The 4-Part Framework for Presentations That Stick and Get Remembered with Vincent Pierri

Summary

The Exit Five CMO Podcast: The 4-Part Framework for Presentations That Stick and Get Remembered with Vincent Pierri

Release Date: August 11, 2025
Host: Dave Gerhardt
Guest: Vincent Pierri, Speaking Coach

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1. Introduction

In this insightful episode of The Exit Five CMO Podcast, host Dave Gerhardt welcomes Vincent Pierri, a seasoned speaking coach who specializes in helping executives deliver impactful presentations. The conversation delves deep into Vincent's unique 4-part framework designed to make presentations memorable and effective.

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2. Vincent Pierri's Background

Vincent begins by sharing his unconventional journey to becoming a speaking coach. Starting in the music industry, Vincent's experience as a band member taught him the importance of engaging an audience. Transitioning from music, he became a pastor, where he honed his public speaking skills by delivering weekly sermons to large congregations. This role required him to constantly innovate his presentations to keep his audience engaged, leading him to develop robust frameworks for effective communication.

Vincent Pierri [03:32]: "Pastors, especially pastors of larger churches, have maybe one of the craziest public speaking expectations of any job. I have to write essentially a 35-minute keynote every single week and deliver it to a room of 500 people."

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3. The 4-Part Framework for Memorable Presentations

Vincent introduces his comprehensive framework, which consists of four main components: Tension, Trust Building, Teaching, and Takeaway. This structure ensures that presentations are not only informative but also engaging and memorable.

a. Tension

The first step involves creating a sense of tension or highlighting a problem that the audience can relate to. This sets the stage for the rest of the presentation by establishing the need for a solution.

Vincent Pierri [11:45]: "If it's going to change one person's life, it will affect a bunch of lives in the room."

b. Trust Building

After establishing the problem, it's crucial to build trust with the audience. Vincent emphasizes sharing personal stories or vulnerabilities to connect on a human level, fostering empathy and credibility.

Vincent Pierri [20:15]: "You build trust really by being humble and self-deprecating. There's nothing that makes people like you or trust you more than hearing from you some embarrassing thing about yourself."

c. Teaching

This core section comprises 70% of the presentation and involves delivering the main content. Vincent breaks this down further into three sub-components:

• Catchy One-Liner: A memorable and punchy statement that encapsulates the core idea.

  Vincent Pierri [28:45]: "The first step is a catchy one-liner where you write something sticky, memorable, punchy, that helps that idea resonate."

• Creative Analogy: Drawing parallels between the presentation topic and unrelated everyday concepts to enhance understanding and retention.

  Vincent Pierri [31:24]: "You pull them out of the subject matter into something unrelated that demonstrates the same principle, helping the idea click."

• Concrete Examples: Providing practical, real-world examples or mini case studies to illustrate the concepts being discussed.

  Vincent Pierri [27:30]: "Give them a framework and a practical example. That's what I recommend happens in every talk."

d. Takeaway

The final component focuses on leaving the audience with a clear and actionable takeaway. This could be a compelling story of someone who successfully applied the presented framework or a visionary statement that inspires further action.

Vincent Pierri [38:15]: "A final closing story of someone who applied your points and found success is a great way to close."

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4. Practical Application and Examples

Vincent shares real-life examples of how his framework has been successfully implemented. He references a talk by Lachey, who, instead of listing 17 points on going solo in marketing, focused on the struggles of working in-house and how going solo addressed those challenges. This approach made her presentation more relatable and impactful.

Vincent Pierri [17:15]: "She was talking about how you don't make enough money to send your kids to college, and it's like keeping you up at night and you don't know if you're going to be able to retire if you stay in this lane."

Another example includes a former detective who transitioned into UX research. By linking his detective skills to user experience, he created an engaging and memorable presentation that resonated deeply with the audience.

Vincent Pierri [33:10]: "He did a talk on what he learned about UXR from being a detective. The connection with the detective mindset made the idea stick."

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5. Deck Development and Delivery

Vincent advises speakers to prioritize practicing their delivery before developing the slide deck. He cautions against overloading slides with information, which can detract from the speaker's connection with the audience. Instead, slides should serve as accents rather than crutches, ensuring that the presentation remains natural and engaging.

Vincent Pierri [39:04]: "If you've got your tension section, your trust building story, your teaching section, and takeaways, the next step is practicing the delivery before you build the deck."

He emphasizes the importance of maintaining a balance between the intellectual, emotional, and practical aspects of the presentation, ensuring that each section complements the others seamlessly.

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6. Final Tips and Closing Remarks

As the conversation wraps up, Vincent offers crucial advice for marketers preparing for upcoming conferences:

1. Start Early: Begin preparing your presentation as soon as possible to allow ample time for refinement and practice.
2. Use a Structured Template: Whether it's his 4-part framework or another method, having a clear structure aids in delivering a coherent and impactful talk.
3. Seek Feedback: Early feedback on your core ideas can boost confidence and improve the overall quality of your presentation.
4. Focus on the Audience: Shift your mindset from presenting to helping your audience. This focus ensures that your content is relevant and valuable to them.

Vincent Pierri [49:43]: "Start as early as you can... Get feedback on the big ideas as early as possible because that will boost your confidence."

Vincent concludes by encouraging speakers to connect with their audience on a personal level, minimizing reliance on slides to foster a more authentic and engaging presentation environment.

Vincent Pierri [46:23]: "I'm always leaning towards, let's get them connected to you rather than to the screen."

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7. Conclusion

This episode offers invaluable insights into crafting presentations that not only convey information but also resonate deeply with audiences. Vincent Pierri's 4-part framework equips marketers and executives with the tools necessary to deliver compelling and memorable talks, ensuring their messages not only stick but also inspire action.

For those looking to enhance their presentation skills, Vincent's strategies provide a solid foundation for creating impactful and engaging presentations that leave a lasting impression.

