It can be hard to create a summit presentation that conveys the right information but also promotes your products or services but ALSO doesn't do it in a way that comes across as pushy AND that makes sense. Deep breath! Lucas is sharing strategies to craft your perfect summit presentation so you can choose the one that works best for YOU.

Want to book more summits and make more sales from them (without feeling slimy)? Get all the details about summit speaking at https://sellwithasummit.com/speakeredition/

Learn more about Lucas at https://scintilla.studio/monster

Mentioned in this episode:

Summit Speaker Strategy Audio Training

If you want to learn more about summit speaking strategies and how you can use it to grow your business, jump over to virtualsummitspeaking.com. I put together a free audio training that you can take on the go in your regular podcast player!

Speaker Audio Training

Welcome to Virtual Summit Success.

I'm Jenn, founder of Virtual Summit Search, and you're in the right place

if you want to make the most of your virtual summit experience, whether

you're a host or virtual summit speaker.

Let's get going with your next step to virtual summit success.

You're listening to a snippet from a Sell With a Summit:

Speaker Edition presentation.

If you've struggled with how to craft a great summit presentation, Lucas is going

to give you the options you need to choose the best presentation structure for you.

Let's get started.

Hello!

I hope you're enjoying Sell With a Summit: Speaker Edition so far.

My name is Lucas Zellers.

I'm here as a speaker who helps speakers and I want to take this part of the

summit to help you with one of the...

probably one of the first things that you have to think about when

you are putting together your presentation for a virtual summit.

Okay, so you have a bunch of ideas.

You have a solution for people, a service they've never seen before, a

product that's going to change their life, that's going to make it easier.

How in the world do you put one idea after another, in a way that's

compelling and interesting and is going to draw people into your service or

your product or your family or however it is you organize your business?

This is one of the first things that you have to think about when you are

writing a speech and Aristotle would say that it's one of only five things,

five canons of rhetoric is organization.

How in the world do you organize a speech?

You've probably gotten this advice: "you gotta solve a problem.

You just gotta.

That's how it is."

And I don't want to put this down - this is pretty intuitive: you have

a product or a service that solves a problem that fulfills a need for your

customers, and so why wouldn't you talk about your business in this way?

I'm going to give you two reasons, actually.

One is that it's repetitive.

I've heard this one before, and you probably have too; that's probably why

you're thinking, "what else can I do?"

I also want to challenge you that the reason you might feel dissatisfied with

this is that it's not the whole story.

Problem and solution come in the middle of a long series of other

ways in which people prioritize and organize and evaluate information.

So I'm going to give you seven other ways to organize your speech, your

presentation that are going to be just as effective, just as engaging, and I

would argue more so on both those counts.

But before we get into that, I have to answer two questions for you, and

they're the questions that I was asked by one of my directors in college

and I'm still asking myself these:

why am I here, and why am I talking?

and I'm still asking myself these:

Why in the world would you listen to me about this?

and I'm still asking myself these:

Since the beginning of my professional career, I've been a singer, a radio

and I'm still asking myself these:

host, a stage actor, a speech coach, a podcaster, and now a professor of

and I'm still asking myself these:

communication adjunct at Cedarville University, and it is a long time

and I'm still asking myself these:

coming and I'm very happy to start.

and I'm still asking myself these:

In other words, just about every way that you can use your voice for fun or

and I'm still asking myself these:

profit I've done on a near-professional level over the last 10 or 12 years.

and I'm still asking myself these:

So I've seen a lot of speeches, I've judged a lot of speeches, a lot of

and I'm still asking myself these:

really great ones, a lot of really bad ones - both ones that I've given

and I'm still asking myself these:

and ones that I've sat through.

and I'm still asking myself these:

So I'm going to take all of that experience and all of that time and

and I'm still asking myself these:

save you the effort of sitting through all of those speeches and I want to

and I'm still asking myself these:

show you other ways to organize a speech besides problem and solution.

and I'm still asking myself these:

So we're going to start with story.

and I'm still asking myself these:

You might be familiar with this from Donald Miller's Storybrand, the

and I'm still asking myself these:

"clarify your message" way of organizing your marketing and your business.

and I'm still asking myself these:

His work is indebted to Joseph Campbell's "Hero of a Thousand

and I'm still asking myself these:

Faces," itself based on Carl Jung's idea of psychological archetypes.

and I'm still asking myself these:

If all of that sounds like mumbo-jumbo, I guarantee you've seen

and I'm still asking myself these:

this before because it's Star Wars.

and I'm still asking myself these:

And if you haven't seen Star Wars...

and I'm still asking myself these:

how?

and I'm still asking myself these:

I'm genuinely impressed and I hope you never do.

and I'm still asking myself these:

But it's enough to know that Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, on which

and I'm still asking myself these:

the StoryBrand idea is built, has as many as 17 different steps,

and I'm still asking myself these:

depending on how you count it.

and I'm still asking myself these:

By contrast Dan Harmon story circle has eight, so I'm going to take the same

and I'm still asking myself these:

idea of story and do it in only eight points that are a way of organizing your

and I'm still asking myself these:

speech and helping position yourself as a guide to the power of the unknown.

and I'm still asking myself these:

Okay, so it's a circle.

and I'm still asking myself these:

It's got eight points on it.

and I'm still asking myself these:

It looks like this.

one, a character is in a zone of comfort - that's

where you begin, it's your home, it's the Shire, it's the moisture farm on Tatooine.

