In the first year of my startup, Ben, true to his word, introduced me to many influential people; primary among them were his venture capital colleagues, or VCs, as they are known in the trade. One of them was one of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley, Don Valentine. A founding partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the premier venture capital firms, Don had been one of the original investors in Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle, and Electronic Arts. Don granted me a courtesy interview, listened patiently as I described my services to him, and then said, “We have a company that’s about to go public, and we think it’ll do fairly well. It has a very esoteric technology that will be difficult to explain to investors. We’re planning on pricing the offering in the $13.50 to $15.50 range, but if the IPO road show presentation is any good, we can probably increase that share price by a couple of bucks. I’m going to introduce you to the CEO and ask him to have you help him with his presentation.”

The company was Cisco Systems. The CEO was John Morgridge. I helped John develop the presentation that explained the company’s complex networking technology. The message got through to the investors. On the day Cisco went public, its stock opened at $18 a share and closed its first day of trading at $22 a share (a then-unheard-of price jump). Cisco quickly became the darling of the investment community and the media. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Don Valentine, speaking in his role as Chairman of Cisco’s board, “attributed ‘at least $2 to $3’ of the increase to Weissman’s coaching. John Morgridge, president of Cisco, is somewhat less generous. He gives Weissman ‘at least an eighth of a point’—12 1/2 cents per share.”

That was more than 500 IPO road shows ago. Among those others, I coached the IPO road shows of corporate luminaries such as Intuit and Yahoo!. During that same time, I also helped another 500 firms, both public and prepublic, to grow their businesses.

Following the IPO, Cisco continued to call on me for their nuts-and-bolts presentations, ranging from prezos (as they are called inside Cisco) in their briefing centers given to small groups of potential new customers, to prezos in their annual NetWorkers conferences given to massive assemblages of end users. Cisco’s then-Vice President of Corporate Marketing, Cate Muther, required that every product manager take my program. At the time, she said, “Jerry’s methods of presentation are now part of our culture; they help prepare our managers for industry leadership.” Today Cisco and many other high-technology companies continue to enlist my help in coaching their senior executives to communicate persuasively. The business press has called me everything from the man who “knows how to talk to money” (Fast Company) to “The Wizard of Aaahs” (Forbes).

The IPO road show is probably the most mission-critical presentation any businessperson will ever make. Succeeding in an IPO road show is the ultimate example of winning over the toughest crowd. The investors are both demanding and knowledgeable, the stakes are high, and a swing of one dollar in the share price of an offering translates into millions of dollars. But if you extend the logic a bit further, every crowd you encounter in business can be your toughest crowd, and every presentation you ever give is mission-critical. Every presentation is a stepping-stone on the path to ultimate success. If any one presentation fails, there may be no tomorrow. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Therefore, in my work with my clients, I treat every presentation as if it were as mission-critical as an IPO road show. I use this approach whether I am working to develop a private financing pitch, a product launch, a keynote speech, a panel appearance, an analysts’ call, a shareholders’ meeting, or a budget approval presentation. You can extend my array with your own presentation situations, be they external or internal, be they for an important contract, a major alliance, or a big sale.

Every business presentation has one common goal: the all-important art of persuasion . . . an art with literally dozens of applications for which everyone in business must be prepared. Persuasion is the classic challenge of sounding the clarion call to action, of getting your target audience to the experience known as Aha!

In a cartoon, Aha! would be represented by the image of a light bulb clicking on above your audience’s heads. It’s that satisfying moment of understanding and agreement that occurs when an idea from one person’s mind has been successfully communicated into another’s. This process is a mystery as old as language itself and almost as profound as love; the ability of humans, using only words and symbols, to understand one another and find common ground in an idea, a plan, a dream.

Maybe you’ve enjoyed moments like this in your past experiences as a presenter, speaker, salesperson, or communicator . . . moments when you saw the light bulb go on, as eyes made contact, smiles spread, and heads nodded. Aha! is the moment when you know your audience is ready to march to your beat.

I’ve written this book to share the persuasive techniques and tools that I provide to my clients. You can use them in your business on a daily basis. The presentation principles my clients have used to attract their billions of investor dollars can work for you, too.

Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital, the legendary venture capitalist who introduced me to Cisco, sits through thousands of presentations every year, most of them made by shrewd entrepreneurs in search of funding for their new business concepts. Don is continually shocked by the failure of most of these presentations to communicate effectively and persuasively.

He once summed it up to me this way: “Jerry, the problem is that nobody knows how to tell a story. And what’s worse, nobody knows that they don’t know how to tell a story!”

This problem is multiplied and compounded 30 million times a day, a figure which, according to recent estimates, is how many PowerPoint presentations are made every business day. Presentation audiences, from the Midas-like Don Valentines to overbooked executives sitting through run-of-the-mill staff meetings, are constantly and relentlessly besieged with torrents of excessive words and slides.

Why? Why wouldn’t every presenter, seeking that clarion call to action, be, as the U.S. Army urges, all that he or she can be? The reason is that the overwhelming majority of business presentations merely serve to convey data, not to persuade.