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Notable Quotes Highlighted:

• Vincent Pierri [03:32]: Speaking about the high expectations in his role as a pastor.
• Vincent Pierri [11:45]: Emphasizing the ripple effect of impacting even one person's life.
• Vincent Pierri [20:15]: On the importance of humility and vulnerability in building trust.
• Vincent Pierri [28:45]: Introducing the catchy one-liner component.
• Vincent Pierri [31:24]: Discussing the role of creative analogies.
• Vincent Pierri [38:15]: Highlighting the effectiveness of a compelling takeaway.
• Vincent Pierri [39:04]: Advising on deck development post-delivery practice.
• Vincent Pierri [49:43]: Final tips on preparation and audience focus.

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By following Vincent Pierri's structured approach, marketers can transform their presentations into powerful tools that engage, inform, and inspire their audiences.

Transcript

[Dave Geart]

This episode is brought to you by Walnut. Why are we pouring all of this effort into marketing? Driving traffic, crafting campaigns just to push buyers to a request, a demo or contact sales button? Come on. Today's buyers, just like you and me, we don't want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works and understand its value before booking a meeting. 70% of the B2B buying journey today is done before someone even contacts a vendor. So putting your product the center of your marketing is the best approach in 2025. And that's where Walnut comes in. Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self guided product experiences in minutes. No engineers, no delays. This is something that I could even.

[Vincent Pietti]

Do on my own.

[Dave Geart]

You can embed these experiences right on your site, in emails or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms. From awareness to close and beyond. That's the beauty of Walnut. You're getting a product that your sales and CS teammates can use to showcase your product before someone buys. And the best part? You get intent data. You can see which features prospects love, where they drop off and what's actually driving pipeline. The demo qualified lead is the new MQL. That's why over 500 companies today use Walnut, including Adobe and NetApp. And they're driving 2 to 3x higher website conversion rates and seven figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical CTA on the website? Go and check out Walnut IO. They're actually going to build out your first demo for free so you can see what this looks like and how it will work for your business. That's Walnut I.O. and tell them you heard about them from Exit 5. They'll hook it up and build out your first demo for free. You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Geart.

[Matt]

Exit in this episode of the Exit 5 podcast, I spoke with Vincent Pietti. Vincent is a speaking coach that helps executives nail high stakes talks. In this episode we talked about how he's helped people prepare for things like speaking at Inbound, how he helped someone from Drive do a speech for all of our members and he walks us through exactly how he preps people for these big talks. But honestly, my favorite part about this episode is all the principles that are taught can be applied to anytime you need to present something. So if you're a marketer like me, you know that you will need to present, whether it's to your team, to the company, or maybe you're sharing your expertise with someone external, maybe it's other peers or your customers. So this episode is something really great that you can have in your back pocket anytime that you need to give a talk. This is one of my favorite episodes to do, and I hope that you enjoy it. All righty. I'm here with Vincent Pietti. Vincent, how's it going?

[Vincent Pietti]

Good, man. How are you? Thanks for having me.

[Matt]

Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. No, it's great to be here. I've seen a lot of your stuff on LinkedIn before. You create some really great graphics, which I think is the original reason why I had reached out to you and we connected and then just wanted to chat more about what your specialty is, which is helping executives nail talks and just helping marketers do better communication overall. So, yeah, we'd love for you to just start by giving the audience a bit of background on who you are.

[Vincent Pietti]

Yeah, a hundred percent, man. Yeah. A lot of people do find me from the graphics, which is so funny. I feel like LinkedIn is the only platform where you can, like, just post infographics and get traction.

[Matt]

Yeah, right.

[Vincent Pietti]

Like, you can't do that on Instagram or anything else.

[Matt]

No.

[Vincent Pietti]

So, yeah, but it works on LinkedIn, which is great. So, yeah, a little bit about my background. I've had sort of a little bit of a windy journey up to this point. I started in the music world, so I was in a band, signed a record deal, toured that whole sort of thing. Never made any money. I think the most we ever made, I ever made personally, was $15 a day on tour. This is, like, back in 2009. So there's a lot of bands that signed record deals and then never actually do a lot. So that was sort of our story. The band ended up breaking up, but that was like, a way of being on stage in front of people that I learned a lot from. And then after several twists and turns, I ended up becoming a pastor. I think we talked about this before, didn't we, on a previous call? Yeah. So that is on my LinkedIn profile. Nobody ever notices. Like, literally says current work is that I'm a pastor of a church, but no one catches it. So that's really what got me into speaking. Pastors, especially pastors of larger churches, have maybe one of, like, the craziest public speaking expectations of, like, any job. Because I'm running a seven figure org. I've got 10 people on the staff team board, budgets, you know all that sort of thing. And I have to write essentially a 35 minute keynote every single week and deliver it to a room of 500 people. And I can't ever recycle any of the same material because it's the same people in general. People come maybe every other week or once a month. So it's maybe a group of a thousand or so who come regularly, but everyone's there frequently enough. You can't use the same joke, you can't tell the same story, you can't use the same analogy, you can't use the same one liner. And in a bigger church like ours is, they don't show up unless they feel like they're getting something out of that talk or sermon every week. So to survive that kind of job, I have had to use frameworks for myself. How do we create a one liner? How do we find the right analogy? How do we sell the right story? And I've got six hours to prep it each week from all of the content and the delivery. So I had to build a bunch of frameworks for myself and really just started posting those online. I obviously watched a ton of talks from the business world as part of the process because it doesn't all translate, but the vast majority of it translates because you're still trying to persuade a big room full of people about something. So that's sort of the journey of how I started doing it. And I. I've been coaching communicators in the nonprofit world for the last maybe 10 years or so, but I just started doing it through LinkedIn. The last year, I just had my one year anniversary.

[Matt]

Nice. Congrats. Thank you. Only a year. You're doing, you're doing really well on LinkedIn. Your engagement's been great.

[Vincent Pietti]

Thank you.