But they want something - to take the ring back to Mordor, to go on an

adventure, to actualize themselves, to solve a problem in their business.

Alright, that's point 2.

We're here.

So they enter an unfamiliar situation They adapt to it.

They get what they wanted.

They pay a heavy price for it.

And then return to their familiar situation - and this is the

important part - having changed.

The other reason that I like this story circle over Joseph Campbell's

work - other than the fact that I hear about it entirely too much - is

that as a circle, we can divide it into halves and then quarters.

But the half, for your purposes as a business owner, is the important part,

because this is the divide between the familiar world and the unfamiliar world.

I've heard it said that there are only two stories that have ever

the journey of adventure, and a stranger comes to town.

Both of those deal with a threshold:

what you know, and what you

Both of those deal with a threshold:

don't; what's familiar to you and what's unfamiliar to you.

Both of those deal with a threshold:

And in the unfamiliar world where there be monsters, that's where the power is.

Both of those deal with a threshold:

That's where where you go to learn things and change and come

Both of those deal with a threshold:

back with power you don't have.

Both of those deal with a threshold:

If you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you've got,

Both of those deal with a threshold:

so you'd go to the unfamiliar world.

Both of those deal with a threshold:

So your challenge when you're putting a speech together is to

Both of those deal with a threshold:

organize it in such a way that you are a part of the unfamiliar world.

Both of those deal with a threshold:

You're going to give something back to your audience that they can return to

Both of those deal with a threshold:

their familiar world with having changed.

Both of those deal with a threshold:

The other way that you can use this is to think about where are people

Both of those deal with a threshold:

in the story, because if they haven't gotten to the point where they've

Both of those deal with a threshold:

recognized that they want something and you give them a problem immediately,

Both of those deal with a threshold:

then you haven't been effective.

Both of those deal with a threshold:

So a problem-solution here doesn't work for people who know

Both of those deal with a threshold:

they're in a zone of comfort.

where in their journey is your customer and

where do you want them to get?

How much ground do you have to cover?

Do you have to hit all eight of these things?

Probably not, given the context of the presentation, the

place where you're presenting.

But you should hit some of them and you should definitely structure this

so that you are part of the unfamiliar world where power is gained, and then

you can give that to your listener.

So that's one way of of organizing your speech - the story circle.

The second way is A Plot/B Plot.

And it's telling two stories at once.

So we're building in the story circle idea and adding another story to your speech.

The best example of this I think I can give you is this

guy; this is Chris Hadfield.

He gave a Ted Talk a while back about what's the scariest

thing you've ever done.

His example, of course is far and away more intense, maybe, than any of us

he was on a spacewalk in a space suit and couldn't see well

enough to complete his mission in space.

So that's where he began his speech, with this fantastic story of where he

was about to be stuck in space without being able to get back into the shuttle...

and then he got to his point.

Another great example is this book.

On Fairytales, Disability, and Making

Space, and it's worth your time, but the subject of it really isn't my point.

The way it was structured was to take a look at all of folktales over history.

Just an overview of fairytales and how they're structured and how they

portray people who have disabilities, people who are differently abled, people

with disfigurements, or handicaps; or however you want to say it.

And the way that those are presented in like Grimm's fairy tales.

That's a lot, and it can be dry and kind of depressing, depending

on how you come down on it.

So in order to make this work, she tells a fairy tale alongside her real

life literary analysis, a fairy tale in which the princess is not what

you would expect - blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful, able, rich, whatever.

And it's the story of her own life and dealing with her own disability.

tell two stories at once, one on top of the

other, or start in the middle of one to get people's attention and

then tell your story from there.

And remember to go through those eight steps or however many of those

your audience is going to need.

The next couple of them kind of break away from stories, so those two come as a pair.

The next one is called comparative advantages - this or that.

This is a way of structuring your speech so that you can give information to

people, so that you can recognize your competitors and say why your business

or product might be different or gives people the thing that they're looking

for, that power from the unfamiliar world.

I use two different pieces of software to

edit my podcast, Making a Monster.

The one on the left is called Hindenburg Journalist.

It's used by NPR professionals, it's very lightweight, it doesn't

have a lot of bells and whistles.

The one on the right is called Descript and it does video editing,

audio editing, transcription, project management - the whole nine.

And I use both of these for my podcast, but I love them both

for very different reasons.

So, which of those do you need?

It depends.

This is why comparative advantages is really powerful: you can recognize

the needs that your audience has, provide them a solution that matches

what they have, and you don't want to give them things that they don't need.

Don't sell them Descript if they want Hindenburg and vice versa.

