The Short Self-Promotion Business Speech

Continued from the previous page:
Should Your Business Speech Be a Sales Pitch?

 Audience Interaction in Your Business Speech

George:  

Audience interaction can be a big thing too because that helps them relate to you. Do you do anything in your presentations to kind of draw the audience out?

Patricia: 
Yes I do as a matter of fact, I actually use a modification of the Socratic Method.  The Socratic is how they teach lawyers to think like lawyers. 

(Ed. Socratic Method: teaching through asking questions rather than telling or lecturing)

And what you do is you ask a question like “If someone dies as a single person without a will, who gets their property?” 

Then you let people give you random answers and sometimes they say things like “The children” and sometimes they say things like “The spouse”.  Of course there’s no spouse if they are single.  Sometimes they say the state will get it.

What you do is you get several different answers and then you explain to them that the law does not always do what they expect it to do and then tell them what the answer is.

George: 

What are some of the other things that you would tell people that are just starting out, trying to accomplish some of the things you have accomplished.

Get to the Room Early 

Patricia: 
Well I mentioned earlier about knowing your environment and going early. I think that that’s very important knows the size of the function. 

One time I walked into a room and there were about 300 faces staring back at me and I had no time to prepare for that.  I just kind of took a gasp and I couldn’t believe that 300 people wanted to hear my speech and I found that you can relate just as easily to 300 as you can to 30.  It felt like the time went very very quickly in that environment but the people were just as complimentary at the end. 

The other thing is that no whether you’re going to have facilities like a black board or a white board or if you’re going to be bringing something to project.  Either the old fashion transparencies or slides or the newer PowerPoint type presentation.

Dealing With Audio Visual Equipment Troubles 

George: 
If I can just throw in something here.  When you have to speak to a group of 300 people you can have situations where you need some technology.  Unless you’re a real big mouth like me, your probably isn’t going to carry to a room full of 3000 people. 

Have you had instances when the technology went down, when you had equipment problems and so on? 

Patricia: 
Well, you can try once or twice to make it work, but if it’s interfering with your presentation I usually try to make the presentation without it.  Although my voice seems very soft and young as we mentioned earlier I do have a very good volume that I can produce at need.  Sometimes I can fill a room even with 300 people in it without a microphone.  Which is a kind of technique that you learn and actually I learned it when I took karate lessons?

George: 
Is that right?

Patricia: 
Yes.

George: 
I’ve found that if you do a lot of speaking too, the same things tend to happen over and over again and the same problems crop up. Eventually you start to get one liners to fit with all those situations. All of a sudden maybe you’ll think of something funny to say one time and it goes over and gets a laugh.  It loosens people up, it deflates the tension that might be in the air and next thing you know, you’re using that line every time something goes wrong. Sometimes it works so well you start hoping for things to go wrong.

Patricia: 
Well I’ve never hoped for things to go wrong but I think the point I was trying to make is that if you go early and check out your environment you can make sure the equipment is working. I’ve been on the receiving end, been in the audience, when speakers have had their PowerPoint presentations or slides other equipment fail and it’s very difficult for them. 

Write Your Own Introduction 

Another thing that I would suggest is that you bring an introduction sheet, something that shows your credentials writing in a conversational manner.  With today’s technology I have pumped up the type face to about a 16 on my introduction sheet.  So it’s really just a short paragraph but it take sup the whole page. But that way if somebody’s working with a low light situation or perhaps their vision isn’t as it used to be then they can read the introduction just as I have written it.  That way you get to highlight the credentials that you think are important.

George:
You touched on a really key area there too because I never do a presentation without writing the introduction for the person who’s introducing me.  Because in a lot of instances if you just leave it to chance, you’re inviting someone to be embarrassed—either you or the person introducing you. 

I think you heard you say that’s been your experience too that you try to make it as easy as possible for the person who is introducing you.

Patricia: 

That’s exactly right.  It’s important to be to have my credentials right up front but I’m also board certified in estate planning and probate law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. To me that’s a very important credential, it adds a lot to your credibility.

Look for Friendly Faces 

George: 
One of the thing I do too is when I’m listening to the person doing the introduction,.  I’m watching the audience closely to see who’s paying attention, who’s not, who’s got their arms folded and who is probably thinking “I don’t know what this guy is going to have to tell me and why I even need to be here.” 

I avoid eye contact with those people and I try to look at the friendly people more often. You like to look for those friendly faces in the audience and during the introduction, that’s a good time to search for those faces if you haven’t already met them coming into the back of the room.  I’ve found that to be really helpful over the years.  You may see somebody who they just look friendly during the introduction.  Those are the folks you can play to during your presentation.

Patricia: 
I agree with you and I think it’s important for the speaker to also pay attention to their body language and their facial expressions during the introduction. 

George: 

What else?

Be Prompt and Dependable 

Patricia:
One of the things that I found that was very important was to keep a good calendar. If you’ve promised somebody that you’re going to be somewhere are noon, you don’t want to show up at 12:05. I found that program chairs are much happier when you come in 10 or 15 or even 20 minutes early for the presentation which I had suggested for a different reason.

