164: How to Craft a Presentation
Have you ever sat down to craft your presentation, but you have no idea how to get started? In today's episode, I'm going to show you exactly how I write presentations for myself, for my clients and how we teach our students to do it themselves.
Listen in as I walk you through writing for your audience, repurposing talks, and the steps you should be taking to craft and prep for your presentation.
If you loved this episode and it motivated you to work on more polished presentations, I’d love for you to leave a review on iTunes and tell me about your biggest takeaway. Take a screenshot of you listening on your device, post it to your Instagram Stories, and tag me @jessicarasdall.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Do you know your content too well?
Before you start crafting your presentation, it’s important to look at the subject matter from your audiences perspective so you’re able to communicate on a level they understand. Find a way to speak your audiences language while still setting your authority. Oftentimes, presenters will forget how well they know their own subject matter, and how little their audience may know.
Which sounds really tough, but you have to develop a solid presentation that the audience will understand.
Repurposing Your Talks
We don't have to start from scratch every time we write a talk. While you may be approached to speak at multiple events throughout the year, this doesn’t mean you have to write that many fresh, new talks. We can constantly be evolving without revisiting the drawing board every single time. Here are two ways to repurpose your talks:
Break it into smaller pieces of content
Duplicate/adjust for a different audience
How to Craft a Presentation
Now, let’s just into how to really craft your presentation!
Identify your audience + the transformation
Craft Your billboard statement - This is your gut check moment - if your audience only remembers one thing from your talk, what will they remember?
Brainstorm stories/visuals/examples - what do you need to share with your audience to support your billboard statement.
Content dump your four phases:
Hook them in - get them to want to listen..
Build your case - talk about the big problem you're solving or the goal you're achieving.
Serve from the stage - three steps of something they can do to overcome the problem.
Leave a lasting impact — this is what makes a difference.. Give them a CTA at the end of your talk that is relevant to your talk.
Presentation Prep:
A talk is going to have a bit of a dance to it - it's not chronological. But getting the information out of your head to include in your presentation should be.
To help you and our students, I reverse engineered our signature presentation outline to guide you through this process:
I mapped out all of the questions I ask my clients in order to get the content we need for their talk
I reorganized those questions into an order that makes more sense.
Our speaking strategy academy students simply go through a doc, answer the questions (that are now in a logical order)
copy and paste those answers into the talk outline
give it the finishing touches and transitions
It’s Time to Craft Your Presentation
Don't let the fear of writing your presentation to hold you back from sharing. I’ve created two resources just for you
Speaking Strategy Academy - A high-level coaching hybrid program for entrepreneurs who want to scale their business by speaking on stages, podcasts, summits, and more.
Speak to Scale Vault - The roadmap and resources you need to start speaking (so you can scale your business)— all in one place. Inside the Speak to Scale Vault, you'll find expert speaking resources that meet you where you are on your speaker's journey... and help you reach that next step. Use the code PODCAST to get the Vault for just $39.
If you're not already a member of the academy, we'd love to invite you to apply to join The Speaking Strategy Academy. You'll get instant access to our A-Z speaking training system with video lessons, transcripts, scripts, templates, and more.... access to our live group coaching calls, personalized 1:1 feedback on your work from me, and an opportunity to present your work live in front of our community for hot seat coaching and feedback. What are you waiting for, friend? Apply today!
Thanks so much for joining us for today's episode, if you enjoyed it - please take a moment to share about it on social or leave us a review in your favorite podcast app. It means the world to me and helps us keep this show going for you!
Loved this episode? follow us on Pinterest and pin it for later!
Other related episodes you’ll love
Read the Transcript from this Episode
Transcript for Episode 164:
So you're ready to craft your presentation. Whether it's a webinar, a summit presentation, a mainstage keynote, you're ready to write the thing, but you have no idea how to get started. In today's episode, I'm going to show you exactly how I write presentations for myself, for my clients and how we teach our students to do it themselves. grab a pen, because you're not going to want to miss this.
Welcome back to another episode of The speak to scale Podcast, where we're helping business owners grow and scale their impact by speaking on stages, podcasts, webinars, and more. I'm your host, Jessica Rasdall.
And after 15 years of traveling the country speaking and sharing my message, I have learned a thing or two, mostly by mistakes, trial and error, I've really learned how to take something that is either difficult or painful or seems easy to us or boring or mundane, and turn it into an incredible presentation. I've learned how to receive feedback, whether I liked it or not, dial in on what worked and found a framework for consistently developing incredible presentations without banging my head against the wall. And in today's episode, I want to walk you through that process. So that writing a presentation delivering something that leaves your audience better than you found them is not painful. In fact, it can be a creative process that allows you to truly make an impact.