When I moved from the world of television to the world of business, I saw immediately that the problem in those massive transmissions of information down one-way streets to passive audiences was not at all communication . . . with the emphasis on the co- . . . they were one-way streets that ground to a halt at a dead end.

In the television medium, ideas and images are also broadcast in one direction over the air, cable, or satellite, but there is a return loop, a feedback, an interaction that comes barreling back at the broadcaster in the form of ratings, critics, sponsors, letters, telephone calls, emails, and sometimes even regulatory legislation.

In the Medium that Marshall McLuhan analyzed in his classic book, The Medium is the Massage (yes, that’s correct, he called it “Massage”), when the message is not clear, and when the audience’s satisfaction is not manifest, the foregone conclusion is sudden death: The television series is canceled.

In business, when the point is not crystal clear, and when the benefit to the audience is not vividly evident, the investment is declined, the sale is not made, the approval is not granted; the presentation fails.

In the Power Presentations programs and in this book, you’ll find the media sensibility applied to the business community . . . a set of prescriptive techniques and services that will enable presenters like you to achieve their clarion call to action with their audiences, to get them to Aha!

The techniques you’ll be learning in these pages are a blend of new and old concepts from a broad array of disciplines.

When creating television public affairs programs, I had to wade through hours of archival and new film footage and reels of videotape, rifle through massive reports, sort through stacks of interviews, and boil it all down to a clear 28-minute-and-40-second program that would capture . . . and hold . . . the audience’s attention. I’ve netted these story-development methods into a simple set of techniques and forms for businesspeople like you. Most professional writers use these same techniques to tap into natural creative processes that every human being possesses.

In television, I worked in multimillion-dollar control rooms equipped with electronic character generators, vast color palettes, chroma key insertion, and computer-driven on-screen animation. Most of these capabilities are now readily available in Microsoft’s PowerPoint software, installed in over 250 million computers. Unfortunately, as anyone who has seen a recent business presentation can attest, most presenters apply these powerful functions with all the subtlety of an MTV video. Instead, they should be following Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s surgically appropriate advice: Less Is More. You’ll find a simple set of guidelines to help you apply Mies’ principle to create visual support for your presentations, to help you design your numeric and text charts so that, rather than overwhelm, confuse, and distract your audience, they enhance and clarify your persuasive message.

In television, I directed both film and video cameras and then spliced and arranged their output into a compelling story. In doing so, I employed the professional practices of cinematography and editing to tell a story and create an impact on the audience. I’ve translated these sophisticated methodologies into a simple set of continuity techniques . . . that you can readily implement with PowerPoint . . . to help you tell your story.

I’ve also drawn many of my communication and persuasion techniques from classical sources, such as the writings of Aristotle. (Please don’t let the word “classical” intimidate you. A wise person once defined a classic simply as something that endures because it works. You’ll rediscover the truth of that definition in these pages.) In ancient times, rhetoric was considered the greatest of the liberal arts; what the philosophers of old called rhetoric is, in fact, what we refer to today as great storytelling. As you read, you’ll come to see the relevance of Aristotle’s concepts to all the types of stories you need to tell in business . . . storytelling that will persuade your audience to respond to your call to action.

Other methods are based on established knowledge, as well as recent discoveries about the human mind. These scientific findings that detail how all brains and eyes absorb information relate directly to how every audience reacts to any data input.

This combination of traditional and advanced techniques for communication and persuasion will provide what I’m confident you’ll find to be a unique and effective system that will help you present to win.

You’ll notice that I give frequent and significant emphasis to the word “story,” which is intentional. In this book, as in my programs and seminars, the focus is first and foremost on helping you define the elements of your story and the story of your business. The traditional presentation skills . . . body language, gestures, voice production, eye contact, and answering questions from the audience . . . are also important. They are so important that I’ve covered those subjects in detail in two separate books: The Power Presenter, which shows you how to develop your delivery skills, and In the Line of Fire, which shows you how to handle tough questions. But in this book, the main focus is on defining your story.

Many clients, when first meeting me, say, “Oh, I don’t need any help with my story. Just show me what to do with my hands while I speak. And just show me how to keep myself from saying ‘Ummm.’” I tell them that I will address those factors, but only after we’ve organized their story. There are two very good reasons for this.

First, there are no quick fixes; it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to develop a natural delivery style, unique and yet comfortable to each and every person. (You will, however, find a checklist for the physical presentation environment in Appendix A, “Tools of the Trade.”)

Second, and more important, getting your story straight is the critical factor in making your presentation powerful. In fact, when your story is right, it serves as a foundation for your delivery skills. The reverse is never true. You may be the most polished speaker on Earth, but if your story isn’t sharply focused, your message will fail.

Let me share an illustrative anecdote:

In 1991, I got a phone call from the public relations people at Microsoft, regular clients of mine. “We have a young executive here named Jeff Raikes,” they explained. “He’s scheduled to make a presentation about a new product of ours, and we wonder if you could help him prepare. It’s called Windows for Pen Computers, the newest member of the Windows family of products.”

“Fine,” I replied, “Let’s book a three-day program for Jeff.”