[Matt]

Of course. Okay, so. So that's probably one of the most interesting backgrounds we've had on this podcast. No doubt. Because, you know, most people, they came up through some version of, whether it's sales, marketing or something, founded their own company. Right. So probably the first person to come up through that, which is unreal.

[Vincent Pietti]

I'm not surprised.

[Matt]

Yeah, makes so much sense, though. Like growing up, when I would go to church, a lot of the times my family would choose the church they would go to based on the pastor and based on the talks that they gave. So this all is making sense now. You definitely cannot reuse the content because you go to the same church every Sunday or whenever you go, and you're going to hear that person. So that makes sense. Okay, so that's great context for the audience. By the time this episode is posted, probably in a month or so, conference season is going to be right around the corner. So it's kind of why we wanted to do this episode around this time. We know that for marketing executives and any marketer, anyone, B2B that's doing a talk in the fall at a conference, this episode is going to help you prep for that. But then the other part of it, too, is such a big part of marketing. There's the phrase that in marketing, you have two customers, you have external customers, then you have the internal customers, customers, and whichever one you're marketing to. The fundamentals of communication are such a big part of our success as marketers, and it's something that we need to nail. Any meeting we go into, any weekly update, any marketing message, those fundamentals are always at play. So I want to dig into those. But let's start on the conference side as the scenario, and then if we want to branch from there, I think. I think we can do that.

[Vincent Pietti]

Sounds great.

[Matt]

So from your end, let's say I'm a marketer marketing executive that is going to speak at. Maybe it's a conference like Inbound. Maybe I don't have the keynote. Maybe I just have a small little stage. But I'm going to speak at a conference like Inbound in the fall, and I want to talk about everything that I've learned about demand generation and this shift with AI. Where do you start with someone like, what are the steps you're taking somebody through to think through that talk?

[Vincent Pietti]

Yeah, that's a great first question. One of the. This is funny. I'm remembering. I actually coached. I'll leave it anonymous probably for now, but I coached a couple people who spoke at Inbound last year. First talk ever in front of 3,000 people.

[Matt]

Wow.

[Vincent Pietti]

And their first talk. And we got on our first coaching call the day the deck was due. Whoa. So that is not ideal. And that is not the best way to get to, like, a great talk. We did a lot of things that I think helped them get there. They got a great rating. At Inbound, you get a rating from the audience. They got a great rating, like, better than average for the conference, even though is their first one. But oftentimes that is how the process starts. Because a lot of times people don't reach out for a coach until it's like they've sort of discovered they're not ready. They're like, oh, shoot, this is a month away. And like, I don't even Know what I'm going to say. And I've given that, like, oftentimes they'll already have handed in a deck, and then they reach out to me. They're like, this deck's already in, but it's not good. And know what to do. So I'll share just a little bit on, like, the ideal path. But if someone stumbles on this and you're four weeks out and you're panicking and it's like. Feels like it's too late. It is not too late. We can figure it out even on a tight timeline. But your original question was just like, sort of some of the core thoughts to, like, mind us to have as you're prepping for it.

[Matt]

Yeah, yeah, some of the core. Exactly. Exactly.

[Vincent Pietti]

Yeah. Great. So one of the first things we talk through in an ideal scenario, and oftentimes in less ideal scenarios, is let's try to think of one person who, you know personally who could benefit from this talk. When people are writing a talk for a big event, oftentimes they picture a big crowd. They picture a big generic crowd, and they say, what would this crowd of people benefit from? The problem with that is it is a big generic crowd that you don't actually feel any personal connection with. You don't have a deep empathy for a big crowd or a big understanding of what they're thinking through or what they're dealing with. And so what you tend to do is you tend to put things down on paper that are just sort of industry best practices, like the new thing or the hottest thing, or just stuff that everyone kind of already knows, but you feel like you have to say it to show that you know what you're doing, rather than thinking, what does a person in this room actually need? The first thing we do is we come up with a single person who they know, and I tell them, someone you know and love. That's kind of a cheesy word.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Vincent Pietti]

But if it's someone you want to win, that you actually want to see succeed, it pulls the best stuff out of you. So that couple for inbound, the deck that they had do that night, the one they had sketched out, had 17 points in it. And I was like, okay, this is all fine, but you've got 35 minutes and 17 points, and you're just not going to be able to get the right stuff in order for this. So what we did is we came up with, okay, who's one person, you know, who might be there? They don't even have to be there. But they would like this talk. What are these 17 points would actually help set them up for success. And we narrowed it down to that sort of thing. So that's what we always do. Who's a real person? What do you know that that real person either doesn't know or they are not doing? Sometimes it's not lack of information, but it's a lack of understanding, application. How do I do this? How do I roll it out? What have you succeeded at that other people have not succeeded at? And start with those first core high value ideas that are going to be unique to you and really help one real person. If you write something that one real person would be wowed by, the crowd will be wowed by it.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Vincent Pietti]

Like if it's going to change one person's life, it will affect a bunch of lives in the room. That's the same mindset I use for preaching. It's the same mindset we honestly used back in the day in the music world. Like, if you say, what's a song? The radio is going to like. You write your worst songs.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Vincent Pietti]

But if you're like, what's a song? My best friends would actually just like play and be like, this is a jam or a bop, whatever the kids are saying these days. I don't know. That helps you write your best music, it helps you write your best sermons, and it helps you write your best talks as well.

[Matt]

I love this. Yeah. Two things that I'm teasing out of this is one, this is partly why it's important to give yourself a bit of time to do this too. Because I find myself whenever I've done a talk. Yeah. Whenever I presented anything, my original draft or deck always has too much. It always happens. And then you sleep on it for a day or two and you get back to it and you're like, oh, actually, like, it's really just these 10 things. And then maybe as time goes on, you've trimmed it down to like seven or six things. And then it's like you have your like six talking points in an hour. Not necessarily saying six isn't too much. Six could also be too much in an hour. But you get what I'm saying. It's. I mean, I found it helpful to start wider and trim. Is that something that you've typically coached your clients onto?

