Storytelling for Persuasion: Insider Tips from James Ontra

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Negotiate Anything is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 3 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made it the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm Kwame Christian and I'm the director of the American Negotiation Institute. We're growing and I want to introduce you to our new team members and new trainers. This will give you new and diverse perspectives on negotiation and conflict resolution. And that's why Shane Martin, our head of sales and partnerships, is going to serve as co host of the show from time to time. We're excited to continue to provide you with the best content that will help to make your difficult conversations easier both at work and at home. Lastly, our team conducts negotiation and conflict resolution trainings in the United States and abroad. Our trainings will give you the practical skills you need to resolve conflict, negotiate, lead and persuade with confidence. Click the link in the description below to learn more about how we can make your difficult conversations easier. James, thanks for joining us today.

Well, thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you, my friend. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

My name's James Entre. I founded a company called Shuffler which is designed for presentation management to help global enterprises manage slide libraries and make presentations easier for the entire company. I have been doing presentations for 25 years, since CD ROM technology and high end animations in the 2000s to cheap animations after YouTube to bringing it to presentation management today.

This is great. And listeners, you are in for a treat. James and I were chatting beforehand and he already blew my mind. So I know you're going to get a lot out of this too. And so the two things to talk about today are introducing the concept of presentation management and then talking about how we can use storytelling to be better closers and persuaders during our negotiations. And so let's talk about this concept of presentation management, because I think now more than ever this is incredibly important as it relates to what we're doing and how we're living in the business world today. So let's just introduce that concept and then we'll start there.

Yeah, great. It's a form of content management where every file, every word document, every PowerPoint, every video, every image is formatted to present so you see it as an image in your library, every PowerPoint, you just see all the slides when you can see all Your files as slides. They're easier to search, easier to find. And in presentation management, you just drag anyone you see into your slide tray and hit save and you're assembling a new presentation, a new slideshow. Think of Amazon, but for slides. And if all those slides were on point for your company, think of how easy it would be to assemble this presentation. All the time you spent hunting and pecking, opening and closing. Is that marketing V2? Oh, do you have that slide you did last summer where everyone applauded, Yay. Did you. And then you're looking for it and we forgot and I finally find it and it's got the last logo and it's not the same. And legal says I can't say this anymore, so I have to submit it to someone else for approval. But. And no one knows who's saying what to whom, when and where, when. Arguably, presentations are more valuable to the sale than all that TV advertising combined. Because if I'm sitting belly to belly with you right now and you don't trust what's over my shoulder, I don't care how good your TV ad is, you're not going to make the sale. But if your TV ad's great and brought me in and I blew the trust and confidence in my presentation, you're not going to make the sale either. Presentations are the ultimate bottom of the funnel, and for some reason, we have never managed them as a communication tool. We manage every communication medium out there. Tv, radio. We know every single second you spent on what page, on what website where you clicked, how long you went, did you send it out of your email or not. But for some reason, there's no data on presentations. That's presentation management. It's managing the lifecycle on a global enterprise for presentation communication.

Wow. And so let's start off with two things. First of all, you could see my face. Listeners probably couldn't because this is a podcast, but you could see that I was reliving trauma as you were talking about hunting down slides, because with the trainings that we do, I mean, this is a daily type of thing, and it is crazy how challenging it can be making these tweaks, finding old presentations and whatnot. So 100%, this makes so much sense because it keeps it organized. We can focus more time on the content and delivery and not as much time as hunting for the right slide. And then the other part is just recognizing how important important this is as a tool of marketing, because I think everybody can recognize that, yes, this is part of the sales process. We might be doing a pitch, but I really like your approach of thinking about it in terms of marketing, a marketing opportunity. And so when you think about this from a strategic perspective, a presentation, like a PowerPoint presentation, strategically, what is the benefit of thinking of it first as marketing versus sales?