There was a slight pause on the other end of the line. “Well, we’re very pressed for time. Jeff has only one day. But it’s really important that his delivery skills get polished. He’s very smart and knows his stuff, but he just isn’t comfortable. Can you make a difference in one day’s time?”

“I’ll try,” I said.

What happened next is revealing. As requested, I spent one day with Jeff. But we had no time to work on Jeff’s voice or body language. Instead, we used our time to develop a cohesive focus of Windows for Pen Computing: about what this remarkable new software product was designed to do, about the markets Microsoft hoped to serve with it, the history behind its development, the benefits it offered computer users. In short, we created the story Jeff had to tell.

I helped Jeff make some decisions about his story: which elements were most relevant and compelling to his audience; which technical details were necessary; and, equally important, which ones were superfluous. Then I helped Jeff organize his presentation so that the key ideas would flow naturally from beginning to end. By the end of the day, we’d worked through the entire story. Jeff was not only in command of the material, but also comfortable about delivering it.

The results? Jeff’s presentation went over phenomenally well. Afterward, the public relations people at Microsoft, who knew I’d coached Jeff, praised me for the job I’d done on his delivery skills, though in fact we’d never discussed those at all. Simply getting the story right helped to transform a hesitant and uncertain speaker into a dynamic and confident one. Jeff Raikes went on to rise through the ranks to become the president of Microsoft’s Business Division and one of the company’s most prominent and effective spokesmen. After 27 years, Jeff left to head the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates’ charitable organization. One of Jeff’s last projects at Microsoft was the Tablet PC, the evolved 21st-century version of the technology that began as Windows for Pen Computing.

The lesson: All the vocal dynamics and animated body language in the world can’t improve a confusing story, while a clear and concise story can give a presenter the clarity of mind to present with poise.

I’ve described the classic art of persuasion as getting your audience to Aha! To be truly effective, however, one Aha! is not enough. The Power Presentation is a continuous series of end-to-end Aha!s.

Making presentations is very much like massage therapy. The good massage therapist never takes his or her hands off your body. In the same way, the good presenter never lets go of the audience’s minds. The good presenter grabs their minds at the beginning of the presentation; navigates them through all the various parts, themes, and ideas, never letting go; and then deposits them at the call to action.

Notice the verbs in this analogy describing the work of a skilled presenter: grab, navigate, and deposit. All three can be reduced to a least-common-denominator verb: manage. People are the deciding factor in business decisions, and management is the number-one factor in investment decisions. The good presenter is one who effectively manages the minds of the audience. Therefore, the subliminal perception of the effective presentation is Effective Management.

Of course, no one is ever going to conclude explicitly that a good presenter is an effective manager, a skilled executive, an excellent director, or a superb CEO. That’s a bit of a stretch. But the converse proves the point. Unconsciously, the audience makes assumptions. If they are subjected to a presentation whose point is unclear, they will be resistant to responding to the call to action.

Influential investors from Warren Buffett to Peter Lynch subscribe to the commonly held principle of investing only in businesses they understand.

When your story is not clear, when it’s fragmented or overly complex, the audience has to work hard to make sense of it. Eventually, this hard work begins to produce first resistance, then irritation, and then loss of confidence.

A book by Steve Krug about Web design has little to do with developing your story, but its title states our point succinctly: Don’t Make Me Think.

The effective presenter makes it easy for the audience to grasp ideas without having to work. The effective presentation story leads the audience to an irrefutable conclusion. The journey gives the audience a psychological comfort level that makes it easy for them to say “yes” to whatever the presenter is proposing. Presenting, therefore, is essentially selling.

Of course, one can never minimize the importance of having solid factual evidence that validates your business premise. A well-honed presentation is no substitute for a well-conceived business plan, just as a commanding speaking style is no substitute for personal integrity. You must have the steak as well as the sizzle. Yet when two companies or two individuals of equal strength are competing, the winner is likely to be the one who tells the story more persuasively.

In the end, the most subtle impact of a clear and compelling presentation is perhaps the most powerful effect of all: The person who is able to tell an effective business story is perceived as being in command, and deserves the confidence of others. When you are in command of your story, you are in command of the room. Your audience will follow where you lead, and so will money, influence, power, and success.

This is the core message and value of this book to you, no matter what role or level in business you currently occupy. Perhaps one day you’ll go public with a company of your own, and then I hope the techniques you’ll learn here will help you make millions of dollars. Before that happens, however, you’ll have to get past many mission-critical hurdles, because every business decision turns on your ability to tell your story. So please use the same persuasive techniques you’ll find in these pages in those scores of other stepping-stones along the way.

To help you master them, you’ll see how Cisco persuaded investors to provide billions in capital to support a technology so esoteric that, even today, few people really understand it. You’ll see how Yahoo! capitalized on the emerging fascination with the Internet by transforming an irreverent brand image into a meaningful investment presentation. You’ll also see how Luminous Networks, a telecommunications startup company, was able to raise $80 million in private capital during one of the steepest market declines in history. I helped create Power Presentations for each of these companies. I hope to do the same for you.

This book is about presentations, yes. But it’s about much more than that. It’s about psychology, about storytelling, about getting every audience to respond to your call to action. It’s about presenting to win.