[Vincent Pietti]

That is a great way to do it Sometimes though. What I'll literally say is, I'll be like. And I'll ask you this right now, Matt, what's like your favorite? Are you a beer guy? Or a coffee guy?

[Matt]

Both.

[Vincent Pietti]

Both. Okay, so like, let's say you're getting a beer. Where do you. What's your favorite spot?

[Matt]

Near you Favorite spot near me. There's a. There's actually a brewery called Indie Ale House. It's pretty cool.

[Vincent Pietti]

Indie Ale House. Perfect.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Vincent Pietti]

It's like if you were going to do a talk and I was going to help you through that process, I'd be like, okay, you are at Indie Ale House with whoever that person is and they pull out their phone and they're like, matt, I have this problem. And it's the problem your talk is going to solve. And they're like, tell me the three things I got to do. I got to leave in five minutes. Tell me the three things I got to do. And you love that person. And you're like one beer in, right? Maybe two. What's actually going to come out of your mouth if you're trying to help that person? Because a lot of times your intuition will be right when it's someone you really care about and you're face to face over coffee, over a beer or whatever.

[Matt]

Yeah, I love that. And I think it just changes what you're going to talk about, how you're going to talk about it to. You're going to be more yourself and you're going to be. What if you're a funny person? You're getting more funny and witty. Whereas when you're speaking to a crowd, it's like, how can I just stay in the most center lane the whole time?

[Vincent Pietti]

Right. The safest lane. The most centered lane. Yes. Which is the worst lane to be in?

[Matt]

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, very cool. Very cool. Okay, so that makes sense. So the starting point is think of a person, you know, that could help and how you would talk about this topic to them. What are some things after that?

[Vincent Pietti]

Yeah. So the next phase we would generally go to. And seriously, for anybody listening, you can run this whole play on your own. And I don't know if we want to give a full roadmap, but everything you're hearing, you can do on your own. At least a basic version of it. The next step is to really give yourself sort of a super structure. So a few main parts of the talk. There are four I often use with clients. Tension, trust building, Teaching takeaway. Tension, trust building, teaching takeaway. The teaching section are those 3, 4, 5 points. That's the main stuff here. Communicating. But you do not want to start with, hey, guys, I'm talking about AI and marketing. Here are three Things you need to know about AI and marketing. Right. It's. That's probably bad talk anyways because that talk's been done like 18,000 times. But you don't want to start with your points. You want to start by building tension that the rest of your talk resolves. You want to start by introducing a problem that your teaching points are going to be the solution for. So I'll use one real example, because she's part of your ecosystem. Lachey. Right. Were you there at. Was that two years ago or last year?

[Matt]

No, last year. Drive. Yeah, I was there.

[Vincent Pietti]

You were there at drive, right?

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Vincent Pietti]

Yeah. So we worked on that talk. Her very first talk. I think she'd be fine. She posted this all on LinkedIn, so I think it's fine to share. She was nervous. It was her very first talk, and it was her very first marketing conference she had attended.

[Matt]

Yeah. It was her very first flight she's been on, too. Oh, yeah. It was the first. So many first.

[Vincent Pietti]

Yeah. So in light of all that, she literally crushed it. But we use this same principle. So her talk was how to build a successful solo marketing business. So she had four points on how to go solo as a marketer. She did not start by saying, here are my four points about how to go solo. She said, hey, here's the pain we're all experiencing working in house. You don't have the creative freedom you wish you have. Like, you. You got into marketing because you like marketing, and now there's red tape and bureaucracy and stakeholders and there's stuff you want to do. There's stuff that's inside you that you just can't try because you're working in house in this one lane. And she did not rush through that. Like, she had storytelling and analogies and. And things along those lines just to bring that tension up in the room. You want to create tension because that's what makes the rest of the talk not boring, is when it brings to light those things. I was nudging this and she just ran with it. But she went, like, very human. Like, she was talking about how you don't make enough money to send your kids to college, and it's like keeping you up at night and you, like, don't know if you're going to be able to retire if you stay in this lane. So that's, like, sometimes even deeper than I might recommend. But it was in her, and I knew it was genuine for her because that's what drove her into building her own business. So that's step One of the sort of superstructure is build tension that your teaching points are going to resolve.

[Matt]

Okay, that's great. That's a great point with that. How much humor could be mixed in with. In the tension stage? Is that something that you'd recommend sprinkling into it?

[Vincent Pietti]

Humor for me, I've done some research on this. There is like no science of humor. People that are like, I'm a humor coach. I'm like, are you though? Are you though? Because like, sometimes I can get people crying, laughing, and sometimes I will make a joke and it is like dead. Nobody laughs. And every standup person you talk to, I mean, people who literally study this and are dedicating their whole lives to it will say, the first two years I bombed, like every set I did bomb. So if you are not a full time speaker, I am like, humor with caution. Because if it doesn't come naturally and it's not your full time gig, it is better to be less funny than try to be funny, not be funny. And no one's even going to care that you cracked the joke and it didn't land. But you start to spiral.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Vincent Pietti]

And, oh, they didn't think that was funny. They come funny and they get in their head and they get weird. So if it comes naturally, great. If it doesn't, in the business world, in the market marketing world, I'm like, don't put that pressure on yourself.

[Matt]

Okay, cool. Okay, awesome.

[Vincent Pietti]

All right.

[Matt]

So in the superstructure, point number one is tension. Point number two was teaching. Right.

[Vincent Pietti]

Teaching is actually third.

[Matt]

Okay.

[Vincent Pietti]

There's one more in between step. Trust building.

[Matt]

Trust building. Okay, let's talk about that.

