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Details Can Be Powerful

Many presenters may have good intentions or hopes of persuading their audience—but if you examine the presentation, you will see that they have not really created an actually strategy for being successful. They just hope they get lucky—but hope is not a strategy. Or they bore their audience with unfocused information. While there are many ways to craft a persuasive argument, the use of details is one way to increase your credibility. This does not mean you should overload your presentation with lots of stuff. It's very easy for your audience to tune you out if you bore them with statistics and charts. Rather the goal is to look at the critical points you are trying to prove and decide which of them would be best supported by being detailed in the presentation on that point. We've probably all had the experience of hearing someone speak who really seemed to know what they were talking about and clearly supported their argument. 

Here's a good illustration from Julie Bick in her book, All I Really Need to Know in Business I Learned at Microsoft, pp. 112-113. 

Details Imply Truth, and numbers imply facts. Get specific to get believed, whether you’re pitching an idea in a meeting, responding to a question, or trying to win an argument. Before we knew much about PR, we’d respond to press questions with round numbers and vague answers. If the press called about a problem with Word, we’d call our phone support people, who could tell us how many had called with the problem and how many more people were likely to be affected. Then we’d tell the press, “It’s no big deal. Don’t worry about it. If anyone has a problem, there’s a fix available.” The next day we’d be surprised to see an article about the problem. Seeing this, we then tried to give the reporters more detailed information in an effort to convince them not to write the article. We’d get mind-numbing details on facts and figures from our product-support folks so we could say, “We have had one hundred thirty-one calls on this problem out of the last five thousand five hundred total calls. That’s two-point-three-eight percent. The problem only occurs with certain bios which only eleven percent of all PC users around the world have. Of those users, forty-two percent probably use Word, and since only nine percent of Word users use this feature, according to our last research study, we don’t expect to get many more calls. For anyone that calls, there’s a patch available on 
the Microsoft Web site or we will mail it out free.” From that barrage of detailed and ultimately boring
information, the reporters saw there wasn’t much of a story to tell and they’d usually drop it.

Remember that this in only one strategy—and not necessarily the best one for every situation. As always, know your
audience. It only works if it works for them. 

Good luck. Come back often.
George Annillo
"The harder I work, the luckier I get"—Mark Twain

You can choose to get presentation skills training from many groups—why choose us? We bring a unique combination of perspectives to this craft, combining business, drama, and persuasive sales savvy to give you confidence and competency above your competition. We strive to give you a depth of understanding, compared to lighter, "public speaking" courses. So give yourself an edge!

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