The Secret To Selling From Stage

Great speakers will often bring a “shape” to their presentation. This is because a shape allows the audience to contextualise where your talk is heading.

If you get lost anywhere along the line, you can understand where you are in the process. It’s before we’ve delivered our key points. We’re now into the content. So we’ve made our connection here.

We’ve basically done the opening, our main problems, our big promise, we’ve set the frames, and we’ve done a why. In this section we feel, we’ve now made a connection with the audience, and now it’s time to deliver the content.

The start of delivering the content, depending on the style of talk you’re giving, you may like to shape your speech. And all that means, is that you put a shape around your actual talk.

Now there’s a saying in the industry, that says this, “You want to put the process, never the person on the pedestal.” If I’m going to talk about anything, I never put people on pedestals, I put processes on pedestals. So, any time I want to position what it is that I do, I’m never saying that I am excellent, I’m saying the only reason I have succeeded is because the process is excellent.

The most important thing you can do during your talks, is put your process on a pedestal. Not the person. So the saying is, “Put the process, not the person, on the pedestal.” What does that mean? It means that as we start to communicate more about what it is that we do. You start using sentences and sayings, words like, “Uh, there’s nothing special about me. All I did was follow a formula. If you look at my background, you realise I’m not the smartest person in this room, what I did do though, was learn a process,” and apply that process.

If you just played a testimonial, Sally, here’s something I want to let you know about Sally. There’s nothing special about Sally. All Sally did was get the pro formula, and meticulously learn that thing day-in day-out, and that’s why she got the results. The more you can elevate your process in the room, the more valuable your process becomes. And people really just miss this whole point.

For some reason, that elevating people, not processes, and by the time you get to the end of your presentation, your process is worth nothing. I never talk about me being in any way special, in fact I do the opposite, most of the time. I pretty much just put myself down, and then blame the process for the reason I succeeded.

Why is that? Because, I’m not really that smart, I’m dyslexic, I didn’t really do very well at school, I got kicked out in year 12, and I haven’t really got any academic rewards to do anything. The fact is, I should never really have succeeded, but I did.

I succeeded because I followed all these great processes. All I’m really doing is just telling the truth. I’m just telling you the truth behind it all. But for some reason, people, I don’t know, they don’t want to elevate a process. They don’t want to lose their power. They don’t want to be not special or something. I don’t know what it is with people. But the higher you position your process, the more valuable it becomes.

At the end of the day, they’re not buying you, they’re buying the process. The audience is not signing up for you, they’re signing up for the process that created you.

They’re signing up for the process that led to your success. They’re signing up for the system that developed whatever result you’re talking about.

The more you can position this system, this process, this technique, in the best possible light, the more valuable it becomes, and the easier it is, if you are happening to sell something from stage, the easier it is for you to actually sell that product or service. So always put the process, not the person, on the pedestal.