[Vincent Pietti]

Yeah. So oftentimes after your tension section, people feel Lachey's was a little different because it was very empathy oriented. But a lot of times after the tension section, you're kind of saying, hey, here's a problem you have and you haven't been able to solve it. And people can feel a little talked down too. Like you're just showing up as the expert with the expert hat on being like, here are all your problems. Here I am to save the day and solve them. So if you go straight from tension to teaching, sometimes there can be a little bit of a barrier between you and the room where they're like, don't tell me what to do. Right. So the trust building section is where you essentially share your story briefly, walking in their shoes. It is not where you say, here's why you should trust me because I'm amazing. It's. You build trust really by being Humble and self deprecating. So Lachey talked about how terrified she was to go solo. Didn't want to make the jump, essentially had to get pushed out of the nest in a way and then tried a bunch of things that didn't work right away. So you essentially put yourself in their spot and say, I've been there. You can't fake it. You have to actually plan something to share that's going to feel a little embarrassing. Like you're like, I don't actually want to say this because it kind of makes me look like an idiot. But when you do that, that is when all the magic starts. Because there's nothing that makes people like you or trust you more than them hearing from you some embarrassing thing about yourself. Like when I'm talking to clients, oftentimes when I'm coaching them, as I'm telling them all these things to do, sometimes I'll say, this isn't in a talk, this is a one on one. But I'll share the story of like the first time I ever had to speak in front of like 150 people. I slept for two and a half hours the night before and I took like, I did like a shot of bourbon. Didn't work. I did like a Vicodin. Didn't work. I was doing whatever I could to try and fall asleep and literally couldn't fall asleep until like 2am and then they go, oh, you get it, you get it. And then kind of open them hearts up to coaching for me in that moment. But it's the same thing on stage. If you can say something embarrassing that gets people to go, he's just like me. She's just like me. After the tension and the trust building, they want to hear what you have to offer.

[Matt]

Okay, cool, cool. Yeah, that makes sense. So when you said trust building, the marketer brain in me automatically went to like social proof. But that's not what this is. This is like, let me meet you human to human level, where you're at today. Because I've been in your shoes once and almost in a sense, like, like you said, self deprecating. Like, almost like give yourself a little knock, like show, show a wound, show a scar, for lack of better words.

[Vincent Pietti]

That's exactly it. Exactly it. Yes.

[Matt]

Okay, cool. So we got tension building, we got trust building is the second piece of it. The third is teaching. Let's talk about that.

[Vincent Pietti]

Yep. So those are your three main points and there's sort of a sub framework. I don't know how deep into this we want to go. But the next sort of logical thing people speakers go to is, okay, I've got my three points. How do I like talk about them? Right. Am I just going to say here's my first point. Okay, here's an example of it. Okay, here's my second point. Here's an example. Like, it's hard to like figure out how to turn those core ideas into a talk. So let's use you again as an example that you said you did a talk at some point.

[Dave Geart]

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[Matt]

Yeah, I did.

[Vincent Pietti]

Last few years. What was it?

[Matt]

So it was actually, it was for this, this fellowship that I was part of when I graduated university. I went back, I was part of it six years ago. I went back and I just talked about essentially what marketing looks like in a startup.

[Vincent Pietti]

Okay. Yep.

[Matt]

They're like fresh out of school, people who maybe have done an internship or Two but aren't really aware of like what a career in marketing might look like as a, as a recent graduate of school.

[Vincent Pietti]

And those types of people may end up at a startup.

[Matt]

Yeah, yeah. That is the intention of the fellowship is to get them from university to startup environment.

[Vincent Pietti]

Okay. Do you remember any of your main points or just one of them?

[Matt]

Yeah, one of them was in a startup you're going to do all facets of marketing. You're going to do product marketing to management, content analytics, ops, all that stuff. It's not just one lane.

[Vincent Pietti]

Great. Do you remember sort of how you developed that point?

[Matt]

How did I develop it? No, I think honestly, weirdly enough. Well, I'm like anyone. I guess my ideas just come to me randomly. So I just spent time like marinating on ideas that in an undistracted state. And it just kind of came to me like, oh, this would be a good, good thing to talk about.

[Vincent Pietti]

Do you remember any of the specific that you ended up choosing or coming to?

[Matt]

Any of the specific?

[Vincent Pietti]

If not, I mean, I probably wouldn't either. Like, did you use stories or like an example or like.

[Matt]

Yeah, so what I did was I did a couple of things I showed Emily Kramer has this great diagram of all the different functions in marketing. So I use that to give a visual of here's in marketing, here are all the different functions. So in demand gen, here's. Here's different things in content, here's different things. And then what I did was I just showed an example of a campaign I did where it's like the idea, the stakeholder alignment, the creating of the assets, the promoting the assets. So working with the sales team, working with our contractors, et cetera. So I just walk them through an example.

[Vincent Pietti]

That's great. Great. So what you just described, perfect little mini case study here, what you gave them is like a framework and a practical example. Yeah, that is what I recommend happens in every talk. Basically when you're developing a point, there are three steps. That's in my way of doing things. That's the third step. Give them a framework. Give them a practical example. There are two steps I recommend before that. One, when I'm coaching people, we spend very little time on that third step because that's the kind of content speaking content that generally comes naturally to somebody who's new to speaking. Okay. You gotta be good at a lot of things when you're in a startup environment. Let me give you a framework. Let me give you an example from my life. So what I recommend, I use three C'S the first one is a catchy one liner. The second one is a creative analogy. And then the third one is the concrete examples. So one of the ways to make a point stick. First step is a catchy one liner where you write something sticky, memorable, punchy, that helps that idea resonate and hopefully stick in people's minds. Did you have one for that? You may have also done that. Some people do do it.

[Matt]

Yeah. Mine was. I think it was there are 22 different functions in marketing. You'll do all 22 or something like that. It was something like there's 22 of them. You'll do every single one of them.