And I'm sure you're pretty used to writing content, you know, whether those are social posts and blog posts, newsletters, anything, you're not new, when it comes to the work that you do you know your stuff. And maybe you know it a little too well, right or come so easy to you. But it feels incredibly difficult to somebody else. And inside of our presentation, we've got to find a way to speak our audience's language, while still positioning ourselves as an authority and remaining engaging and oh my goodness, that sounds like a lot. When it comes time to actually craft that presentation and write it sitting down and just writing start to finish doesn't really work. I mean, if that works for you, awesome. But for myself, for most of my clients, my students, that's just not the way they operate.
That's not the way they develop a high value presentation. And I say develop because he doesn't just happen in one shot, we don't just sit down and this magic talk comes flowing through our fingertips onto the paper. It takes time, it takes space to let that creativity flow to come up with the great examples to elaborate on the stuff that we wrote. So I want to give you the permission slip to have a first, second, third, fourth, however many drafts you need to create the space to start writing this walk away from it, come back to it because you are developing a presentation. It's not going to be finished right away.
Okay, this isn't a quick let me draft an Instagram caption. This is you developing your message. That's the day I'm going to show you how you can craft this high value presentation without banging your head against the wall. And I want to show you how I craft my talks, how I craft them for clients during VIP intensives. And how we teach our students inside of the speaking strategy Academy to craft their talks on their own. And you really want to take the time to develop a high value presentation. Because once you have that talk done, it becomes the heart of your communication strategy. You can take that talk and break it into smaller pieces of content. You can take that talk and kind of duplicate it and then adjust it for a different audience or a slightly different angle of your subject matter. In fact,
I just did that this morning, literally this morning. I recently spoke at an in person conference, which you guys know about, I just did a debrief on the show. And at that conference, I was delivering your presentation called your billboard message like the secret to captivating and closing more clients and I was delivering this talk, helping the audience walk through this exercise of crafting a billboard statement, which we're actually going to talk about in a minute. But it was through the lens of closing more clients and how they can use that statement to get more clear and more consistent and more conversion focused and the conversations that they're having all this morning. I was recording a presentation for an upcoming summit, where I'm giving a presentation very similar, but through the lens of content. So how they can craft a billboard statement to create content that connects.
So because I already had this great presentation already developed, I was able to duplicate it, make a few adjustments, kind of switch up my reference points from clients to content, and boom, I had another high value presentation ready to go quickly. We don't have to start from scratch every time we're writing a talk, okay, if from the very beginning, we can focus on high value, great content, we can constantly be evolving, improving and adapting that presentation to meet all of our speaking needs. You don't have to revisit the drawing board every single time. So how do we get started? How do we write that talk? Well, the very first thing you've got to do is figure out who is your audience? Who is it that you're going to be speaking to when you deliver this presentation, because you're not going to know what they need to hear from you. You're not going to you know, you don't know what to teach them if you don't know what they meet.
So you need to identify your audience. And I would take this one step further and say you need to also identify the transformation you want to deliver in your talk. Because right here at the public speaking strategist on the speak to scale podcast, we are 110% about delivering transformations about leaving our audience better than we found them. So you want to say okay, my audience is who? when they walk into the room, when they hear my presentation, what is their before state? What are they struggling with? What are they hoping for? And when they leave my talk, what transformation will I have provided? What will they know that they didn't know? What How will they feel what you know, what is the transformation that happens here, because that is going to help you figure out what you need to be talking about in the presentation, in order to actually deliver the transformation.
So first, we'll identify our audience and the transformation we're going to provide. And then two, we need to craft a billboard statement. This is your gut check moment, right? This is the statement that says if my audience only remembers one thing from my talk, what will they remember, if you're not familiar with the billboard statement, you're going to want to head back to Episode 152. That's going to show you how to craft a statement, it's going to walk you through a whole exercise. And you'll be able to craft one for yourself. But once you know who you're talking to, and the transformation you're trying to provide, you want to create this powerful statement that's going to guide your talk. From there, we can move into Step three, you want to start to brainstorm visuals, stories that you can tell examples you can share. What do you need to be sharing with your audience, to support your billboard statement to make it visual to bring it to life, you've got so much information you can share. And I want you to constantly go back to that billboard statement, that's gonna be the thing that helps you stay focused, right.
