10 Ways to Customize Your Presentation

Personalization is everywhere.  

Personalization is the capacity of one company to create, tailor or customize a specify offer (product or service) to an individual’s needs and wants. Personalization is mainstream now and home business consultants call this process mass customization. For the purpose of this article, we will treat both terms as the same thing.  

As I am writing this article, I did some quick research, and here are some of the many things that you can personalize to your own individual needs:

  • Your shoes at www.converse.com
  • Your car (mustang) at www.ford.com/cars/mustang/customizer
  • Your clothing at http://www.customizedgirl.com
  • Your food at http://customizedfoodsmfg.com
  • Your computer  http://www.shopping.hp.com
  • Your drinking glasses and everything else you can think of http://www.discountmugs.com/

As you may be aware, in today’s business environment, you can customize pretty much everything.  So why is this important to you? 

Because customized offers, for the most part, will be more attractive to your clients. It is a solution developed for their unique problems, wants and desires. Obviously, personalization will add more cost to your process and in some instances, it is not a viable business model. Technology is the primary driver that allow us to live in this customized world and I believe we can learn from this trend and apply in our business.

When it comes to presentation and public speaking, customization is key. When you are communicating to one person, customization is obvious (at least it should be); we know what that specify client wants and needs, and we craft a message and a solution for her.

However, when it comes to presenting to a small, medium or large group, many professionals don’t take the time and the effort to really customize their message to that specific audience. The ones who  spend time crafting and customizing their messages, usually are the ones who are more persuasive at the end. 

There are so many ways you can customized your message when presenting to a group, some are common sense, others aren’t.

The biggest advice that I can give you is this one: spend time learning, getting to know, interviewing and listening to your audience members before you present to them. They will give you everything you need to customize your talk.

There are several ways you customize your next presentation, I would like to introduce you to 10 strategies you can implement today:

The title of your presentation: For example, "7 Ways Apple Employees Can Become Even More Productive At the Fashion Valley Store"

Quotes: You can interview some of the audience members before your talk and ask their opinion about a specific issue. You ask their permission to quote them during your presentation and you are good to go. During your presentation you say something like: "As Mary Janne from the HR department said…

Stories: During the interview process, you ask questions to uncover hidden stories (stories that the audience members never shared). Again, after you learn about these stories, you ask permission to use them during your talk. Stories are excellent to illustrate your claims. During your presentation you can say something like "Everybody is in sales, let me give you an example" (then you tell a story from one of the audience members that illustrate that point)

Colors: If you are speaking for an organization and they have specific colors, you can use those colors in your slide or handouts

Values: You can go to the organization’s website, and learn about their core values. Let’s say you learn that one of their biggest values is innovation. You can include some innovation stories, quotes or studies talking about how innovative companies and teams win in the end

Insiders Language: During your interview process, you learn about specific language that only people from that specific organization or team use.  Then, you can use that language to become "one of them". For example, when I worked for the Anthony Robbins companies we came up with with a word called FI (freaking intense), and we used this language when communicating amongst our team. Let’s say if you were to do a presentation to our team, you could share how your product would makes us even more "FI". 

Analogies and Metaphors: Simple and powerful devices. For example, if you are speaking to Realtors, incorporate real estate analogies and metaphors.   One of our clients, who is a very successful financial coach, uses the metaphor "financial sublaxations" when speaking to Chiropractors.  He is very successful in that industry.

Vividly describe their problems:  When describing your client’s problems, make sure you have empathy for it, feel their pain as if you were on of them, and describe it with vivid language. For example, when I describe the fear of public speaking that some of our clients have, I go back in time when I was afraid to speak in front of groups and I do the best I can to describe those feelings (my mouth was dry, my heart was beating really fast, I had this tingling sensation in my legs and hands, I felt butterflies in my stomach, etc)

Reveal the mutual enemy: People will come together, even when they don’t know each other, if they have a common enemy. This is the "Us Vs Them" mentality, and it works. This strategy is widespread in our society from politics, sports, activist groups, etc. Figure out your audience’s enemy and make it your own (only do it with integrity and if it is real, if you really feel that way) .

Create a customized solution: Probably the most important element when customizing your presentation is your solution. How is your solution specifically tailored to your clients? Remember that customization of your solution is not what you think, is how your clients feel. For example, one of the strategies we use at InfluenceOlogy is to build up a Peak Performance Presentation based on how the top producers of a specific company think and behave. So instead of doing an "off-the-shelf" motivational presentation with examples from the outside world, we developed a process to interview the top producers in that company, and we use the findings to craft a message that is 100% unique, relevant and influential to that specific audience. Because most of the content, stories and illustrations comes from their top performers, the presentation is a home-run. Our job is to extract, package and present those findings back to them in a persuasive case.

As you can see, there are many ways you can customize your next presentation. These examples are fairly easy to implement, but will have a massive impact on the responsiveness of your presentation. Do your best to include atleast 3 in your next presentation.

I would love to hear from you. What are your biggest questions, challenges and concerns when it comes to presentation, influence and marketing? I would love to create the next blog posts based on your specific questions.

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  1. […] by interviewing some of your audience members when your prepare your talk. That’s from 10 ways to customize your presentation by Jeff […]

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