[Vincent Pietti]

I love it. I love it. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. So, yeah, you say, okay, here are three things you gotta know when you get to your teaching section. Here's the first thing. There are 22 functions in marketing and you gotta get good at all. 22 when you're starting, right? Yeah. A lot of times what will work to create those one liners is to take sort of what you're trying to say and then the misconception people have and smush them together into one sentence. So you kind of probably did it there, actually. But another way you could take it might be something like, in the long run of your career, you're going to get really good at one thing. In the short run of your career, you got to get pretty good at everything. Helping sort of contrast those two ideas. Or you go more punchy. Right. Getting your first job is not about being a specialist, it's about being a generalist. It's not about doing one thing, it's about doing everything. That's a little bit against the grain, I would imagine, at least for some people's thinking. Because people tend to think they got to become specialists, which is true in the long run. So, yeah, you had a one liner. It's great. So you write that one liner, you spend some time on it, you put it on a slide, you say the one liner, and then you use that as a launching point to just explain the basics of the concept. Yeah, that's the first step. Catchy one liner. Second step is creative analogy. This is oftentimes overlooked. If you didn't have one, maybe you did. What you did would be amazing. What most people don't, but that's where you try to pull something from everyday life to make the concept click on an emotional level before you give those more tactical examples. So, for example, I'm just making this up and it might not even work that well, but you might say like, hey, there are people who are roof people, or there are people who are basement people. Like, we have a leak in our basement, we brought someone in called basement doctor. That's all they do is they fix leaks in basement. But if you're going to build a house, you can't just be good at basements. You gotta be good at basements. You gotta be good at foundations and walls and drywall. You have to be able to do it all if you're building a house as opposed to just focusing on one aspect of a house. And as marketers fresh out of this fellowship, you are building a house. It's not the greatest analogy, but you get the idea.

[Matt]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Vincent Pietti]

You pull them out of marketing, you pull them out of the subject matter, whatever the people are speaking on, into something unrelated that demonstrates the same principle, but then helps that idea click. Before you put up that list of functions or the framework or your stories that make sense, you give the one liner, brief explanation, analogy, and then the other stuff you mentioned at the beginning.

[Matt]

Okay, got it, got it. Okay. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So there's the three steps, there's the, the catchy one liner, the creative analogy, and then the concrete example. Are the first two just kind of teeing you up for number three or those with what set it up? Like, how much time are you spending on 1 and 2, verse 3?

[Vincent Pietti]

My take is that those first two are what makes a talk easy to listen to and sort of non downloadable and non googleable. So I actually recommend not breezing through them because as soon as you put those 22 things up there, people kind of get it. And the story of your own journey is great because stories are always great, but people kind of get it. But what people will come up to you afterward and say, oh my gosh, I wrote down when you said there are 22 functions and I have to learn all 22. I wrote that down and they posted on LinkedIn and it just feels fun. The house analogy or whatever kind of analogy you use, people will go, oh my goodness, I never forgot about that thing. Another client who was a former detective and now he's in uxr, you know, with uxr. Yeah, it's like user experience research. It's like where they study what people do on an app and where they get stuck and that sort of thing.

[Matt]

Right.

[Vincent Pietti]

So he did a talk is actually his first talk was a paid keynote and he did it on what I learned about uxr, UX research from being a detective. You gotta believe the only thing people wanted to hear was the detective story.

[Matt]

Yes, right. Yeah, exactly.

[Vincent Pietti]

And it's so cool to go, oh, here's all this connection with the detective mindset and then the research mindset. And in retrospect, we probably should have had to spend even more time on the creative elements because that's what makes the idea stick. Another way to think about it is the one liner is the intellectual moment, the analogy is the emotional moment, and the concrete part is the practical moment. So I like to keep them balanced between those three things when it comes to how much time you spend on each one.

[Matt]

Yeah, okay, cool. That makes sense. Yeah, no, that kind of makes it click because, you know, if you think of the type of stuff that there obviously are scenarios where people want to read and consume extremely tactical or practical content, but the stuff that gets people coming back and super hooked and just like so engaged is the stuff that's somewhat entertaining too. It's like fun to just hear about how detective does their work and within that you're weaving in stories of how it relates to user experience, design and research.

[Vincent Pietti]

Yes.

[Matt]

So that's a great point. That's a really, really great point.

[Vincent Pietti]

Yep. 100%. 100%. And so few people are doing it. If you do it at a talk, like at an event, it just stands out so much from the rest of the room.

[Matt]

Yeah. And I guess that's also why just overall, like you said, it's so important to try and be as authentic and genuine and talk from your own personal experience when you're trying to go outside of that bubble. I've even made the mistake going outside of that bubble and trying to sound smarter than I am or be the know it all, it just always falls flat because you can't follow that type of structure. You could only go to a concrete example that is probably something you've ripped off from something you found on the Internet anyway.

[Vincent Pietti]

So true. So true. Yeah, that's a great point.

[Matt]

Yeah. Okay, awesome. So in the superstructure so far, we had tension, which was point number one. We had trust building, which is point number two. We had teaching, which is point number three. Within teaching, we had a substructure that had three steps, which was a catchy one liner, creative analogy and concrete examples. Was there a fourth part of the substructure? Am I making that up or the superstructure? Am I making that up?

[Vincent Pietti]

