Do you have a persuasive sounding voice? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggest that how a voice sounds will impact its persuasive ability. 
"Voice matters -- it's what sells," says John Daly, a University of Texas communications professor who has written a book about persuasion. University of California at Los Angeles psychology professor Albert Mehrabian even claims to have quantified how important a voice is. When we are deciding whether we like the person delivering a message, tone of voice accounts for 38% of our opinion, body language for 55% and the actual words for just 7%, his studies suggest.
The article then goes on to analyze the voices of all major presidential candidates.
Have you ever had a loud mouth, determined audience member try to derail your presentation? I have. What you really want to do is to blast right back, give as much anger and volume as your critic is giving. This is rarely a good approach as you will loose audience sympathy if you come off like a bully. Here are two excellent approaches demonstrated by presidential hopefuls Clinton and Romney.
First Hillary Clinton. Her approach was to get her audience to shut up her heckler. She did not address the heckler directly. She paused, gave a look and smile to draw the audience's attention to him, and the audience took over and shouted him down. When you are giving a presentation your audience is there to hear you, not a heckler. If your audience shuts them up they will feel empowered and much more invested in what you have to say from that point forward. Here is a link to the CNN video. It's a great 47 second clip.
Watch Hillary clobber the heckler with a smile
In contrast, Mitt Romney let the heckler say his piece. This YouTube clip opens with a religious heckler holding the floor while Romney calmly listens. Through the heckler's eventually unkind words Romney was respectful and patient. The audience was so taken with Romney's tolerance that they gave him an immediate standing ovation afterward that he may not have other wise received.
Dealing with a heckler is all about managing audience sympathy. If you can win it and leverage it no heckler will bother you for long.
There's a great post contrasting the graphic presentation styles of Bill Gates and Steven Jobs on the Presentation Zen blog. Blogger Garr Reynolds roots for Jobs' use of minimal graphics over Gates' slides with more complex information.
While the graphic contrast is striking, so are how the slides get flowed during a presentation. Jobs uses his slides in a sequence to involve his audience.
Take the challenge of selling a new idea that emerges when three or four elements combine.
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The common approach that Bill Gates (as well as 90% of presenters I have seen) is using above is to show all elements on the screen with arrows linking them and then explain how each comes together to form the new idea.
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Steve Jobs took this same "several elements create a new idea" challenge, but instead, used a sequence of slides to get the audience more involved during his recent presentation that introduced the iPhone.
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As Jobs returned to the stage at MacWorld, possibly to introduce a new product, he surprised the audience by announcing that Apple was introducing not one, but three revolutionary new products.
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He went on to list all three (shown left 1 to 3) calling each "revolutionary" as he did.
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Then as the screen (4) showed the three new products just named, Jobs repeated those product names 
with a chant like pacing, "An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator."
As he did, the graphics representing the three products morphed into a single 3D shape (5) which started to slowly rotate in the center of the screen.
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Mid way through Job's third repetition of the new products, ("...an iPod, a phone...") he stopped and looked knowingly at the audience. The audience laughed appreciatively. Jobs paused and asked, "Are you getting it?
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Jobs held up a single finger (6) and said,”These are not three separate devices this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone. Today Apple is going to re-invent the phone, and here it is!"
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Bill Gates showed the relationship between the elements of his idea by displaying them on a screen graphically linked with arrows.
Steven Jobs used a series of simple slides to surprise and involve the audience and ultimately to let them "see" the idea in their minds. Jobs never actually displayed an "elements with linking arrows" graphic to explain his idea, instead the idea was build in the collective minds of his audience, one slide at a time.
For those of us making persuasive presentations, there is nothing funny about the cliché that says you should start every presentation with a joke.
Stories, both funny and serious, are the way to begin a persuasive presentation because they engage an audience and invite an empathetic response. When you tell a story about the most embarrassing moment in your life, audience members either start thinking about a similar event in their lives or imagine being put into your story’s situation.
I'm not telling you to avoid jokes, humor is one of the most powerful persuasive tools a presenter has. It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the time and task. Humor has the power to invite an audience to like you, and lighten an audience’s critical thinking and thus resistance to change. Powerful things.
But as you start a persuasive presentation your priorities should be different. You MUST get your audience INVOLVED right from the start. This is where stories are just more powerful.
I did a survey about this for my book, "Presentations That Change Minds."
In the survey, 41.8% of presenters said they begin their business presentations with a humorous story, and 37.8% with a serious story. Only 19.3% begin presentations with a joke and only 14 % of presenters jump right into their content without any opening.
A you plan your next presentation, look for a story that get your audience involved with your subject matter.
Click on the chart to see the survey results.
During the final episode of the "Sopranos," the big showdown between Tony and rival mob boss Phil Leotardo was over, and the episode was winding down as
the Soprano family began to gather at a restaurant. But show creator David Chase, started building tension back in by inter-cutting shots of possibly dangerous characters in and near the restaurant.
Just before the final Soprano family member joined the group, Chase abruptly cut to a blank screen ending the six season hit series. Simultaneously, the sound went dead as the rock group "Journey," was cut mid-song while belting out the refrain "Don't Stop Believin'" from their song of the same name. Curiously, the song stopped just after the words "DON'T STOP!"
Some viewers thought their cable service had gone dead. Many hated it, everyone talked about it.
As a presenter consider this; your audience retains only a fraction of the content you show. In many cases they remember only the first and last things you share so it is critical that these two be powerful and memorable.
In presentations, you achieve maximum impact only in two ways; either by hitting your audience, right between the eyes, with a message so on target it touches their hearts, or by hitting them with a complete surprise. I call this my, "Hit them where they are, or hit them where they ain't" rule. To play it safe in the middle is to risk being unmemorable.
Hats off to David Chase. Love it or hate it, he risked big, and hit us where "we ain't" and we all will remember the ending to "The Sopranos" for a long time.