A singular benefit is right now. Marketing materials rarely get reused in a presentation management environment. Your posters, your designs, your big pitch for the big conference are all part of your presentation library. Therefore, it's searchable and anyone in your company can reuse it at any time. Most marketing dollars are thrown away after they're used once this repurposes them as one. Secondly, if you think about it, if you made a presentation on your company and your whole presentation might be 250 slides, who you are, your history, where you were founded, the bios of the executives, the timeline, your products, your services, the London plant, the LA office, your case studies and everything, it might be 250 slides, everything. And if you get someone to sit through all of that, they would know everything about your company. But no one will ever do that. But if you have a published library of 250 slides and anyone in your company approved can say, man, I'm going to talk about the London plant. And our CEO went to the same college as the guy I'm pitching and they need to see the bio of our banking project because they're in banking as well. And I hit save, I'm ready to go to the meeting. In the middle of the meeting I'm telling you about banking, you go, you know, it's more finance than banking. And I'm like, God, I had a slide on finance, I have a slide on finance, I can bring it up instantly. Just like I'm showing you another image on my cell phone and suddenly my conversation, my presentation is following the conversation, not forcing the conversation, which is a critical situation in making the sale and negotiating.

Yeah, absolutely. And James, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm thinking about the general applicability of this too, because for sure in sales, for sure in negotiations, this is going to be powerful. But people every day in the corporate world are making presentations for different reasons. And it sounds like this concept of presentation management would apply there as well.

Well, yeah, you could, you know, eight people in HR use it for onboarding because you can update the presentation and you'll know what slides are being used. It's like a library. If you have a book in a library and someone updates that book and they go and take the book off the shelf and put A new one in there. From that day forward, everyone is pulling pages out of the new book. If you manage your slides in the same way in a published area, everyone is always up to date, presenting the most up to date stuff. And that just feeds into what you said?

Absolutely. Oh, that's great. And now let's transition into the storytelling aspect of this, because this is critical as it relates to our ability to persuade and connect with other people. And so when we think about storytelling in the business world, when it comes to sales and negotiation, what does that look like to you?

To me, I see it as cinematic storytelling. I see it as you take your first step to connect emotionally with your audience. And when you've properly connected, they will dig out the data and reinforcement that your next slides, your logical slides are coming in to reinforce it. Much like when we spoke right here and I said, you ever hunt and peck and gone through the presentations or whatever to find your slide? And you said, God, I was having a moment. I was connecting with you emotionally. Once you were connected emotionally, you're like, gosh, God, I can reuse slides. Aren't there numbers on that? The top salespeople. You start going through it because you reinforce what you've already bought yourself into because you emotionally connected with it. You can use this analogy in cinema. You can watch movies and you'll see that almost every great movie grabs you emotionally right out the chute. There's a big change in life. Someone dies, someone has a divorce, someone moves away, some grand change happens, and then the story starts. That should be the way you look at presentations. If you've got a slide library you're now looking at, Each presentation's a story, Every slide's a scene. When every slide's a scene, you can look at that scene and go, I want people to feel emotionally sad about the leaky pipe on the slide. I made that up. I'm just saying. And then you know where you're bringing your audience. And if you start giving that focus to each slide in your library, everyone out in the field is pulling from these slides. They start driving to the same area. All the messaging's to the same horizon. You can shuffle up the slides into different different stories, but it tells the same message. I'll give an example, like, who is it? Quentin Tarantino? We've seen Pulp Fiction, right? It almost. It starts in the middle, and then in the middle, you're at the beginning, and then at the end, you seem to loop around back to the beginning, and you're back to the middle. And then at the end, you finally get to the start, right? He's got all these scenes, but it's almost like he took those scenes. If you shuffled them and put them into a regular chronological order, would it be the same story? It would have the same feel. It might not go the same route, but you're going to the same horizon. If your slides are a scene and all your slides, remember a video is just another slide. Drag that in. I want to see the next video play. These are all real powerful things. It's. Here's an example. Emotional selling versus data statistic reinforcement selling. Early in my career, I worked on Olympic presentation right here. This is NBC sold all their Olympic advertising. They made a big buy on the Olympics for eight years, and they used our system. And I was young at the company at the time, and they brought it in and they're like, what's the difference between a $1 billion endorsement and a $2 billion endorsement? And they're like, well, their numbers and stuff. He goes, give them the Carrie Strugg video. Give them the Muhammad Ali video. What does that mean? I can bring you through the Olympics and tell you that a million people are going to watch it, and they all buy Jaguars and they eat lay's potato chips and drink Coca Cola. So your advertising is going to reach X amount of people. And I can do an equation and shoot you an invoice and you can pay the bill. But if I play a video of Muhammad Ali lighting that torch, his hand shaking from Parkinson's, and you connect to the. The. The great athlete who fly like a butterfly and stung like a bee, but he's weak and weathered through humanity lighting that torch. I've got you emotionally now you're looking at it as, wow. Buying this sponsorship actually connects with an emote. Emotional events throughout history, and no one can touch that. That's worth $2 billion.