The final piece. And quick clarification to the teaching section that has that little mini structure. That teaching section is going to be 70% of your whole talk, okay? Because that's where you're giving your three main ideas and you're developing them. You're coming up with the analogies. You're giving them the examples. So the three little subsets, you know you're going to do that three times, four times, five times. In the teaching section, you run those three Cs for each main point. So that's your biggest section. Tension is the setup, trust building, setup. Teaching is the bulk. Then the final piece is a shorter one again. And that's where you try to leave them with one main takeaway as the fourth piece. So the takeaway. There's some freedom here. One thing I love to recommend is a story about someone who isn't you, who ran the playbook you just taught him in the teaching section, and it worked for that person. Back to Lachey's talk. She does her whole talk, how to build a successful solo marketing business. She weaves her own story through those points, which she closed with talking about somebody else who had followed the same playbook and also went solo. If she ended with and now here's what I did and I'm killing leaves with her as the hero. But if she ends with somebody else who applied the same information and found success, now, it leaves with someone representative of the audience as the hero. And it also shows, this just didn't work for me. This works for everybody or can work at least for everybody. So a final closing story of someone who applied your three or four points and it worked is a great way to close. It's oftentimes where you have to do some research as the speaker, because you're like, I don't know if I know anyone who did these three or four things, but if you do some research and you got some good content, you'll be able to find somebody. So story is the main thing. If you want to do like a cta, that's the spot to do it. Sometimes a single kind of call to action is another thing you can do in the takeaway. These are sort of plug and play options. You kind of pick which ones feel right for the moment. Depending on the environment, you can do a little bit of what you might call vision. Right? Picture if the marketing world functioned like this, picture if we all started doing this, how much better would we like our jobs? How much happier would our clients be? Sort of that, like vision casting for the future. You know, that's a world I want to live in. Isn't that a world you want to live in? Let's do this Together. So yeah.

[Matt]

Okay, cool, cool. Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. Okay, great. Okay, so with the superstructure now, is there. In the beginning it was like pick one person that you want to speak to personally. And then after that it's the superstructure. Is there another step after that or is that the main. Are you done after superstructure development?

[Vincent Pietti]

If you've got your tension section, your trust building story of you looking like a fool, your teaching section, one liner analogy, concrete examples for each point, closing story. In my mind, I assume next step is to start practicing the delivery.

[Matt]

Okay, got it. How about deck development? Like are you usually recommending individuals that are going to creating that themselves? Finding somebody to create it for them? What do you coach people on there?

[Vincent Pietti]

I like to encourage people to start practicing before they make the deck.

[Matt]

Okay.

[Vincent Pietti]

Interesting to say, Can I, with this fairly sparse outline, can I just say this from my gut how I want to say it? When we start building a deck, especially if we're starting to add detail to the deck, a few things can go wrong. One, our decks often starts to deviate from our outline. You start just throwing things on the deck that aren't in your original roadmap and before you know it, you can't really remember how your talk even goes. One of the great things about those four T's is you know what you're doing in each part. In the intro, I'm building tension, then I'm building trust, then I'm teaching, and then I'm giving a takeaway. And then how am I developing each of these points? Oh, I've got these three Cs. They're the same three Cs every single time. It's like so linear and so you can really just riff onto them. Be yourself. If you add a bunch of bullet points and animations and memes and all this other crap to your deck, oftentimes you get confused. That's the first problem. The second problem is that you will tend to give yourself more script. It's not really a script, but more pre planned. This is what I need to say at every single slide, then will serve you to sound natural.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Vincent Pietti]

So if you've got 30 minutes and 30 slides and each slide has three or four bullet points, you're just reading now and that feels horrible to people in the room. I say if you're one again, back to the dinner scenario, the beer scenario, the coffee scenario. If you're one on one with somebody and you had those four T's and those analogies and those concrete examples all planned out in your head. And that person said, hey, can you help me understand this? That would be so much preparation to be able to talk for 25 minutes, just to talk through that in a conversation. You'd be like, I have so much I gotta share in the next 25 minutes if I'm gonna try to get through all these different ideas. But then when we get on stage, we don't. We get out of conversation mode. We go more performance mode, and we try to have everything memorized. We get very awkward. So we give ourselves more and more and more sort of crutches. I gotta say this and this and this and this bullet, this bullet, this bullet. And so I say, give yourself that simple roadmap. Start practicing, and then just once it starts to feel comfortable, then you use the deck as sort of accents.

[Matt]

Okay, I like that. Yeah. I've always found, like, the deck kind of becomes this burden of a thing when you're practicing. It's like, oh, this thing didn't sound great or didn't roll off the tongue. So how am I going to reorient the deck for it to either fit or be removed or something to be added on? So it does kind of bind you sometimes. Although there also are times where I find the deck is a good way to trigger the start of a certain talking point. So how do you coach between some level of memorization and the deck being the thing that walks you through the sequence of what you're supposed to be talking through? How do you then go and take what you have and translate that to a deck or to a memory of things to talk about?

[Vincent Pietti]

Some of it depends on the comfort level of the speaker. Like, if they're freaking out, we'll put a bit more on the deck to give them a little bit more of those safeguards. The bumpers on the alley. If they're a little more comfortable, then we'll go a little more sparse. So, like, your talk to that group of people finishing this fellowship, right?

[Matt]

Fellowship, yeah.

[Vincent Pietti]

So tell me, what are some of the. If they were to apply all the stuff that you gave them to land that first job, what are some of the problems or fears that they're feeling like that would be solved? What are the problems that would be fixed? Or maybe what are the anxieties that they're feeling in the moment as you start that talk?

[Matt]

I think, yeah, for them, it's just like they're not even really being sure if marketing is for them, if it's the right job for them to get into. If it's as lucrative as something like sales or engineering or something like that.

[Vincent Pietti]

What do they feel specifically when it comes to the. Is it the right field? Like any. What does that look like for somebody?

[Matt]

Yeah, I think it's a confusion point. I think the deeper thing too is am I picking the right career path?

[Vincent Pietti]

How did a lot of them get into marketing? How do they choose that to begin with?

[Matt]

Well, for them, they didn't choose it. That's the thing. This is more of a general boot camp and marketing is just one sliver of it. So they get to learn, they get to learn about sales, marketing, product ops and everything there. So I was just there to be like, this is what the marketing part looks like.

[Vincent Pietti]

Okay, so what's the bootcamp? Who attends the bootcamp? Are they pre choosing a major?

[Matt]

No, they're just graduating university. They're in their last year and they're about to leave, so they're about to go into the workforce.

[Vincent Pietti]

What sorts of like straight business degrees or something?

[Matt]

No, not even. It's typically not business degrees who want to get into startups.

[Vincent Pietti]

Interesting. What sorts of majors?

[Matt]

Could be psychology, sociology. Could be some business, could be some engineering. It's a mix, honestly.

