Why Showing Beats Telling in Every Presentation
Seeing is believing. That old cliche exists because it is true. You can explain something for twenty minutes and people will nod politely. But show them, physically demonstrate it in front of their eyes, and they believe.
That is the entire argument of Chapter 9. Dan Kennedy says demonstration is the single most powerful tool you can add to any presentation. And he makes a convincing case.
The Power of What People See
Kennedy opens with an unusual example. He talks about psychics, mediums, and faith healers. Not because he believes in any of it. He calls it all charlatanism. But he points out that these scammers have survived for over a hundred years using the exact same tricks. Some of them even get their own TV shows now.
Why do the tricks keep working? Because the demonstrations are physically convincing. When people see a table lift or watch a healer appear to pull something from a body, they believe. Even smart people. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, watched Houdini debunk psychics and still believed Houdini himself had real magical powers.
Kennedy’s point is not about fraud. His point is this: when people see something happen in front of them, it creates belief that words alone cannot create. If con artists can use demonstration to make people believe in ghosts, imagine what honest presenters can do with it.
Tangible Products Are Easy to Demonstrate
Some products practically demonstrate themselves. Kennedy lists classic examples that have been used for decades. The blender that can juice a whole watermelon. The knife that cuts a metal nail and then slices a tomato paper-thin. The nonstick pan where nothing sticks. The car polish so strong you can pour gasoline on the hood, light it on fire, put it out, and there is not even a smudge.
These demonstrations are simple. You show the product doing its thing, and the audience is sold. If you sell a physical product, you probably already know this. But what if your product is intangible?
You Can Demonstrate Anything (Yes, Even Services)
This is where the chapter gets really useful. Kennedy says most people believe their service or intangible product cannot be demonstrated. He says they are almost certainly wrong.
He gives several real examples from his career:
The network marketing visualization. You have probably seen someone draw circles on a whiteboard to explain how a network grows. Six people recruit six people who recruit six people. It is boring. But Kennedy watched an Amway leader named Charlie Marsh do something different. Marsh brought helpers on stage to unroll a massive sheet of butcher paper, as wide as the room and seven feet tall. On it were actual photos of every person in his organization through eight levels, connected with lines. He walked around pointing to people, telling their stories, and then pointed to just six at the top and said “They’re the only ones I recruited.” That is a demonstration. Same concept as the circles, but a thousand times more powerful.
The show-and-tell for a marketing system. Kennedy sold a home study course for small business owners. The product was basically pages in a notebook. Not exciting. But during his presentation, he would show a real sequence of letters written for an Italian restaurant owner, display them on a big screen, read parts of them, and then ask the audience: “Do you honestly believe that anybody receiving these four letters does not know all about this restaurant? For four postage stamps, we made him famous almost overnight.” That one demonstration became so popular that repeat audiences asked him to do it again and again.
The live theft demonstration. Kennedy had a client who taught supermarket owners about employee theft. Most owners thought shoplifters were the real problem. So they created a demonstration. The client would bring a skeptical store manager on stage, set up a fake delivery scenario, and challenge the manager to catch every attempt to steal. Then, right in front of everyone, he robbed the manager blind. Hard to deny the problem after watching it happen live.
The secret shopping recordings. A client who sold phone training to dentists would secretly call the offices of doctors attending his convention talk. Then from stage, he played the recordings of their own staff bungling calls, one after another, until the group yelled “We surrender!”
The burning money demonstration. A financial advisor gave audience members real $100 bills and a lighter, then told them to burn the money, just like they were burning it with bad tax strategies. People could not do it. Their hands shook. Then he put twenty $100 bills in a metal tray and reached for the lighter fluid. The audience begged him to stop. Point made.
The Takeaway
Kennedy’s message is clear. Every product and every service can be demonstrated in some physical, visible way. It does not matter if what you sell is intangible. You can always find a way to make people see the result, feel the pain of the problem, or watch the solution in action.
If you only talk about your product, people will listen and forget. If you show them, they will believe and remember.
The question is not whether you can add a demonstration to your presentation. The question is whether you are willing to put in the creative work to figure out how.
This is post 11 of 21 in my retelling of No B.S. Guide to Powerful Presentations by Dan Kennedy.
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