Posts Tagged ‘proof’

Helping Your Audience By Going After An Iceberg With A Shotgun

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
Image Credit When You're Hunting For A Good Speech Closing, Sometimes A Shotgun Is What You Need

When You're Hunting For A Good Speech Closing, Sometimes A Shotgun Is What You Need

If how you wrap up your next speech is really the most important part of the speech, then what’s the best way to do it? The last thing in the world that you want to do is to end up leaving your audience flat – thanks for listening to me, got any questions? Instead, you need to have a collection of possible ways to close your speech that you can pick and choose from. I’ve got three for you to take a look at now: the iceberg, the shotgun, and the offer to help.

The Iceberg Closing

This type of closing is well suited to those speeches where you have a lot of interconnected details that you’ve laid out for your audience. Your challenge as a speaker is to find a way to remind your audience of everything that you’ve covered while not overwhelming them.

The key to this type of closing is to group the various points that you’ve made into two or three main conclusions. These are what you are going to want the audience to remember. During the close you’ll present your main point (tip of the iceberg) and then you’ll present the various points that support that main point (body of the iceberg).

Now there’s no way that your audience is going to remember your multiple supporting points. However, what they will remember are your two or three main points. They will even vaguely remember that you did a good job of explaining why they should support these main points – but they won’t remember all of your supporting points.

The Shotgun Closing

Let’s move on to a more tricky type of speech to give. Sometimes we are faced with the challenge of delivering a speech in which there is a lot of information that we need to get across to our audience. Now it’s nice if this information is related to each other in some way, but all to often that is not the case.

A good example of this would be if you were introducing people to a new piece of software. There are many things that you’ll have to talk about like how you log in, what the control bar does, where your files are saved, etc. In cases like this, you’ve got a challenge on your hands – it’s going to be all to easy to overwhelm your audience and have them walk away from your speech not remembering anything.

The shotgun closing provides you with a way to prevent this from happening. The shotgun closing starts, somewhat surprisingly, when you open your speech. The best way to do this is to give your audience a verbal quiz with multiple questions about the facts that you want them to walk away from your speech knowing. Clearly they won’t have the answers now, but have them take the quiz anyway.

Next, you deliver your speech and in your speech you need to step through each of the questions on the quiz in the same sequence that they were on your quize. Finally, as part of your closing, have your audience take the verbal quiz one more time. This combination of seeing / hearing / doing can do wonders for your audience’s ability to retain what you’ve said.

The “I’m Here To Help You” Closing

When you have a problem that you need to solve, who wouldn’t want someone to show up and offer to help you out? That’s exactly what this closing does for your audience.

This closing once again starts with your opening. In your opening, you need to identify the challenge that the audience is facing. Once you’ve done this, you then need to spend the body of your speech identifying the features of your product and then relate them to the goal of solving the challenge that your audience is trying to achieve.

Finally, in your closing you are going to want to take it up a level and review what your audience is trying to achieve, and then go over how your product will help them to achieve it.

What All Of This Means For You

The way that you choose to close your next speech is perhaps the most important decision that you’ll make about that speech. In order to create the most powerful closing, you need to know as many different closing styles as possible.

Three powerful closing styles include the iceberg, the shotgun, and the “I’m here to help” approaches. The iceberg is good for summarizing lots of related points, the shotgun is a good way to get people to remember unrelated points, and the “I’m here to help” approach works to show people how your solution relates to their issues.

As with all such things in life, there is no one solution that is right for every speech that you’ll give. Instead, you are going to have to evaluate what you’d like to communicate to your audience and pick the closing that works best for you. Good luck!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What would be the best way to deliver the quiz that is part of the shotgun closing?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Check with just about any professional speaker or pick up a book at the book store on public speaking and you’ll get some great advice. They’ll tell you exactly what you SHOULD be doing. That’s all good, but what’s been missing has been anyone talking about the other side of that coin – what should you NOT be doing?

