Who's the biggest star in Hollywood?

You might be surprised to learn that from Hollywood's perspective, anyone you see on the screen is not the star. The star is you. And the rest of the audience. Hollywood convinced you, after all, to bring your body into the theater and pay $10 plus popcorn to experience an altered reality. You have to get something out of the deal to make you want to do it again.

One Hollywood secret is that the ultimate goal of any movie is to make you feel like you're a star. To the degree that a film makes you feel like you're the one on screen, is the degree to which it is successful. That's because audience empathy translates into dollars. Audiences are willing to pay top dollar if they feel like they “own” the characters, as if they had created them and lived their lives.

Like a movie, every sales presentation you give is a performance. You are the talent, your PowerPoint is your media, and your potential client is the audience. When you give your business performance, what do you do to make your audience feel like they are the star? Have you fallen into the trap where you think your product or company is the star? Or even worse, that you are the star?

Take Hollywood's advice, and look at the experience from the perspective of the audience. You need to figure out what to present to your prospective clients that will make them feel like they are the center of the universe. For many presenters that won't be easy. Adapting successful Hollywood media techniques means they'll have to leave their current thinking about presentations on the cutting room floor.

When big movie studios use tired script templates, they can afford to spend millions on marketing, an all-star cast, and impressive animations to make it critic-proof. But unless you're a big company with similar resources, you can't afford the risk of a box office flop by counting on a template to do the job. Like independent filmmakers, most companies have to use their creativity and smarts to turn a modest investment into a popular and profitable venture.

To avoid making your audience feel like you don't care about them, the best thing to do is to throw out your current PowerPoint. Or at least reinvent it. If you use the same presentation every time, and use canned profiles of you, your company, and your product, you're going to have to do a “Take 2.” Your presentation needs to make your audience--the potential client-–feel like they are the star. You should tailor the content so it seems like they are unique and special. They don't want to feel like the cookie dough in somebody else's cookie-cutter template.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Cliff Atkinson

Cliff Atkinson is an author, speaker, and consultant who translates complex ideas into communications that get results at www.cliffatkinson.com. He is the author of the bestselling Beyond Bullet Points, published in four editions by Microsoft Press.

LinkedIn: Cliff Atkinson