Make Marketing Suck Less

How to Cram More Information Into Your Speech

You’re an expert.

You’ve got a lot to say on your topic, you’re excited to share it with your audience because you know it’s going to rock their world like a hurricane.

But the problem is that you’ve only got 20-minutes to speak (or 30-minutes or an hour).

How do you cram  everything you want to say into your presentation? Every bit of it is important.  Every bit of it is necessary. It all must be said in order for your audience to get value.

The answer is…

You don’t.

Here’s a big dose of reality: research shows that audiences forget between 50 and 80% of your presentation within 24-hours. (Check out the theory!)

Don’t panic. Yes, there are ways you can help them remember more of your presentation.

But all that information that you think the audience absolutely-must-have in order to get value out of your presentation? Most of it will have been forgotten in less than a day.

And that is good news for you! You might be thinking “Whatcha talkin’ about, Michelle? How in the world is that good news?”

It means that you can relax, and concentrate on creating a presentation focused on ONE and only one idea that you want the audience to take action on.

An audience can get a lifetime of value out of just one sentence. It’s the sentence they’ll remember. The sentence that they’ll repeat as a sage piece of wisdom to their friends. And the best part is that you’re remembered as the one who presented it to them on a silver platter.

Recently, I discovered Derek Sievers 3-minute TED talk. Since then, I’ve quoted this one line to my husband, my clients, my community, and in front of an audience of 200 people.

“It’s the first follower that transformed the lone nut into a leader”

That’s the power of one.

One sentence creates a huge impact.

Stop cramming in everything you know into one speech. Focus on the one idea, the one sentence, you want your audience to remember because that is how you speak for impact.