I’ve had seen the anxiety on the face of a program chair when their speaker has not arrived and indeed I’ve been asked to extend my presentation because the next speaker had not arrived for a particular program. 

It’s important that you confirm you commitments in writing.  I have a form letter that has a cheerful opening and a pleasant closing and in between it confirms the day, time and place of the speech.  That way there’s no confusion as to which Monday we meant when we said we were going to get together on a Monday.

And be sure to stay after the presentation in case people have additional questions. I find that sometimes the questions that they want to ask me are more personal or private and they don’t want to ask in a group situation.  That is the question that will get them to come into my office.

Repeat the Question 

George: 
Yeah, that’s very important and let me backtrack on that subject a little bit.  It’s always a good idea to repeat a question you get from the audience because not everybody can heard it when the question is asked.

Patricia: 
That is very true, especially in an environment that requires a microphone.  Many of my presentations are small, maybe 30 people and unless the person asking the question actually has a very soft voice, the rest of the audience can usually hear what they say.  But occasionally-- especially with a group of seniors where they might be not so good on the hearing anymore-- maybe those people would appreciate the question being repeated.

George:
One of the things you’ll find too is the people up front always talk so it’s easy to hear them from ten feet away. But the people in the back, who are 60 or 70 feet away, can’t hear the question. When someone in the front of the room asks you something, you almost always have to repeat it for the people in the back of the room.

Patricia: 
That’s especially true in a large room, or particularly one that’s longer or deeper than it is wide.

George: 
Right, the worst rooms are the long narrow ones.  You seem to be shouting at the people up front but the people way in the back can barely hear you.

George: 

In any case do you have one or two more hints for people who are just thinking about using public speaking as a marketing strategy?

Bring Handouts 

Patricia: 

Bring handouts. I may have mentioned that earlier.  This is an important place to summarize it.  I can’t tell you how important those handouts are.  People bring them to conferences with me and I can tell by looking at the dates on the what year it was that I spoke to them.  Sometimes it’s as many a seven or eight years later.  So they have held on to the piece of paper with my name and phone number that long.  So the paper is very very important to tell people that you’re available, that you would like to have their business. 

George: 
Don’t make the assumption.

Patricia: 

I’ve run into people that I had given speeches to, and they’ve told me how much I had motivated them and how they went to another attorney and got all this work done. So I ask them, “Was there a reason you didn’t come to me?” 

“Oh,” they say. “We didn’t know that you did this.  We thought you just made speeches.”

I was told early on by someone who had been doing this for awhile that people like to go away with something that they can carry and importantly it should have your name and your address and your telephone number on it so that they can reach you and these days of course your email and web address.

George: 
On the subject of handouts, how did you develop those?  How did you get them?

Patricia: 
Actually that’s an interesting story in itself.  When I was trying to develop my business as part of my business plan I had said that I wanted to write for publications for seniors. 

So I just sat down and wrote an article and I sent it to one of the local senior’s papers.  It’s a free “give away” paper directed at seniors.  The editor of the paper and picked it up and he used part of integrated it in with some other things. 

So I called him up and I said “I noticed you used some of my stuff, would you like some more?”  and he said “Yeah, okay, that would be fine”.  So I sent him another article and he published it. 

So the next month I sent him another article and he published that.  The third month though it had gotten busier by that time and I didn’t send him an article and got a frantic phone call “Where’s my article, I have to have an article”

So I wrote him another article in a hurry and sent it off.  By the time that we had been through a year I had 12 pamphlets that I could republish and use as handouts for my speeches.

George: 
So your work counted twice basically.

Patricia: 
I did, I often try to use things more than once.  I find that over the years that I’ve rewritten the papers several times but they stay fresh year after year.

So if you’re out there looking for business I think it’s very important to say what kind of business you would like to have and most particularly that you would like to have their business. 

Use a Filing System 

George: 
In talking about measuring your success--you have to keep track of these things to know how well you’re doing, don’t you?

Patricia: 
Yes, you’re absolutely right and when you’re giving 100 speeches a year you have to know to whom you’ve spoken and who the contact was and what topic you used. 

I have a filing system and it’s worked really well for me.  I break everything out to the type of organization it is. For example, I have a section on Chamber of Commerce because I did quite a lot of work with the Chamber of Commerce and was able to meet many people in the community so I have a whole section on that.  I have a section on AARP--the American Association of Retired Persons because I did a lot of speaking with them. And so on.

I also have a whole section of directories that I have collected.  I have a section of maps that I collected because one of the things that you have to be able to do is to get around in your community.  We live in a large metropolitan area but there are many outlying communities that also have needs.  So I’ve been known to go to small communities within a couple hours of our town and give the speeches and presentations there. 

I have a whole file for all the letters that I have sent out, broken out by what type of organization. Whether it was a church organization or a civic organization so that I can a track of all the letters that I’ve sent out. 

I have just a whole list of all the organizations that I’ve spoken before and one file folder for each one of them.