A sign of how well your presentation will do is how engaged your audience are in the first 30 seconds.

Let’s face it though: it’s hard to get your audience interested in dry business topics.

So what can you do?

Use analogies and stories to draw your audience into your presentation.

A famous quote in sales copywriting is: Features tell but stories sell.

The most successful copywriters use stories to engage their readers. Often the reader is so engrossed in the story they don’t realize they are being sold something until they’re reaching for their wallet.

Watch Shawn Achor start his presentation with a story:

Here’s how to come up with a story for your presentation

Perhaps you are presenting about a really boring topic: the implementation of a new computer system.

How can you come up with an interesting story about this?

Easy:

Think about all the complaints staff have about the current computer system.

Maybe one complaint is the system is slow to respond.

It takes a really long time to complete a day’s work because of the system delays.

Imagine a particular person’s job and all the bad things and problems that could happen if they don’t meet their deadlines. Let’s call the person Steve.

Exaggerate all the bad things. What would happen if they all went wrong at once? How would Steve be feeling? How would Steve appear to his co-workers?

Now structure a presentation introduction where you detail the day-in-the-life of Steve. The computer system fails and Steve experiences all the bad things as a result.

Now transition to your new computer system. The system which will fix all of these problems.

This is how you engage your audience and make the content relevant to them.