Using Frameworks For Effective Sales Presos

Anyone who has ever delivered a presentation or even listened to one knows that the key to an effective presentation is telling a story. If you peruse even a few pages of any of the books about how to deliver a solid presentation, you will find references to storytelling and its role in passing along information throughout history. Yes, we must tell stories. But not all stories work.

So how do you pick a story or a framework for a presentation that will be effective?

Stories vs frameworks

Let me start off by saying that you need both stories and frameworks. When you think about the structure of the points you want to convey, think about frameworks. When you want to make a point real, use a story. When you are delivering a technical presentation especially, you are very unlikely to find a single story that can weave in all the points you want to make. You are, after all, a presenter not a comedian. Don’t try to force all of your points into a long story.

So that leaves you searching for a framework. A framework is simply a way of organizing your points. It is ultimately the framework more than the stories that you need your audience to remember, largely because the stories capture moments in your presentation where your framework captures the overarching theme.

What makes a good framework?

Having crafted many hundreds of presentations, you might think that I can say for certain. But the reality is that every time I have to put together a presentation, I struggle with this. Most of the time my struggles are because I am trying to be way too clever for my own good. I come up with these very elegant frameworks that capture nuance perfectly (in my mind, anyway). I choose words that are very subtle and have specific meaning.

But all of that said, the most effective frameworks are not about you. They are about your audience. When you outthink yourself, you end up with nuance and subtlety and context that is lost on an audience member who, if you’re lucky, will remember 3 things you say in an hour-long presentation.

With that in mind, the most important thing in finding a good framework is making it memorable. Here, there are a few tricks that can help you out. There is a theory in public speaking called the Rule of Three. The premise is that the mind will remember things that are listed in threes more easily than two or four. One psychological premise behind this is the idea of creating a progression (a start, middle, and ending). It’s hard to know if there is real psychology behind this, but the idea is so prominent that a simple Google search for Rule of Three will yield a ton of results.

And if you are picking three things around which your framework will revolve, do yourself a favor and make it somewhat catchy. You don’t need to dive straight into marketing to do this, but you should put a little bit of thought into the words you use to describe your framework. A couple of standbys include using numbers or using a common first letter.

Why make it catchy?

Of course you want people to remember your framework. But knowing that is really only skimming the surface. Though you want your framework to be memorable, the question is why?

The key to selling (a product, a position, an idea) is not in laying out a logical argument that your audience is going to remember. In an hour presentation, the details that you spend all of your time obsessing over get lost. Even an hour after the presentation, the chances are that your audience remembers only a few points (if any) that you made. If you really want to move your audience to a particular position, you need to make it their conclusion not yours.

So what does that mean?

The value in providing a framework is that it allows the audience member to deconstruct the presentation after the fact. Whether that is an hour later, a day later, or a year later, the dynamic you really want is for your audience to remember a few key points and be able to deduce what it is you wanted them to understand. Even if they don’t remember the details, if they can reasonably reconstruct the argument based on the framework, they can arrive at the same conclusion over and over again. More importantly, they can tell their colleagues when you are not there, allowing them to be strong ambassadors for whatever position you were advocating.

Some examples

We can look at a few examples from the networking industry itself to see how powerful a good framework can be. For those of you who have been following a little thing called SDN and overlays for awhile, let me toss out a couple of examples.

Nicira very early on described themselves as the VMWare of networking. This was a brilliant move, though the purists probably still cringe every time you hear this comparison. But by describing themselves (or allowing others to describe them) as the VMWare of networking, the audience was able to draw their own conclusions about what that meant. It almost didn’t matter what details were said after that punch line because an audience member could easily construct whatever reality they wanted from the tag line alone.

A more recent example of a framework paying dividends is Cumulus. Depending on who you listen to, they are described as the Linux of networking (which, to be fair, is literally true) or as the RedHat of networking. Both descriptions allow the audience to remember a single point and then to deduce what that means in their context.

When you have a good framework, don’t ruin it

When you have a good framework, the key is not to pollute it with competing frameworks and thoughts. Every framework you put up after the one that works is just one more distraction. You might think you are laying golden points down, but if you are forcing the audience to remember multiple frameworks, then you are really just diluting your strength. I don’t mean to say that you should be vapid and without substance, but be careful layering on too many points. All too often, a good presentation is ruined not because you don’t make the point you want but rather because you make that point and 200 others that follow it.

The bottom line

The value in a framework is in allowing someone to reach the same conclusions without you standing in front of them. And if you think this is just for marketing and sales people, let me add that everyone is presenting virtually all the time. A meeting to review an architectural design? That’s a presentation, and if you want your architecture to go through, you ought to spend time thinking about how to talk about it. That one-on-one with your boss where you want to talk about your promotion? That’s a presentation, and you should make it easy for your boss to summarize the reasons. Why? Because she has to go and make the case for you when you are not there. Presentations are everywhere, and if you think you can get by without deliberately planning for success, you are following yourself.

Using Frameworks For Effective Sales Presos