In the article “Best Formula for Selling Yourself,” Frances Cole Jones, author of The Wow Factor: The 33 Things You Must (and Must Not) Do to Guarantee Your Edge in Today’s Business World highlighted three proven techniques to close a sale⎯whether to sell an idea, a product, or yourself as a candidate for a job.

The first of three techniques is to incorporate the word “you” in your narrative. As you read in a prior blog, a Yale University study of the most persuasive words in the English language found that the word “you” was on the top of the list. “You” is persuasive because it makes a direct connection between the speaker and the audience.

The second technique is to use the word “because.” According to California-based social psychologist Ellen Langer, the one word in the English language that will increase the possibility of cooperation, from 60 to 94 percent, is “because.” Using the word “because” will lead you to think about what your audience needs to know and how what you are offering will benefit them.

Lastly, keep in mind The Duncan Hines Cake Mix Marketing Theory. Jones wrote, “When Duncan Hines began making cake mix, the decision to have cooks at home add the egg was made in the marketing department. Why is this effective? Because they realized that when we add the egg, we feel proud because we contributed; we can say, ‘I baked!’” The persuasive point here is to find an opportunity for your target audience to participate. So when you are pitching an idea, a product, or a job, find an opportunity that will lead them to act.

When you put it all together, this is how your narrative should sound:

“This is important to you because you are experiencing X. My Company Y can offer you two possible solutions to solving X.” (Describe solutions) “Which solution would you like to get started on?”

You can also leverage the power of “you” in your presentations by periodically inserting “you” statements in your narrative as follows:

• “What this means to you is…”
• “The reason I’m telling you this is because…”

Each of these phrases will lead you to complete the statement with specific benefits to your target audience. And using the right words, along with the right pitch, will land you the deal you want.

(Thanks to Barry James Folsom, CEO of Twirl TV, for his email, which gave rise to this blog.)

In a prior blog, you read about the analogy of an elephant to presentations. Now, let’s take a look at another similar example to illustrate the importance of integration in presentations.

In a recent Bayer’s commercial for women’s birth control pills, six blind-folded women described a rhino by touch. One woman said it was a pillar, another a wall, another a rope, another a brush, and the last woman called it a pipe.

The women each removed their blindfolds to discover a rhino standing in front of them. What they described by touch were only parts, or elements, of the rhino.

The narration to the commercial added, “Having only one point of view on anything⎯can be misleading. So before you come to a conclusion, make sure you get the full picture.”

The commercial demonstrates the importance of seeing objects (and objectives) from a bird’s eye view rather than just as component parts; to see the forest, not just the trees.

This same point can be applied in presentations. Most people in business view a presentation as the individual parts of the rhino. One person describes it as the story, another as the slides, another as the delivery, and yet another as the handling of tough questions.

As Jerry noted in his blog, “a clear story can be ruined by slides that are guilty of the designation, ‘Death by PowerPoint.’ A clear story supported by slides that follow the Less Is More principle can be ruined by the presenter who freezes like a deer in the headlights in front of the audience. A clear story supported by slides that follow the Less Is More principle delivered by a presenter who has the poise and confidence of Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama can be ruined by a tough question that throws the presenter for a loop.”

Every one of these parts, or elements, must be thoroughly managed by the presenter and carefully integrated with each of the other elements or any one of them can ruin the entire presentation.

The presentation is the rhino.

Last Sunday, Frank Rich, the New York Times political columnist, provided another lesson in writing style for presenters; in fact, two lessons. In a previous blog, you read how Mr. Rich had used bookends, a figure of speech—a quote, a title, an incident, a person— that he referenced at the beginning and then again at the end of his story. This simple culminating device adds continuity to any story or presentation.

The subject matter of both Mr. Rich’s earlier and current articles was racism. In Sunday’s article, he focused on the controversy surrounding Shirley Sherrod’s speech to NAACP, but he bracketed it with references to a scene in the first episode of the new season of “Mad Men.” The popular cable television series is set in the 1960s, a time of unrest in the civil rights movement. Mr. Rich began by citing a scene in the premiere episode in which one of the fictional characters talks about the actual 1967 murder of Andrew Goodman, a civil rights worker, in Mississippi. The character then goes on to say, “Is that what it takes to change things?”

Mr. Rich then spent several paragraphs discussing the charges and countercharges of racism swirling around the Sherrod affair, concluding that prejudice is still present in our society. To reinforce his conclusion, he repeated the line from “Mad Men” in his closing paragraph:

           We don’t know what history will bring next. But we might at least address the chilling question prompted in
           “Mad Men” by the horrific events of 46 summers ago — “Is that what it takes to change things?” — before
           our own summer comes to a boil again.

In addition to the bookending, Mr. Rich also provided a lesson in timeliness; the season premiere of “Mad Men” was broadcast the same night as his column appeared. Granted this was easy for a professional journalist because the advertising campaign for series was highly visible. Presenters don’t always have the luxury of a prominent media event, but if you do a brief search of the Internet and daily media, you are likely to find an item related to the subject of your presentation or your audience. Reference that item to make your presentation current.

