Prove It!

So, you've told your audience what you expect them to do, why they should do it and how they can get on with things. But even though you may have got your message across, you haven't really underlined it as yet. You need to provide evidence for your assertions - prove what you have said is beyond dispute. The 'prove it' section of your talk is the most important part you need to write, after the key message. So spend lots of time in planning this.

You can prove your key message in several ways, but the main evidence will come from:

• Personal examples
• Case studies
• Statistics

Individual, personal examples are immensely powerful - especially if you tell them as stories. Case studies are in depth examples and can be useful, but they are more difficult to tell as stories. Statistics are useful to help prove a point, but they do not carry as much weight as examples and case histories. That's because people know that you can massage the statistics in your favour, so they put less trust in them.

In our example the 'prove it' section may go on to consider:

The story about the marketing manager you met at a conference who said the program had enabled much greater control of marketing programmes

The case study of the company which used the software and achieved a much happier marketing team as a result

The figures from several companies that showed marketing efforts were 30% more successful when the software was used

► So now you know the three steps to a successful presentation, all you have to do is put them together in USING WHPI.