"How many life-changing, career-building, awe-inspiring business presentations have you heard or delivered?" Patricia Fripp asked her audience at the IAMC Professional Forum Leadership Development workshop in early October.

"Zero," said someone in the room.

Fripp immediately set out to 1) deliver something memorable, and 2) help her audience learn to do the same. And from the evidence apparent in member remarks from the podium at meetings following the workshop, she achieved both goals.

"What you do for a living is a whole lot more complex than giving a presentation," she said, "but that doesn't mean you have a natural talent for it."

How do you convey that you're a thought leader and build credibility and trust through your presentation? More concretely, how do you get your points across to your board of directors or teams without "regurgitating your Powerpoint," as one attendee said?

Whether it's going to be a good sermon or powerful sales presentation, said Fripp, "If you do not know what you're going to say, put together in an orderly and organized way, you can't focus."

There are two ways to connect, says Fripp: emotion and intellect. And in speaking, that emotional connection begins by adopting a physical and verbal empathy with your audience. "If you want to be persuasive to your point of view, you will never go wrong when you report what you're saying from the point of view of the listener," she said. That means more "you"s and fewer "I"s. It also means direct eye contact, best made when timed with a thought, idea or phrase. And it means savoring the power of the pause, when you want the audience to think about something.

"The enemy of the speaker is sameness," said Fripp, noting a professional speaker she had observed who was "entertaining, fabulous and dynamic," but ineffective because she maintained a high-energy delivery from start to finish. "Find ways to add variety," Fripp reminded her IAMC audience, ways to be "thoughtful, serious, soft, loud, funny then profound."

Like an acting teacher, time and again Fripp returned to the theme of preparation, whether it be writing out your presentation in prose, going through an actually rehearsed delivery or the uncommon practice of arriving so early that you can meet your audience personally. Such a practice only reinforces the emphasis on the listener's point of view that the speaker hopes to communicate in the forthcoming presentation:

"The law of reciprocation was built into us all," said Fripp. "If you extend yourself to somebody else, there is something in their DNA that will give you the benefit of the doubt even if they were initially adversarial."

It's also a chance to get the mouth working, she added, comparing the muscle memory of a presenter to that of her rock-star brother's guitar-playing fingers, which he often warms up on the fretboard while watching a movie. Paradoxically, like a great guitar solo, your speech ought to be so practiced that its delivery sounds like it's the first time you've ever done it.

Two other reinforcing tools: Deliver your opening line to one person in the audience (after all, the first 30 seconds are the most important), and maintain that "I-you" ratio in heavy favor of the "you"s.

Stories are a third way to be remembered and repeated, said Fripp, what screenwriter Robert McKee calls "the creative conversion of life itself." If you want to tell one, make it real, not a joke. (Likewise, let your quotations be powerful, not overused.) The formula for story success comes down to this: Situation, solution, success. And the best delivery vehicle is a third-person endorsement case history that is, like your speech, short on "I"s and strong on character and dialogue.

Humility can be a presenter's greatest tool of all. "You are not speaking to compete with the PhDs in the room," said Fripp. "You are speaking to communicate for the audience's benefit." Sending the message that you've always known what you know is not exactly inspiring to younger members of your organization. In fact, when it's a sales presentation, it may be those younger members who ought to be presenting: "They do their homework," said Fripp.

Finally, you want a big finish? Then don't ask a question, says Fripp. Instead, close the circle you began drawing with your opening premise. And let those last words ... that "Columbo" kicker ... linger.

"One major problem with business leaders," she observed, is that "they are good when they're in their element, but they have no idea how to start and no idea how to stop on a high."

Copyright © 2004-2005 Industrial Asset Management Council (IAMC)