Learn from a professional: use bookends and be timely in your presentations.

General Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, shared his feelings about his Commander-in-Chief with an advisor, who was later quoted in a Rolling Stone article:

            Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him,
            who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his
            f***ing war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The
            Boss was pretty disappointed.

The very same week the article was published, his Commander-in-Chief relieved General McChrystal of his command.

During the same month, Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, in a statement to the media about his company’s disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, said, “I’d like my life back.”

One month later, Mr. Hayward was replaced as the company’s spokesman.

In the summer of 2006, at a rally during his campaign for the Virginia senate seat, Senator George Allen, the favored incumbent, mocked a student of Indian descent as “Macaca.”

On Election Day Senator Allen went down to defeat.

In 2002, during a 100^th birthday party for segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, Senator Trent Lott, the Republican senator from Mississippi and Senate Majority Leader, said:

            When Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the
            country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.

Three weeks of public furor later, Senator Lott resigned from his majority post.

Clearly, the World War II slogan, “Loose lips sink ships,” also applies to politics and business. Where politicians lose elections, business people lose jobs and sink deals as a result of verbal gaffes.

An article by Jeffrey Zaslow in last week’s Wall Street Journal called, “Keeping Your Foot Away From Your Mouth,” looked at some famous gaffes by famous people and analyzed the reasons why such slips happen:

            There are gaffes that result from clueless thinking or unfortunate phrasing, and then there are gaffes—
            such as those with racial or sexual overtones—that can be rooted in our personal belief systems.

The article went on to note that that the viral influence of the Internet and YouTube have worsened the negative impact of gaffes. “Even if we don’t mean it, it can be hard to recover. We’ve become a culture that is unforgiving when it comes to poor word choice.”

Granted, there is another way to look at verbal errors. In business, the high stakes involved in presentations and the resultant pressure are universal givens. Therefore, whenever a presenter makes a mistake, every person in every audience has been there done that, and so they respond empathically rather than critically. Audiences will be forgiving of imperfections that fall into the “clueless thinking or unfortunate phrasing” category; although not so for “racial or sexual overtones.”

This is not to say that you should intentionally make mistakes to create empathy (although there are presenters who do so to manipulate their audiences’ emotions) but to be forgiving of yourself. Many presenters, in striving for unattainable perfection, memorize their presentations. However, memorization (unless you are performing William Shakespeare) is actually counterproductive. If you miss one word, you lose track completely. Instead, use Verbalization, a more efficient way to practice described in a prior post.

Even Verbalization does not guarantee perfection. When, not if, but when you slip in a presentation—or in any situation in life—remember the words of the 18^th Century British poet Alexander Pope: “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

Last Thursday, Sarah Palin and her political action committee, Sarah PAC, released its first campaign video of the year. According to a Yahoo! News article, the ad includes a vocal track of a speech Palin delivered in Washington in May, touting the rise of “mama grizzlies” and conservative women.

Palin’s main message in the ad was to promote conservative female empowerment. But in the short one minute and fifty seconds clip, there were six instances of negativity, such as the use of “no” and “don’t.” References to mama grizzlies fighting and pink elephants stampeding, while promoting empowerment, also have a negative cast.

Sarah Palin says, “You don’t want to mess with the mama grizzlies,” but are we ready for another political campaign of mud-slinging? Wasn’t 2008 enough?

Cole Porter’s 1934 song, “Miss Otis Regrets,” a wry blues tale about a society lady indisposed to answer questions, had its modern variation last week during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan.

In the prior post, you read how thoroughly the president’s staff prepared Ms. Kagan for the hearings by subjecting her to Murder Boards, intense practice sessions in which tough questions were fired at her repeatedly and she gave her answers to those questions repeatedly. Apparently, part of the preparation also included not answering some questions.

Jon Stewart seized on this strategy in his coverage of the hearings on “The Daily Show;” first by setting it up:

            Perhaps this year will be Elena Kagan’s chance to demonstrate the proper manner in which to answer
            committee questions in a forthright, non-evasive, honest, judicially transparent way, so that we may,
            as a nation, finally have the Supreme Court confirmation conversation that we deserve.

Mr. Stewart then followed his lead-in with quick cuts of about half a dozen video sound bites from the hearing in which Ms. Kagan refused to comment or said that a comment would not be appropriate.

Linda Greenhouse also seized on the refusals in the New York Times. Ms. Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for her coverage of the Supreme Court and teaches at Yale Law School, wrote, “A hearing like this represents a lost opportunity for the public to actually learn something about how judges think about what the Constitution means.”

Because of the highly-polarized political aspects of such legal hearings, candidates for the Supreme Court can invoke caution or appropriateness in not answering; because of the public’s low expectations of integrity in the political world, politicians often get away with ducking tough questions.

You do not have that option. In business, you must answer every question asked of you.

No ifs, ands, or buts.

