speech_projects

Selling an Idea

Your Goal

Persuade a mixed audience (technical and non-technical people) to adopt a certain point of view. It could be to use a certain technology, believe an interpretation or even make a financial investment.

You may already have experienced that in real-world business, this is a frequent type of presentation. At the same time, selling is very different from putting the facts on the table. A viable strategy to sell an idea successfully is to engage your audience emotionally in the beginning, and then move quickly to support your point with facts.

One possible strategy is to use the AIDA schema:

1. Attention: Evoke a positive response in the first minute.
2. Interest: Convince the audience why the presentation is relevant to them.
3. Desire: Support your point by facts and details, slowly building up a real demand for what you are “selling”.
4. Action: At the end, state what specific step your audience could take.

The best persuasive presentations use stories. A story could be an authentic personal experience, or it could be a problem-solution structure that you use to illustrate your point. As a rule of thumb, stories with very few persons do a better job at selling than those in which a bulk of people appears.

If you are presenting to decision makers, always leave enough room for them to make the decision to look like their own.

Time

5-7 minutes

Questions for evaluators

• What did the speaker do to spark interest in the audience?
• What did the speaker do to demonstrate relevance of the problem?
• What did the speaker do to build credibility?
• Did the speaker propose a small and specific next step?
• What could the speaker do differently?
• Did the speaker convince you?

Extra Material

• A sale is a love affair TEDx talk by Jack Vincent