No. That's great. And you know, James, one of the things that I like about this is the fact that we are incorporating emotions into this process, as we should, because the emotions are critical elements of all of the decisions that we make. And now a lot of people in sales and negotiation, in these difficult conversations, a lot of times they're afraid of leaning in to the emotionality that would serve them. And so let's talk about the distinction, because right now, I think people could listen to this and say, intellectually speaking, hey, James, I get it. That makes sense. But a lot of times people cognitively understand it, but they still don't do it, because there's some kind of block. And so for those people who are struggling to connect emotionally with their product or their service, the mission, vision, value of the company or their clients or prospects, what advice would you give to them to help them overcome that and lean into the emotionality of these presentations? Does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more. And now back to the show.

I would say think of the one slide that you want to move someone emotionally or to connect with them. Don't think of it as emotion because that might be too out there. But just connect something that you understand and I understand what meme would represent it. If you made a meme to represent it, what would it be? Remember the best memes, there's huge competition nowadays and we've seen them out there. Everyone does it. But what it does is it causes a side and a counter side. It's usually something in culture that is a conflict and they put them on the thing and it causes debate, it causes discussion. It gets that emotion out on to the table. We can think about that meme. What is it? It's. It's the lady yelling and the little cat sitting there in front of the plate of vegetables and they put a hundred different words there and you know what I mean? But it represents so many different things. All that does is represent someone very emotional and someone going, a cat doesn't care. So. Right. And they use it for a hundred things. So think about your business. Think about what is that basic thing. That would be a simple meme. Jot it down on a piece of paper, maybe make a little image of it, because that might be the simple thing that causes the discussion that allows that connection to happen. Once you do that, then you go into my product, it's, you know, 100 times better than this one and it costs 20 times less. And therefore you make money. That all becomes nuts and bolts after it. But if you don't connect with the understanding it makes it difficult.

Absolutely.

Someone asked me the other day, they said, if you were at a plumbing conference, how would you do this? I said, well, I would just think about a picture of a pipe under the kitchen sink, and I would turn the sound up real high and it would go drip, drip, drip, drip. And I would let it drip until everyone's looking at me like, when is this going to stop? And then I would say, you hear that? That is your cash register ringing. How are we going to fix it? And you make the connection between the two. Because as a plumber, you're there to make a living. And you know, oh, God, it's leaking. It's usually tearing together. And if you're in an industry where you know your audience, you know what it is, Pick something. That way. If you're in the tool business, you might be greasing the, in the, in the, in the garage. If you're a cook, it might be burnt butter. I mean, I'm making all this up. I don't know. Do you know what I mean? If you, you can name any industry, you know, if you're a lawyer, you could say it's crossing your T's and dotting your eyes while covering your A's, you know, that's what lawyers do, you know? So it's, it's that type of thing. So I like it. To sum that up, think of your own profession. And if you can make a single meme that shows off what's going on in your, you know, that can create conversation. Start with that. Make that your first slide.

Yeah, I love that. And it sounds like a key element of this is simplicity, too. Yes, yes. And so now again, we can overthink these things. So why is it that simplicity is so powerful when it comes to conveying these message messages?

