Engage your listeners’ passion by tapping into your own
Steve Jobs is passionate about designing cool, fun, and easy-to-use computers, digital music
players, and now phones. And he’s not too bashful to admit it. His words and phrases reflect
his enthusiasm. These quotes are from the iPhone launch and from previous presentations:
Present your theme as a mantra to help your listeners remember it
easily.
Jobs has always been able to craft a vision so vivid and powerful, he rallies his listeners to the
better future he sees and, in so doing, persuades them to go along for the ride. When Jobs
was attempting to lure then-Pepsi CEO John Sculley to lead Apple, Sculley was reluctant
Sell the Benefit
Goal: Explain the real-world problem, then offer your solution.
Once Jobs reveals his one-liner — his core vision — he immediately launches into a
discussion of why the world needs a new phone. A solution is inspiring only when it cures a
real-world pain. Jobs sells the benefit of the phone by first describing the current state of the
industry. The problem, he says, “is [smartphones] are not that smart, and they are not that
easy to use. We want to make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device
has ever been and super easy to use. That is what iPhone is.”
Jobs continues to describe the problem on most smartphones: keyboards, which take up
more than one-third of the phone whether the person is using them or not. The Apple solution
is to create a “revolutionary interface” that will get rid of the buttons and create one giant
screen. This brings up the problem —