So if I'm delivering a presentation on Billboard statements like I was this morning, right, the big thing I wanted my audience to know is that less is more. And that if we are going to create content inside of our business, there's so much information we could share. But we need to get crystal clear on the one thing we want to say to them, so that that content is valuable, impactful and transformational. So with that I was able to come up with some stories and examples. And for me, I happen to use the story, an example of the Cheesecake Factory, right and how their menu is gigantic and overwhelming. And we can't be the Cheesecake Factory in our content. We're not for everybody. We're not like no matter who sits at our table, they're not going to find something they like, we serve a very specific audience, we want to speak directly to them.
So I wouldn't have come up with that. And now a geo wouldn't have used the story they did if I didn't first know the message I wanted to deliver. So define your audience and the transformation. craft the message you want to share. Then brainstorm stories, analogies and ideas that you can use to bring it to life. That is your foundation. We start there. Once you know that we can start to map out your content. So I want you to kind of think of this as a brain dump a bullet point list if you will. You're sloppy first draft. Oh one of our academy students. Amy calls that something else. And I won't I don't curse on the show but it's funnier her hers also starts with an S but it's Something else first draft and it's hilarious. We need, we want, we want to think of your first go your first stab at this presentation as a first draft, and we want to map it out into four big old sections. If you've listened to Episode 132, on how to craft a webinar that converts, that episode actually breaks down these four phases a little more. So you might want to go back and reference that one, if you haven't heard it yet. But those four phases are first to hook the audience in, then to build our case, then we serve from the stage and we leave a lasting impact. And what I mean by that is, when we start our presentation, we're just getting our audience to get to the edge of their seat, wonder where she going with this, you know, actually want to listen, not scroll through their phone, we're not diving into teaching points, we're not doing any of that.
We're simply getting them to want to hear more, once they've actually decided that they're going to listen, we move into building our case, this is talking about the big problem, we're solving the goal, we're helping them achieve whatever it might be, we want to look at this through the lens of a universal problems. So that might be things like, what, what is the thing that industry wide like across the board, everybody's doing? The problem that they're struggling with, we want to make sure this is the section where our audience realizes there's an issue they want to fix, or there's something they want to achieve, because they're not going to take action on your teaching points, if they don't first believe that there's a problem to be solved or a goal to attain. So we hook them in, then we build our case. And then that third section, we're going to serve from the stage like non negotiable giving real value here, three steps of something that they can do a breakdown of overcoming something, whatever it may be, but you're actually going to show up and give your audience value, not talk about yourself for an hour. Deal. Deal.
So if you're in that, for me, for example, on that billboard presentation this morning, during the serve from the stage section, I'm actually walking them through the exercise, I was helping them, figure out their billboard statement, select their stories and be able to duplicate that every time they're creating a piece of content. And we can't just leave them there, right? If we ended our presentation here, we might feel good, and say, Wow, I gave them so much information. But we're still not giving them a transformation. That final piece of our talk, leaving a lasting impact is essential. Because once our audience has absorbed our information they've been hooked in, they realize there's a problem, they're ready to fix it they've they've seen the potential and what's possible for them, we need to give them a next step. What is it that our audience needs to go do after they've heard her talk to start seeing a result. Now you can't change their whole life or their whole business during your presentation. But you can help them take that first step. Don't leave this part out of your talk. This is what creates real change in the world. And it's something that so many of us overlook. So even if you just told even if I just told my audience, hey, I want you to use this how you word a billboard statement, I then need to tell them, go write your billboard statement and not even that share it with the world. Like when they start sharing their billboard statements. Now they're creating connections with their audience. Now they're writing better content, now they're seeing results. And that's creating real change.
That's the kind of impact I want you to have with your presentation. If you have purchase access to our speak to scale vault, you have a workbook inside of the vault that covers these four phases. So if you're a vault member, I want you to go get that download it, print it out, whatever you need to do, so that when you're doing your content brainstorm, when you're going through this process, you can plug it right into the order. If you're not a vault member yet, why? It's, it's a one time if you use the code podcast, it's a one time fee of $39. And it instantly unlocks all of our best resources in the right order so you know exactly what to do and when to do it. to scale your business with speaking, you can head over to the link in our show notes or go to speak to scale vault calm. And just be sure to use the code podcast to get the extra discount. Okay, so now we have a pretty good feeling of how we do this, right? Like we identify the audience and the transformation. We're going to craft our statements. We're going to brainstorm visuals, stories, examples, analogies, and then we're going to content dump all the things As we're thinking for this talk in the right order. Now, what I want to do is give you a behind the scenes peek as to like how this plays out,
how do I physically do this? Because in theory, this all sounds great, right? The reality is, is writing a talk and delivering your presentation, there's going to be a little bit of a dance to it, right? We're going to shift the energy from our audience to ourselves to a universal issue, and back and forth. Because we're constantly talking at our audience, they feel called out, we're constantly talking about our experience, we come off as boastful. If we constantly talk about this just as a universal thing, we miss out on the connection. So we need to be able to create this dance between ourselves in the audience and the world around us. And that doesn't happen chronologically, right? We can't just sit down and do that. But what I want you to do is get the information out of your head, and then figure out the best way to put it into the format. So for me, I reverse engineered our signature presentation outline. So after writing literally hundreds of talks over the years, I figured out the best format for us and what consistently worked really well. But I found that the way I fill in that template is not from start to finish. And that might sound crazy, but like, the way that you process your content isn't always in the order that you write the content. Because when I sit down, and I'm coaching a client through this, and I'm asking them questions, I don't start with Okay, what opening story are we going to do? Like, no, we're not there. Right?