People understand simplicity. The more complex you get, the more they distrust you. If I can under something very simple, you get it. You know what I mean? It's. They say, dumb it down, keep it simple. I find the more complex something gets, the more I want to pull away from it. How about this Steve Jobs, what did he do to the whole stereo system? Used to be two speakers, equalizer, 20 different knobs, a stereo, a record player, two cassette tapes, all that. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's one circular button on a little device. One button. Anyone before that would be going, no, no, no, no. There's a hundred buttons. We've got an equalizer. We got, no, he's like, no. One button. See how simple that one button on the iPad is. Think $2 trillion today.

Right, right. Yeah. It makes so much sense. And tell me if I'm off on this. I like to get into my nerdy psychological mode, but let's see where I go with this. So when it comes to emotions and the tie of simplicity to emotions, it's easy to understand. But as we start to make these pitches more complicated and as we try to connect with people, but we do it in a way that's a little bit more difficult to understand, to me, it seems as though what we're doing is we're taking them out of that emotional state and moving them to a state where they have to process at a high level. And so even though we're trying to connect emotionally with them, it's difficult for us to do that because they need to process at a high level. So it takes them out of that emotional type of mode.

There's a place for both of those type of things. I find you start with emotion when you've connected, then you go into logic and reason. Logic and reason can get into incredible technical detail that, you know what I mean, can just go on for days and days. And that might be appropriate in a lot of situations. But I find that if you connect and it might just be one slide, it might be simple enough. Think of people who just speak. They connect with the audience by telling a joke in the beginning. Once they've connected, they go, oh, hi, I'm James and I'm here to talk about abc. That's a way of. That's the same thing. You connect with them. It opens them up, it loosens it up. I strike a commonality with you. You have the same pain I do. So like we're, you know, we live. Misery finds each other.

Right, right.

And, you know, that's a, that's a good thing. Find a pain point and join the person in that pain point.

Yeah.

Whatever it is in your industry. Because every industry is built around a pain point.

That's true, that's true. And.

And when you're out of pain point, no one pays money.

Exactly. That's 100% true. And sometimes people are a bit apprehensive to kind of hold like zero in and be laser focused on that pain. But really the, the pain of change needs to be seen as less than the pain of staying in the same spot. And sometimes we need to help them to understand that too.

It's a little bit of courage, of conviction, because if you're, to be honest, if you really don't have the conviction to do your job and to sell your product, do something else. It's really because people will smell that on you, like fear. If you really don't trust what's coming out of your mouth and what you're saying, I don't care if you're Brad Pitt actor, people are smarter than you think they are.

Right.

Subtle confidence takes the cake. And by the way, when you're confident, you're short, you're brief and you're elegant. We were talking about being concise to the point. If you're confident and you understand what you're doing, you don't have a need to try to over convince people.

Right.

Because you say what it is and you say that's it. That's. That's it.

Yeah, I like that. And. And when you think about the biggest mistakes that you've seen as it relates to storytelling within presentations, what are some of the biggest mistakes that people make that come to mind?

Boring the crap out of your audience. And I'll give you a nuts and bolts. And that's just using too much, too many words. If you can bring images, bring a short animation, make something move, try to get your logo to spin around very quietly or something. Because people are trained to watch 10,000 images in like two minutes nowadays. Pick up your phone, there's 22 videos coming off it. Watch a commercial on TV and at 30 seconds, you've got 90 images coming at you. Flash, flash, flash, flash, flash. And they think you're gonna sit and digest something. So you just gotta be prepared that you don't bore the crap out of them. And the easiest way to bore someone is to write too many words on the slide.

Yeah, 100.

Even if you have to say it, even if you have to say those words, try to find a way to do it in a. Give a little visual to it. How would you make someone smile? If you make someone smile, you make their day, you make them happy. Better than the opposite.

Absolutely. And you know, that's a very interesting question because in. That's a really interesting question because I think, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this because I think a strategic mistake when it comes to how people build these presentations, they think about the information that they want to convey and they don't think about how they want people to feel as they walk with you through the journey.

