Now I go ahead and use them, on occasion. There are plenty of tissues to go round, if needed.
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That’s not a very long list, but I hope you find it useful. Here are a few bonus pointers that I also find important. These are not related to presentations but to business life itself:
6. Show up
7. Show up on time
8. Answer your phone (no, not during a presentation)
9. Don’t complain about jetlag — it comes off as a humble brag and nobody wants to hear it.
Micah Solomon is a customer service keynote speaker and bestselling customer experience author. You can purchase his new Forbes Signature Series eBook on Amazon and Apple today.
