Persuasive Presentation Skills Training | Best Presentation Skills

Building a Persuasive Structure: The Key Parts to Your Presentation

A good structure is one that makes your job of both engaging and persuading your prospect easier. Let’s look at why a structure is important and introduce a proven persuasive structure for you to follow.

Understanding the importance of a good framework

If you’ve ever sat through a presentation that went around the block a few times before finally arriving unsteadily — and late — at its destination, you understand firsthand the need for a good, clear framework for your message. Not only does the right structure help you efficiently get from point A to point B, but it also serves some other very important functions:

• Organizing your message: You’ve gathered a lot of insights and information prior to your presentation. You may well feel a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it. Attempting to include all of it makes for a bloated presentation that doesn’t necessarily hit the mark. You can easily get lost in the weeds by over explaining or discussing topics that aren’t relevant when you don’t have a solid structure to follow. A good structure helps you get your arms around all that information, prioritize, and organize it in a way that has the greatest impact on your audience.

• Simplifying your message: Without a clear, easy-to-follow, and consistent structure, a presentation can make your product seem even more complex than it is. If your solution has any complexity to it at all (which of course applies to nearly everyone), you need a structure that makes your product or service appear, if not easy, at least not daunting for the prospect to adopt and put into use.

• Moving your audience: A good structure takes your audience on a journey that leads to a natural and obvious conclusion. Because buying decisions are rarely based on logic alone, your structure should allow room for making a strong emotional case as well. The more complex your solution, the more critical you follow a clear structure.

Increasing the power of a three-part structure

The three part structure — an opening, a body, and a conclusion — is the basis of most presentations, speeches, film, television, and theater. Invented by Aristotle, it’s a structure your audience is familiar with and can easily follow. This structure has many variations: chronological, vendor qualification/problem/solution, and situation, complication, and resolution, to name three. The structure you choose depends upon your goal.

Some types of three-part structures are better for educating, entertaining, or motivating audiences. In sales, you want to be sure to use a structure that persuades and drives home your message in a way that encourages your prospect to take action at the end of your presentation. The situation, complication, resolution structure is proven to be most effective at accomplishing that goal.

This persuasive structure places the focus on your prospect’s challenge or objective — not on your product, service, or company. The way the situation, complication, resolution structure organizes your content has the ability to change your prospect’s perception, open her mind to new ideas, and motivate her to take action. This structure also addresses many of the problems associated with the typical sales presentation structure and helps to increase your prospect’s attention, keep her engaged throughout your presentation, and increase recall of your message.

Let us take a closer look at these three parts of a persuasive presentation — called situation, complication, and resolution — to help you understand what to include in your presentation as well as the two organizational questions you must keep in mind.

Establishing the situation (the opening)

Your presentation’s opening is your first impression with your prospect, so quickly set the stage for her by defining her current situation, for example, addressing the problem, opportunity, or challenge that you’re there to solve and the impact it’s having on her organization. By clearly defining the situation you are laying the groundwork for why your prospect needs to change as well as letting her know that you have a clear understanding of her situation.

After you’ve set up the current situation for the prospect, you want to tell her where your product or service can take her; in other words, you’re painting a picture of a better future with your solution. This starts to create an uncomfortable but necessary disparity between where your prospect is and where she wants to be. Establishing the situation in your opening is a critical component for a presentation that needs to persuade. This by no means leaves out the need to entertain, engage, and interact; in fact, gaining your audience’s attention during your opening is key to your success.

Building in complication (the body)

In the body you continue to widen that gap between pain and relief to increase your prospect’s urgency to resolve the problem. You do this by introducing complications that create tension and make sticking with the status quo or putting off a decision less desirable options. Because most people are uncomfortable with indecision, tension taps into that human desire to solve the problem.

By exploring each challenge and the impact of not making a change, you’re building a case for answering the questions “Why should the prospect buy the product or service?” and/or “Why should the prospect buy it from you?” Refer to the later section, “Eyeing two organizing questions central to structure” for more on those two questions.

Some controversy surrounds whether or how to address your prospect’s pain points — a problem (real or perceived) that your product or service can address. Although pain has certainly been handled with a heavy hand in the past, bringing up and exploring pain with your prospect is important in a persuasive argument. Pain is an emotional reaction and a persuasive case needs to trigger that emotion. Logic alone isn’t enough, as you discover later.

Pain trumps gain. Research shows that avoiding loss or pain is almost twice as strong a motivator as gaining something positive. Pain is a mighty motivator. Calling out the pain points in a way that is appropriate for your audience is necessary to promote action. If there weren’t any pain, you wouldn’t be there.

Finishing with your resolution (the closing)

Your closing is the time to relieve that tension by providing a clear resolution to the problem that’s easy for your prospect to act upon. You’ve made a case for value now, and you can restate it as a statement of fact and substantiate your claims with evidence, facts, figures, research studies, industry statistics, and so forth. Your closing also needs to include a specific call to action — in other words, a statement of what you want your prospect to do at the end of your presentation — as well as some elements that make it easier for your prospect to remember your presentation.

To help you organize the information you’ve collected into your opening, body, and closing, you need to know what question your presentation answers. The following sections give you some direction.

Eyeing two organizing questions central to structure

Whether your presentation is 20 minutes or two days, virtual or live, it must answer one or both of two central questions in your prospect’s mind. Which question you address can help you decide what information to include in your opening, body, and closing and how to position your message in response.

The two questions are :

• Why should I buy this product or service? In this situation your prospect isn’t yet convinced that your solution is the answer to her problem. She may have other alternatives or priorities, or she may not feel the problem is sufficient enough to warrant solving. In other words, the status quo is acceptable. Your presentation in this situation will center on convincing her that your solution is the best way to address her problem.

• Why should I buy it from you? In this scenario, your prospect agrees that the solution will solve her problem or address her need, but she isn’t convinced that your product or service is the best choice. You can easily fall into a price war if you aren’t deliberate about establishing value and communicating your competitive advantage. In this situation your structure will center on convincing the prospect that you’re the preferred vendor.

Your presentation may have to answer both questions, in which case, you should thoroughly address the first question before addressing the second.