On a very practical level, too, this gives you a way of organizing

let's talk about this thing and then this thing.

So what are the features of this thing that this thing doesn't have, what

are the ones that they don't have?

So quite aside from the fact that this lets you organize your ideas in

a way that has flow, that isn't just problem and solution, it has this sneaky

comparative advantage of positioning you as the guide to this unfamiliar

world of perhaps audio editing software.

So that's our third way of organizing a speech: comparative advantage.

Another way of organizing your speech is with distance, and by this, I

don't mean necessarily geographical distance or physical distance.

This is more psychological distance.

It could be far away from me in space, like on the other side of the

country; it could be far away from me in time, something that happened

a while ago or has yet to happen.

It could be distant from me socially in the people that I tend to

interact, with my friends and family.

And it could be conceptually distant or just kind of too abstract to be

a part of my regular experience.

You can organize your speech near to far along these dimensions, or far to

near, depending on how you want to do it.

I've been working on a project that looks

at the stories of extinct species.

It can be really difficult to connect with, especially when

most of the information that you have looks kinda like this.

This is a depiction of the passenger pigeon, probably one of the most famous

extinct animals in North America.

And this is a shooting of passenger pigeons that happened in Northern

Louisiana - quite far away from where I live - it was drawn by Smith

Bennett in 1875, quite a while ago.

And it depicts a flight of passenger pigeons.

And we know these from historical accounts to have been millions strong - numbers

that we can't even really conceptualize, like, hold onto it or minds.

Like, imagine a million of anything.

At some point, that becomes a word and not a number that you have

any real way of holding on to.

This, however, is a picture that I took of one of the last passenger

pigeon specimens in the world.

This is a male.

And it looks - by the museum director's own admission - not much

better than a pile of feathers, and a ratty pile of feathers at that.

I took this picture a week ago.

I got this close to it.

And I can't really describe to you what I felt because this distant idea of massive

hoards, massive flocks of passenger pigeons that used to exist in the 19th

century all over the country suddenly became something that was a few inches

from my camera, just one of them at a place I can get to an hour's drive away.

That's what I mean by closing psychological distance.

So that's how you can organize your speech by distance.

The closer it can be psychologically to your audience, the more

effective it's going to be.

I've talked about temporal distance, but I also want to give you time as a

way of organizing your speech, and it's not cheating, I promise, because I don't

mean closing a psychological distance or bringing something closer to me in time.

What I mean is for this way of organizing a speech, life doesn't

always follow a three-act structure.

It is okay to just tell the story as it happens or tell a process

as it is supposed to happen.

Like, what do I do first?

What happened first?

When do I preheat the oven?

My example for this is Griffin McElroy.

If you don't know him, he's one third of My Brother, My Brother, and Me, the

juggernaut of the podcasting industry.

He's a games journalist and one of the founding members of Polygon, now

an imprint of Vox, and he's also a Forbes 30 Under 30 media luminary.

The most helpful thing that I ever saw from him was an address he

gave at Florida State University.

And it was just his story.

How in the world did he get a full-time job as a podcaster

starting in West Virginia.

And he just told this story how it happened.

There's an immense value to that, especially if your story is interesting or

outside of the norm or something I might not ever get to experience on my own.

You are allowed to just tell stories how they happen.

You're allowed to just show me processes how they should happen.

It's going to be way more real and personal and credible than problem

and solution could be off the bat.

Then finally, here's my curveball: all of the above.

If you look back over at the presentation, I've just given, I've

used a little bit of all of these in order to work through my material.

It's okay to mix and match.

And bonus points for those of you who can identify which are

the ones that I've actually used.

So that's the information that I've got for you.

If you want to connect with me, you can find me on Twitter at @sparkotter.

I tend to talk a lot about Dungeons and Dragons and how it interacts with the

stories that we tell ourselves and the way that we share truth with each other.

If that's interesting to you, you can find me on Making a Monster

or wherever you get your podcasts.

And you can also email me at lucas@virtualsummitsearch.com.

I'd love to connect more with you, I'd love to hear some of the ways that you've

organized your speeches if I haven't covered them or maybe walk through

how you can take the content that you have and reorganize it along one of

these schemes in order to have a more interesting and more effective speech.

That's really my hope for you, and I hope that by going through these

seven things, I can give you a piece or an idea of how to make that happen.

So thanks for your time.

Again, I hope you enjoy the rest of Sell With a Summit: Speaker Edition,

and I hope to talk to you soon!

I hope this episode has sparked some ideas for you when it comes to

presentation structure for the full presentation, where Lucas

shares all seven of the options, as well as the other fantastic sessions,

go to sellwithasummit.com/speakeredition to get free access.

Which presentation structure stood out to you most, or do you have a different

presentation structure that you love?

I want to hear all about it, so share with us in the comments.

Thanks for listening to Virtual Summit Success.

Don't forget to leave a review and let others know your biggest

takeaways from this episode.

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summits there are, the more tips we'll have to share with you.

For show notes, links, and other resources, go to virtualsummitsuccess.live