I was confirmed into the Anglican Church when I was twelve years of age. I remember it was the first time I ever wore a tie in my life. Prior to that, every week I had to ride my bicycle to the church after school and do bible studies with other kids with the Minister in order to pass the test to be able to confirmed. My parents were not religious at all, but I guess because Christianity is such a central component to our belief systems and literature, that they wanted me to get the basics.

Years later I discovered Zig Ziglar, one of the most famous modern day sales trainers. He was raised in the Deep South of America where bible studies is very big. I have read his books and watched his videos. I am fan. I noticed he was an incredible communicator. I also noticed that a lot of his sales stories where like the parables he would have read in his “red letter” bible, that is where the words attributed to Jesus are written in red. Australians are not particularly religious like Americans are, but I did recognise the power of these parables in communication. I don’t mean the actual quotation of the parables themselves, but the storytelling structure.

The parable structure always has a learning component wrapped up in the story being told. Often in business, we want to achieve the same thing for our audience. We might be giving a “persuade” speech rather than simple “inform” speech” or we may be calling for the audience to “take action” rather than just “entertain” them.

The parables are always from real life, rather than being a confection created for effect. This makes it easy for us to identify with the story. When I mentioned going through the confirmation process as a child, I am sure many readers went through a similar experience, including those who are from Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist religious belief systems. Our real life stories make it easy to connect with our audience, because they can understand or emphasise with what we are saying.

The parables are also very easy to understand. The message is crystal clear. Do this and things will be good. Do that and things will be bad. This simplicity is what makes the storytelling so effective. Zig Ziglar was a master of telling his stories which each had a lesson there for us in sales to absorb. They were from his experience or the experience of others from the real world, not from the “how it should be world”.

This is the danger when we become speakers. We pontificate from on high, from way above the clouds, as if we were superhumans who never made a mistake or had a failure. The ego has to be strong to tell a story against yourself. We have grown up supersensitive to being criticised and so it is like kryptonite, we avoid it completely. Criticising yourself sounds crazy, so we only talk about what a legend we are.

Zig understood that audiences love a good redemption tale. Of course we like to hear how to do things so that they go well, that parable is always in fashion. Interestingly though, we often feel distant from this model story of bravery, perseverance against the odds, intelligence, strength and wisdom. We naturally aspire to those things, but they can feel like they are a million miles away from where we are at this moment. Now failure, disaster, train wrecks all feel much closer to our reality and of course we want to avoid those. Parable stories on what no to do are much more popular than the ones on what we should be doing.

When things go pear shaped, don’t miss the chance to take a note on that for a future talk. The events may feel radioactive at the time, but get it down on the record, so that you can retell it when the pain has subsided. Particularly include the characters involved, the extent of the damage and the depth of the heroics or stupidity involved. Don’t be limited to your own disasters. Comb through the media and books for other people’s disasters, which can then be trotted out as a parable for doom and gloom.

Storytelling master Zig Ziglar copied the parables, probably without even giving it a second thought, because it was so much a part of his cultural upbringings in Yazoo City, Mississippi. As presenters we can find our own blue ribbon stories of triumph and catastrophe. We can wrap these up in simple, true renditions of reality that our audience can identify with and easily recall. The parables are well remembered for a reason – they work as a storytelling structure and we can adopt it for our own talks too. In ten minutes, I bet you can come up with at least two or three good incidents that have parable like qualities, which can then be fleshed out into mini-stories of business good and evil for an audience. Give it a try!

Usually when we have an opportunity to make a presentation, we get busy thinking about what we will talk about. The organisers may have set some rails by specifying the theme of the event or they may have asked us to speak on a particular topic. We are busy and often we start with creating new slides and scanning previous presentations for slides we can recycle. This is a poor strategy. What do we bang on about to our staff – plan the event or the project before you get started on the nitty gritty details. However, we neglect our own sage advice when it comes to presenting.

Part of the planning process should involve boiling the key message down to a nub that cleverly, succinctly and concisely summarises the whole point of the talk. Before we go there though we would be wise to consult others for ideas. It is a bit odd isn’t it, because we are always recommending collaboration and crowd sourcing of ideas for projects. How we seek those ideas though is a bit tricky.

Bounding up to someone for your presentation and suddenly saying , “do you have any ideas for this talk I am going to give” may not work all that well. Teamwork featuring excellent levels of collaboration is a concept, a sacred concept in most firms, but rather undefined. What is the environment for collaboration? Are people’s ideas welcomed in your workplace? Are we able to go outside the workplace and source broader networks for ideas? Do we have trustworthy networks in the first place?

I had to give a keynote speech to a relocation industry conference in Osaka. I called my contacts working in that industry and asked them about their issues, headaches and challenges. I have never worked in that industry and neither had anyone in my company, so I needed that broader network to help me. The irony was that after all the work I had put into crafting that piece de resistance , Covid put the whole event to the sword. I never did give that talk. It would have been brilliant of course!

