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If you've felt like your presentation didn't land quite right with your audience, this newsletter issue is for you.

Today, I'm sharing a powerful template (access it for free ​HERE​) that's helped hundreds of my students craft compelling presentations. Filling it out in advance of your talk a short exercise that's saved me countless hours in prep time.

I recently used it with a client to transform their executive update from a list of boring features to a series of engaging stories.

By the end, 8 audience members messaged him afterwards saying how engaging he was, and he received a return invite to present to the executive team.

Let's break down how you can do the same:

The Audience Conversion Guide

Before crafting any presentation, it's crucial to understand how you want your audience to convert from their current state (before your presentation) to their ideal state (after your presentation). If you don't have an end goal in mind, you won't deliver the promise you're meant to give to your audience.

Think of your audience's conversion in 3 time phases that will serve as the column headers of your table:

• BEFORE your presentation
• DURING your presentation
• AFTER your presentation

 Over time, they will convert across three key dimensions that will serve as the row headers of your table:

• KNOWLEDGE: How will your audience's knowledge of the topic change over the course of your presentation?
• ATTITUDES: How will your audience's feelings and beliefs about the topic change over the course of your presentation?
• ACTION: How will your audience's desire for action about the topic change over the course of your presentation?

The table should look something like this:

 

This is roughly a ~10 to 20-minute exercise that will save you hours of time when crafting your message. You can see a picture of what it looked like for my client, a cybersecurity director presenting an update to executive team below:

 

From Table to Presentation: The PISER Framework

Using this table as our guide, we structured the presentation using the PISER framework: Preview, Issue-Solution-Effect (for each point), and Recap. Here's how it looked:

• P - Preview: "Hey everyone. I'm excited to share four recent security updates that the team has worked on that will materially reduce cyber risk for our company."
• Storypoint 1: I (Issue): "We've had a known issue wherein we haven't had visibility of what suspicious activity, if any, was taking place in our containerized environment." S (Solution): "Now, we've solved for it through implementing a runtime security protection solution." E (Effect): "This allows us to detect cyber attacks, malicious activity in the containers, and effectively neutralize them."
• Storypoint 2: I (Issue): "We recently transitioned from our previous tool to a new cloud security solution. Now, this might feel like a regular tool swap, but it wasn't." S (Solution): "It was, in fact, a result of a carefully thought-out decision to rationalize and simplify our tool stack and also to gain cost efficiencies in the process." E (Effect): [Implied effect of improved efficiency and cost savings]
• Storypoint 3: I (Issue): "We've had an issue wherein we had insecure base images being deployed in production." S (Solution): "We've now implemented a registry scan installation that will detect vulnerabilities early on." E (Effect): "So that we can deploy secure images into our production workloads."
• Storypoint 4: I (Issue): "Up until recently, if there was a security incident that would happen out of office hours, somebody in the security operations team would be paged. They might be having dinner, they might be out on a date, whatsoever. And that would potentially impact our meantime to respond and recover from security incidents." S (Solution): "How we've solved for this now is we've transitioned to a managed Security Service, which will provide us 24/7, around-the-clock incident monitoring service." E (Effect): "So not only will this service detect and respond to security incidents, but they will also see them through to resolution. This will significantly speed up our incident response timelines, but they will also help us scale security operations without needing to add additional headcount."
• R - Recap: "Now together, all of these four improvements will massively reduce cyber risk for our company. They will help us build trust with our partners and customers, so I'm really pumped up about those."

The Power of Issue-Solution-Effect Storytelling

This Issue-Solution-Effect (ISE) structure for each point is powerful for two reasons:

1. Relevance: Starting with an issue immediately connects with your audience's concerns, making your message more engaging.
2. Narrative: Each point becomes a mini-story (problem → solution → outcome), which is inherently more engaging than a simple feature list.

By using this approach, you'll craft presentations that engage your audience on both intellectual and emotional levels, driving the changes in knowledge, attitude, and action that you're aiming for.

If you found this helpful, the Impromptu Speakers Academy is my 3-week bootcamp to help you become a clear and confident speaker at work. Reserve your spot today while they're still available.

Talk soon,

Preston