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Persuasion Power – How To Win Over An Audience

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
Speakers Who Can Persuade An Audience Are Powerful Indeed <br> (C) - Jason Cross

Speakers Who Can Persuade An Audience Are Powerful Indeed (C) - Jason Cross

Not all speeches are the same. Graduations, weddings, corporate pep-rally’s – those are all pretty straightforward. One of the most difficult types of speeches to give is one in which you have been brought in to convince an audience of something. As difficult as this type of speech is to give, if you can become good at doing it, you will seen as being a very valuable speaker indeed!

Persuasion Starts With Small Steps

You can assume that the audience that you’ll be speaking to will be be made up of a mix of people who already support your position, who have not make up their minds yet, and who are dead set against whatever you are going to say. Good luck with that presenter!

Clearly the first step in winning any audience over is for you to do your homework BEFORE you are facing the audience. One key area to research is to find out what arguments “the other side” has made. If there is a person or a group that represents “the other side”, then this is pretty straightforward. If there is not a clear “other side”, then you’re going to have to spend some time researching the flip side of what you want to persuade your audience about – because some people will have decided that that is what they want to believe.

One sure-fire way to start to win your audience over to your way of thinking is by using something called strategic agreement. When you do this  you agree with parts of the other side’s position. Automatically this will start to make the audience view you as a reasonable person. They may not completely agree with you, but they will start to warm to your view point.

Show Up Ready For A Fight

Well, maybe that’s putting it just a little bit too harshly. How about if we say that you need to show up ready to address your audience’s objections. Whatever you have been asked to convince them about, there will be objections to it. Before you give your speech, you need to once again do your homework. In your speech you need to make sure that you address these each of these objections.

Sometimes we like to shy away from sticky arguments that we don’t feel that we have a good response to. However, you must be careful to not do this. It turns out that if you don’t address an objection, then your audience will assume that it is a valid objection because you didn’t talk about it.

This Is A No Dumping Zone

I am probably more guilty of dumping than anyone else that I know. When I’m giving a persuasive speech, I want to make sure that I get my point across. This means that I’ll do a lot of research and, if I’m not careful, I’ll “dump” all of that research on my audience during my presentation. This is a bad idea.

Instead, you want to do the research, pick out the points that are going to be the most important to your audience, and then cover just these few points in detail.

What It Takes To Make A Good Argument

You would think that we’d all know this by now, but when I’m coaching speakers I keep discovering that they know WHAT they want to say to make their point, but they don’t know HOW to say it. It turns out that there is a simple formula that allows you to create a complete argument in order to support your position:

  • First: Make An Assertion – you’ve got to tell your audience what point you are going to be trying to convince them about. Without this, they’ll never know what you are talking about.
  • Next: Tell Them Why – this is where you need to explain to your audience why YOU think that your position is correct. This is the meat of your point and you really need to come across as convincing.
  • Finally: Show Proof - the fact that you believe something is great, but not enough. You need to wrap up your point by sharing evidence with your audience that will back up your position.

Final Thoughts

There is no doubt about it – winning people over to your way of thinking is just about the hardest type of speech to give. Ask any politician. However, it can be done. What it requires is that you do a lot of homework in order to prepare your arguments with an understanding of the facts and what your audience is currently thinking.

Public speaking is never an easy thing to do. Developing the skills that are needed in order to rally a crowd behind a new idea, a change in policy, or bold new idea is time well spent for a speaker. If you can do this, then you’ll have a powerful new speaking tool and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

Questions For You

Have you ever had to give a speech where you had to persuade the audience? Did you do enough homework to prepare for the speech? Did you find out what the audience was thinking before you gave your speech? How did it turn out? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you are going to go to the effort of creating and delivering a speech, doesn’t it make sense that you’d want to be able to reach your audience and somehow appeal to them? No matter if you are trying to persuade them or educate them, ultimately the goal is find a way to successfully appeal to them. Good news – how to do this has been known for the past 2,500 years!

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