Jokes aside, the idea of involving others is a good one, because we only know what we know. “Two brains are better than one” is ancient wisdom, but how often do we avail ourselves of outside input. I was getting my book “Japan Sales Mastery” translated and was struggling for the best title in Japanese. My friend Tak Adachi and I were having lunch and I mentioned my problem. He said why don’t you just call it “Za Eigyo” or “The Sale”. My son, later said to me why don’t I drop the katakana for “Za” from the title and just use “The” from English, to become “The Eigyo”.

This was a smart idea because I am an Australian writing in Japanese about selling in Japan, so the title combines both languages, to differentiate the book as a how foreigner would look at the world of sales in Japan. I would never have come up with those ideas on my own, so it demonstrated the value of collaboration.

The problem is we all recognise this in theory and we should be applying it to our presentation preparations, but we turn the whole thing into a solitary affair. We emerge from our cave, brandishing our slide deck and away we go. Getting more input is a better road to take, but there are some caveats. People we consult on the spot, will give us the very shallowest of ideas. We need to set this up, explain the theme and then fix a date a few days later, to allow them to digest the theme and work on some ideas. We are looking for diversity of views here and are not going to make any snap judgments. We should listen quietly – no interrupting, jumping in over the top of them or ending their sentences. We then thank them and privately reject, modify or incorporate their ideas.

If we ask them to give some feedback on our ideas, always frame the response. We want them to tell us what they like about it first and then tell us how we could make it even better. Confidence is a key aspect when presenting and that includes the preparation phase as well. This whole effort doesn’t have to take a lot of time, so we are not going to be caught in a time crunch and have to rush things, to be in time for the talk. More ancient wisdom says we don’t plan to fail, but we often fail to plan. We can incorporate more ideas into the preparation phase, if we simply plan for it.

One consistent issue which often pops up within companies requesting our training is achieving persuasion power with colleagues, bosses and subordinates. Being unable to convince others to follow your requests, ideas and suggestions is highly frustrating. Often the issue is how the topic is approached. In this “time is money”, no patience, miniscule concentration span, twenty four/seven scramble, people drive you to get to your point. If you are giving a presentation the big boss might bark out “Story, get to the point”. We are taught at business school to start with the punchline and get that into the Executive Summary, right at the front of the document. That is fine except it is ineffectual when presenting in person.

The punchline may be an excellent idea – “let’s increase the marketing budget by $1 million to fund campaigns to coincide with the end of Covid”. The problem though is that the punchline is naked and has no protection attached. As soon as we offer a statement, we suddenly transform our neutral audience into a raving band of doubters, sceptics, naysayers and critics. Fair enough too, because we didn’t land the punchline properly. Comedians don’t start with the punchline. They set it up, they build the mental pictures for us so we can see the scene in our mind’s eye. They plug in plenty of context, add interesting characters, nominate a location and secure the build up in a temporal frame for us.

When the punchline is unveiled it is congruent with the set up, makes a lot of sense and we laugh. Why on earth serious, well educated business people would imagine they can just throw the punchline out there, with no context, background, proof, evidence, data and statistics is a bit of a mystery. But they do just that and then get cut to ribbons by the baying crowd of non-believers.

Our communication skills have to be good enough that briefly, we can build the basis for the punchline. If we do a good job, the members of the audience are all sitting there thinking “we should fund a campaign to coincide with the end of Covid”, before we say anything about it. The lead up has been so well constructed that given the background, the best way forward occurs to everyone as the most obvious thing needed.

We have to keep it brief though. Storytelling is a big part of this, but these are “short stories”, not War and Peace tome like equivalents. If we labour the point or go too long with the background, some grumpy attendees are bound to tell us “get to the point”. So we need to have enough context, supported with tons of evidence, which draws out the needed next step. When we explain what comes next, everyone feels they already thought of that answer by themselves. This is guaranteed to get agreement to the proposal.

The way we get to the structure of the talk is to start with the action we want everyone to agree to. Having isolated out the action we investigate why do we think this? What have we read, heard, seen, experienced something, which tells us this is the best solution. There must be a reason for what we are recommending. All we need to do is capture that information and add in the people they know, a place they can see in their mind, put it all in a time frame and definitely add in data, evidence and proof to back up what we are saying.

We start with the background and then we reveal the punchline but we don’t stop there. Recency is powerful, so we want to control what is the last thing our audience hears. We top it all off with stating the benefit of the action. The action/ benefit component must be very short. There needs to be one clear action, so that everyone can understand what we need to do. Also, while there may be many benefits, we only want to mention the most powerful one. If we keep piling on the benefits we begin to dilute their power with too much detail. Clarity must be the driving ambition here. If we put it into mathematical terms then 90% of the time we speak should be devoted to providing the richest context possible and 5% each for the action and benefit.

If we are doing a good job then by the time we blurt out the punchline the audience will be thinking “that is old hat, I knew that, that is obvious”. If we can engender that reaction then we have done our job well. Brief but powerful, clear and convincing - these should be our objectives.