The customer service faux pas lesson for better speechwriting

Imagine you go into a coffee shop that does delicious food and coffee. Absolutely incredible.

But the worst service.

In fact, it’s so bad that you feel it’s your duty as a customer to tell the owner/manager about how amazing the food and coffee is, but how bad the coffee is.

“Good customer service is so important,” you tell him.

“Oh hell,” he answers, “I’ve heard that before, I know good customer service is important. Without it nobody will ever want to come back!”

But he doesn’t do anything about it.

“What an idiot,” you think to yourself, “If he’s heard this before, why doesn’t he do something about it?” And you’d go about your day feeling pretty sure that his business won’t last very long.

And you’d probably be right. As our little thought experiment shows, hearing a lesson isn’t the same as learning or applying it.

I see it all the time in public speaking. Over and over again we’ve all heard ‘You need to have a point’.

But do you think I can find one in a full half of all the talks I hear?

Not a crumb.

Why?

Because they’ve heard it before, so it can’t help them. They’re like the coffee shop manager who knows how important customer service is but doesn’t actually have it.

So here’s a test for you.

Can you say in 10 words or less what the exact message of your last talk or presentation was?

If you can, good. You had a point.

If you can’t – you didn’t.

One technique I use occasionally is to write that one key message out in your Word doc, then copy and paste it a few lines below.

I treat those as my first and last sentence of the speech, and I write the rest of the speech in between.

At the end of each paragraph I ask myself if I could go from that paragraph to my ‘final sentence’ (which was the same as the first sentence, and the same as the key message). If the answer is ‘no’ more than two paragraphs in a row, I’ve lost the point.

Try it sometime.

If you can’t start and end your speech with the same sentence, you’re doing something wrong.

Warning: I’m not saying you should start and end with the same sentence. You can, but you don’t want to every time. The point is you should be able to. Once you’ve written it you can delete one or both sentences if you want.

That kind of laser focus on your key message – on why you’re speaking and what you want your audience to walk away with – is like a straight punch to the jaw… it hits hard and fast.

And you really don’t want to get in the way of it…

You get the point.

Now it’s up to you to put this back in the I’ve-heard-this-before-so-it-can’t-help-me basket… or you can actually do what I say, and watch your speeches, talks, and presentations (hell, even your reports and op eds) improve by leaps and bounds.

The choice is yours.

But if you want the benefit of that kind of focus and thematic strength from an expert with over 300,000 words a year to his name, hit reply or send me an email at [email protected] and let’s talk about how I can help you or your team.

Talk soon,

Alexander