It’s no wonder that BP finally replaced its CEO, Tony Hayward as its spokesman. He was the flash point for the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In business as in sports, the manager gets fired after a big loss and Mr. Hayward made a mess of his job. From his now-infamous “I’d like my life back,” quote to his stonewalling at a congressional hearing; he only served to make matters worse for his company. The last straw came last weekend when he flew home to the UK to observe his luxurious yacht in a race off the coast of England.

It’s also no wonder that BP chose Bob Dudley as Mr. Hayward’s successor. Mr. Dudley is a low-key, soft-spoken American, a sharp contrast to Mr. Hayward’s upper-crust British persona.

The Doonesbury cartoon strip anticipated the switch even before the yachting gaffe when, Duke, the strip’s running character who is always called in to fix shady dealings, counseled Mr. Hayward to lose “the fancy accent.”

You have only to watch this embedded clip of Mr. Dudley being interviewed on PBS—a month before the managerial switch—to know that he was being groomed for the part. The Southern drawl, the wispy hair, the sedate jacket and the open collar shirt take the standard corporate slick spokesman image down a couple of notches.

It’s the least that BP can do to provide the right image for a bad message.

The Senate Judiciary Committee begins hearings today on President Obama’s second nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan. Just as the first nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, and both of President George W. Bush’s nominees, John G. Roberts and Samuel Alito, and all the previous nominees of all the previous presidents, Ms. Kagan will be grilled mercilessly by the senators, particularly those of the opposition. All’s fair in politics and the party out of power wants to do everything it can to make the sitting president—and that president’s choices—look bad.

In preparation for the grilling, Ms. Kagan spent long hours in mock sessions called “Murder Boards.” This intense practice process, which includes everything from re-creating the setting in the senate chamber to anticipating the worst case questions from the senators, was described in a post on realclearpolitics.com by Julie Hirschfeld Davis. One particular item in the article that deserves your attention comes from Rachel Brand, an attorney who helped prepare Justices Roberts and Alito for their confirmation hearings. Ms. Brand said that the purpose of the Murder Boards “is to ask those hard questions in the nastiest conceivable way, over and over and over.”

The triple iteration of “over” is the operative point. Readers of this blog are familiar with Verbalization, the process of rehearsing your presentation aloud as you would to an actual audience; that same practice is just as, if not more important, in handling tough questions. It may seem sufficient to list the anticipated challenging questions and to craft an answer for each of them, but that is not enough. It is far more effective to have someone fire those questions at you, and to speak your answers aloud. And you must do it over and over and over. The dynamics of the repeated interchanges in practice will make your responses in real time crisp and assertive.

The CEO of a Silicon Valley company who had taken the Power Presentations program in preparation for his IPO road show, decided to prepare for his subsequent quarterly analysts’ call by writing the anticipated tough questions on flash cards and to Verbalize his answer to each card. To his dismay, during the actual call, he found his responses halting. He called me for a brush-up, and I told him that the flash cards were not a substitute for having a human voice—even in mock practice—fire the questions.

The Murder Boards for Ms. Kagan did it right. According to the article, the questions fired at her came from “About 20 members of President Barack Obama’s team…Kagan’s pals from academia as well as White House and Justice Department lawyers.” They made the mock practice more real.

In preparation for your next Q&A session, have a member or members of your team fire tough questions at you and Verbalize your answers to them over and over and over.

Think of it as volleying to perfect your tennis game.

In last week’s post on Obama’s Oval Office speech on the oil spill you read how Mike Allen, the Washington columnist the New York Times dubbed “The Man the White House Wakes Up To,” anticipated the importance of the event. Mr. Allen’s succinct postmortem: “It’s the first Obama speech ever panned by the talking heads.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, a former speech writer for George H. W. Bush, was more specific:

The president’s failure to turn things around Tuesday night with a speech damaged his reputation as a man whose rhetorical powers are such that he can turn things around with a speech. He lessened his own mystique. Reaction among his usual supporters was, in the words of Time’s Mark Halperin, “fierce, unforeseen disappointment.”

Ms. Noonan went on to list more pans from other Obama supporters, including the usually loyal Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. Then she concluded, “The right didn’t like the speech either.”

Even the New York Times’ Frank Rich, another loyal Obama supporter, agreed, “The speech’s pans were inevitable,” but he went on to add, “it also provides him with a nearly unparalleled opening to make his and government’s case.” Mr. Rich was referring to another oil spill speech that received even worse pans than the president’s; that of Joe Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who said:

I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case, a $20 billion shakedown

The nation, the press, the Democrats, and even the Republicans reacted in utter shock at the insensitivity of the statement. So much so, the Republicans forced Mr. Barton to backpedal:

I want the record to be absolutely clear that I believe BP is responsible for this accident, should be held responsible and should in every way possible make good on the consequences that have resulted from this accident. If anything I’ve said this morning was misconstrued from that I want to apologize for that misconstruction.

Mr, Barton’s position is the “unparalleled opening” to which Mr. Rich was referring. He urged the president, “There couldn’t be a riper moment for Obama, as a man once said, to bring it on.”

Speechmaking is often like sports: win some, lose some.