I start with exactly what I told you. What's the transformation that we're going to provide the audience? How do we get them that transformation, because that is going to inform the teaching points that we deliver. So what I did was I mapped out all of the questions that I asked my client. And when we are writing a talk together, I all of the questions that I use to gather the information, we need to write the talk. Now, when I got those questions, they're in a little bit of a confusing order. But the order that I asked them in is the best way to process the information. So all I focus on is getting answers to these questions. If I'm working with a client one on one, I will ask them these questions. Specifically, if a student inside of the speaking strategy Academy is doing this themselves, we have a document that they simply open up and answer the questions, all they got to do is brain dump, they don't look at outlines. They don't worry about writing their talk, they simply answer questions. And it's as if I'm sitting there with them, like coaching them through this. So I want you to kind of forget about the format from the beginning and just get the content out. So then what I did is I took all of those questions, and I reorganize them to fit the outline. So what that means for our clients, is they open up a second document, which is now the actual presentation template, and it tells them exactly where to copy and paste the answers to those questions into the outline.
They don't ever have to think about the order, all they got to do is copy and paste. This gives them their skeleton outline, right, like all their bullet points, all of their responses are in the right order, we just copy and paste it into the outline. I use the same documents in the same process when I'm writing talks for my clients, right? Like, I ask them the questions and then I put them into the outline. Once we have all the content in the right order, and now it's time to go back through it and give it all the finishing touches. But I'm going to be super honest with you, I actually step away, step away from the talk once I copy and paste it into the outline because you need space for creativity. Now that we know the structure is there, like all the meat is already in the presentation, I step away because I feel like that uses one part of my brain, the structure and the like data, all of that stuff is one part of my brain and I need to step away and shut that off. Then when I come back to the presentation to open it back up, I want to look at it through a more creative lens. I want to give myself time and space to let the creative idea of flow. That helps me a lot. So I take the time to write the technical teaching points. First, I step away. And when I come back, I focus on how can I connect the dots for my audience? What stories and examples and touch points can I add in here? What transitions are needed, you know, I bring it all together. I don't just sit down from start to finish and write a speech out. That doesn't work for me and it probably is ain't gonna work for you.
So I hope that today's episode just gives you the opportunity to give yourself some grace and say, You know what, if speech writing has felt really hard up until this point, it's not me, like everybody else is feeling it too. And next time you write a presentation, you're going to go through this process of identifying your audience and the transformation. Developing that one thing you want to say, brainstorming visuals to bring it to life, and then dumping all of your ideas into those four phases. And don't forget, like if you need support and doing this, if you're actively writing a talk, if you want to be better at presenting and growing your business by speaking on stages, podcasts, webinars, and more, know that we always have resources right here to help you and support you whether you're ready to go all in and join us inside of the speaking strategy Academy. One, we'd love to have you. Or if you just need some resources to get you started. The speak to skill vault is your is like the best first step. It's the best $39 you'll ever spend, because you're going to get access to all of our best resources. So you can figure out the right speaking topics for you. You can get feel better about brain dumping that presentation, figuring out where you should be speaking. And every thing else. I'm going to link all of this inside of the show notes for you so you can easily find it. But just know this, no matter what I need you to remember that the the fear, the intimidation, the nervousness of writing your presentation. Please don't let that get in the way of you putting yourself out there and sharing your message. We never know who needs to hear it. Well, lives can be transformed. And my goal here is just to equip you with the tools and the resources and a little tough love to help you get your message in front of the people that you have been called to serve. You're doing a great job friend. Keep going.
Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of The speak to scale podcast. It would mean the world to us if you could just take a second and head on over to iTunes and leave us a review. Your support of this show allows us to continue creating this content for you each and every week. And we appreciate your reviews and you sharing about the show more than you know. As always, I will be over here cheering you on friend. I'll see you next week for another episode of The speak to scale podcast.
*Affiliate links may be included above. However, we only share resources with you that we personally use and love!