That's right. Well, I think the key there is journey. People don't get the same emotion out of every scene. If I constantly made you mad in 10 scenes in a row. You wouldn't feel good if I made you feel sad in the beginning and then warmed you up and showed something that was cute and loving and then showed a challenging, dangerous situation. Then I scared you, and then I came back with a warm, serene thing and said, everything's going to be all right and I'm going to take care of you. You felt like you went on a journey. You emotionally went. You feel fulfilled, you feel like something went through it. If you are consistent on all of your scenes, remember, every presentation is a story. Every slide's a scene. If you kind of track that a little bit on where you're bringing someone on your journey, in addition to the information you're giving them along the way, it makes a difference. Think of a nursery rhyme. Almost every nursery rhyme is a form of a journey. And along the journey, Little Red Riding Hood finds the wolves, and then she finds Grandma. You know what I mean? There's little lessons in each one of those stages of the journey. At one point, she's happy, she's being fed, then she's scared, and she was. She gets away and survives. You know what I mean? Just everything that goes into it is about a journey. And each scene is emotion. Take it to the Hollywood level. Gee, Hollywood. Do you think George Lucas would create a scene for Star wars if he didn't know the emotion, the mood, the feel of every single character, how Luke Skywalker is going to walk on? Are you going to feel scared for him? Do you think he's going to get ambushed? Or is he coming on strong, ready to kill the next guy? Do you love Chewbacca? Do you think Chewbacca is just an idiot? Or do you think he really understands everyone out there and he's a loyal companion? Are the. You know what I mean? Every single component in a Hollywood movie is so thought about the emotion. How would that person smell? What did they do when they grew up? Why does Harrison Ford have a. Have a. A slash in his lip? He's got a scar here. They put that in Indiana Jones. He did the whip and he accidentally, when he's learned it, he went like this. It whipped his lips. He has a real scar on his lip from real life. But they made it into the movie, which made a little thing about him pulling the gun and taking his whip and getting it. It made it that much better because he learned it as a kid because he whipped himself and you felt bad for him. Wow. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There's so much Intentionality. And, and, and the thing, the thing that I'm realizing, I mean, this is a. This is almost like an impression, impromptu coaching session. So, James, I appreciate this because it's helping me to realize the discrepancy between the elite level presentations and the presentations that we see every day in the business world. It's like they always say, there are levels to this game. And what you're doing here is you're helping us to really be a lot more intentional about the journey that we're taking people on and be more intentional about. Every slide must be calibrated and narrowly tailored to meet a specific goal.

Yeah. We call it structured storytelling. If you structure your slide library in such a way that you know your slides and you considered it a publishing tool, then everyone telling stories from that slide library is more on point, more directed. And every presentation is towards the same horizon. And as time goes by, you start knowing. This slide was used 85 times by our best salespeople. Maybe we should invest a better animation. Maybe we should make a short video for it because it seems like they always close the deal while that slide is up. Or our worst salespeople always talk about the history of the company. Let's get talking about the benefits that type of structured storytelling. And you only learn it once you've created a slide library for people to pull from.

I love it. This is a perfect place for us to end because it goes back to the value that you and your company bring to the. To the market, which is very unique. So I appreciate you coming in and taking the time to share with us, James. Really appreciate it. And again, before you go, tell the listeners about the company and how they can work with you.

Yeah, you can find us at shuffler.com, s h u F F L R R. It's about presentation, management and ensuring that everyone is singing off the same sheet of music. So if you have 25 people presenting on your behalf, or 2,500 or 25,000, you can keep them singing off the same sheet of music. If you want to know more, you can actually get my book at Amazon right now. It talks about presentation, management and the strategy behind it. So you can implement it yourself or come to our website and we'll help you out.

Absolutely. And everybody, there will be links in the description below. James, really appreciate it. Thanks for coming and sharing your wisdom with us.

Thank you. Kwame, Pleasure.

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