[Vincent Pietti]

Okay, great. So perfect little mini case study here that was all in your head at the tip of your tongue from years ago. So if you could, if, like, if I was coaching you, I would just say, okay, we're just reverse engineer that and just talk to them about that. Hey, you guys are all here, you just finished a four year degree and you're going, did I literally just screw up my entire life because I majored in this thing and now I don't even want to do it. And I realized it's not going to land me a job or it's not going to land me a job that can pay the bills. And so you're kind of throwing this like Hail Mary final like, okay, maybe I'll just try this thing to see if it could land me a job after I just spent all this money and all these years studying something I'm not even going to use. And now you're trying to make a decision on this path, this path, this path, this path. And I would imagine most of you in this room are freaking out, you're terrified and you're going, what am I supposed to do? So I want to hear, I'm here today to tell you I can't solve all that for you. I can't fix all those fears. But my goal for you in this talk is that you will have A very clear understanding of what it might look like for you to go down the marketing path. I want you to know what it will take and I want you to know whether it's gonna sound exciting to you or not. And what it might look like to take some first next steps. Now I'm guessing if you practice that two or three times, it would probably start to come out pretty natural. Does that make sense?

[Matt]

Yeah, 100%. 100%. That's great.

[Vincent Pietti]

Just talking to them, Just talking to them in their world. In this again, I always come back to the sitting face to face the same way you would over coffee, the same way it over a beer. You're just showing up for them as a friend and you don't want to plan the sentences, you just want to plan what you're trying to do for them in that moment. That's the tension building moment. You're bringing all these sort of fears to the surface for them, but not for many mal intent reasons, but so that you can meet them where they are. If you can do that without any slides, that's always my recommendation.

[Matt]

Yeah, okay.

[Vincent Pietti]

Because you're just talking to them and they will look at you and you look at them. Every time you have something on the screen, you do not have their eyeballs on you. Every time the screen changes, they stop looking at you and they look at the screen. And sometimes you want that to happen because you want them to see the visual on the screen more than you want them to be looking at you. But in general, I'm always leaning towards, let's get them connected to you rather than to the screen. Now if somebody's like, I can't pull that off, well then we make a couple bullets. Here are the three things you might be experiencing walking into this session. Thing one, thing two, thing three, this is how I lean, obviously from my background in the church world. I try to use as few slides as possible. I do use them, but I try to use as few as possible so I can connect with people on an emotional level. And I was kind of wondering like, maybe that's just a preacher thing. Then I was coaching this lady who's a AI startup for lawyers, for general counsel of companies. And she was talking to me and she was talking to another coach who works with like some of the highest level people, a speaking coach. And he was like, I try to get every one of my clients to do no deck, nothing, no slides. He was like, well, the world's leaders do not talk to you from a slide deck. As soon as you have a deck. You're already just kind of lowering the value. Now. I. I have yet to get a client to do a talk without a deck. So that's not like, I don't, like, push that hard. But I think that's just sort of a universal communication principle, is if you can do fewer, that's better, but if you need more, it's better to have more and you not panicking than the other way to have fewer. But you're like, I don't remember what I'm going to say. So we're kind of just working that balance client by client.

[Matt]

Okay, very cool. Yeah, it's definitely. The deck is, say, sometimes a crutch for people, for sure. But it's also such a burden sometimes I wish I could. That's kind of why I love doing stuff like this, like just chatting on a podcast, because this is when my best stuff comes out. When I could just kind of talk from the heart and go back and forth with somebody and the same with the talk, like, if I've ever done one. Even when I've done webinars presenting things, some of my work at exit 5, the deck is always like. Like, I don't. Sometimes I do have something to show them, a screenshot, so it makes sense. But I wish I could just talk. Yeah.

[Vincent Pietti]

And if you've got a clear roadmap, maybe you can.

[Matt]

Yeah, true. Maybe using this now, I can, you.

[Vincent Pietti]

Know, break the mold. Yeah. Instead of being the tiny little square in the corner with this big, random, you know, deck that some. Some designer made you, you get yourself big on everybody's screen and.

[Matt]

Yeah, 100% that's it. Well, I know that when we release this episode, there's no doubt that it's going to be good timing for some people I know for us, for Drive, it's coming up again this September, and we already have all our speakers chosen. I'm sure a lot of them have not started working on their talk because it's in September, and that's just not how most people operate. I listen to HubSpot's podcast Marketing against the Grain, and they talk all the time about their upcoming Inbound conference in San Francisco they're doing this year. So a lot of speakers in the marketing world have already been chosen, and I could guess that very few are prepped and ready to go. So do you have any closing, final words for those people?

[Vincent Pietti]

I would say start as early as you can. If you don't love the template I just shared, find some kind of template to Structure your thoughts with. Get feedback on the. I'm kind of rapid firing these, but get feedback on the big ideas as early as possible because that will boost your confidence. Start practicing as early as possible because that will boost your confidence as well. And then day of just focus on trying to help people. In terms of delivery, best advice I have is just be like, I'm nervous. It's okay to be nervous. What difference is this going to make in somebody's life? How could it help somebody succeed? And train your mind to just focus on that process person.

[Matt]

Love it. All right, well, if you want to find more Vincent's content, he's on LinkedIn, you know, has really, really great stuff. Super visually engaging stuff that even I've learned a ton just getting through. So go give him a follow on LinkedIn. Who knows, maybe he can help you with a future talk. But Vincent, this has been awesome. Even I've learned so much from talking to you. I haven't done a lot of talks. Maybe I'll do more in the future, but now I know if I do have the best structure in the world to follow. So I really, really appreciate it. And you know, I'll see you around.

[Vincent Pietti]

The Exit 5 community sounds great, man. Thanks for having me.

[Matt]

Of course. Thanks.

[Dave Geart]

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what, I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are. So you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more Exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.

[Matt]

Foreign.

[Dave Geart]

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