Choosing your CTA for your presentation is usually pretty easy, so we’ll use that as a reward for ourselves.
The harder job is building the path to that CTA.
In a previous post, I talked about structure and having 3 acts. And I talked about the different models.
The Lecture Model is the one everyone uses all the time. Assumption/Myth is the model that the template lays out. And I also mentioned the Persuasion Model.
The Lecture model is how we move the audience from not-knowing to knowing. For some reason, this is where everyone stops. Especially in B2B. Because, if only the customer knew enough, or knew what we knew, they’d buy from us.
But that’s not the real world. Selling exists for a reason. Persuasion is needed.
The Persuasion Model, or if you like, you can call it the persuasion layer, has two jobs.
It moves the audience from not-believing to believing. And then from not doing to doing.
You can think of this as a tour of your company. You start by taking the customer through your engineering department or your factory. That’s the Lecture Model: from not-knowing to knowing.
After that, you put them through a Marketing experience. From not-believing to believing.
Then they end up with Sales: from not doing, to doing.
We get the audience through the Persuasion Model by answering 10 questions. We answer those questions on behalf of the audience since we’re the ones doing the talking. And we answer them as subtly as we can. Most of the time, we’re answering indirectly. Because if we answer directly, our entire message sounds like a sales pitch, and we’ll lose our audience. No matter how many audience attention tools we use.
In B2B, the questions are, in order:
- Why is this different?
- How do I know I can trust you?
- How do I know this is real?
- What’s in it for us?
- What’s kept us from getting what we want?
- How will this help us get what we want?
- Why now?
- How does it work?
- What’s the risk of doing nothing?
- What’s the next step?
I’ve written about some of these before.
For example, “How do I know I can trust you?” is handled with the people introduction slide, slide 3. That’s where I said the unspoken message is “I’m worth listening to.” In a previous post, I also mentioned that one of the things we’re conveying is “people like us do things like this.” Or “people like us believe things like this.” Those are all versions of “How do I know I can trust you?”
And you probably guessed that the last question, “What’s the next step?” is tied to my advice to literally show, during your presentation, how to perform the call to action. How to sign up for the newsletter, book a follow-up meeting, or schedule a discovery call.
So, you’re already familiar with some of these items. In future posts, I’ll go through them, one by one. I’ll show you where they belong. And just as importantly, how to phrase them indirectly.