How can you test a presentation? How can you test a talk that you've done? Because unless you're a huge corporation, you can't be hiring focus groups and spending a lot of money. Typically, the answer is right there in your audience, you ask them. What most people do is the audience comes up. If you're talking to more than 10 people, someone will say, Oh, good job, did a good presentation.

Don't just say thank you say thank you. And can you tell me, what do you remember what sticks out? What messages to remember? How would you describe what I talked about today to a colleague who wasn't here? And then really listen. Because if all the person does is say, Oh, you are great, professional, interesting, you didn't communicate anything.

You need to hear specifically the messages you prepared coming out of the mouth of the audience member doesn't have to be your words or your order. But the messages you care about if they don't come out of the mouth, Have an audience member. If the stories you planned and delivered, don't come out of the mouth of the audience member, if they don't remember your slides, then you flunked the test you did not communicate, even if they think that you did a good job. Our goal isn't to get a reputation as being a great speaker. Our goal is to actually communicate messages and influence the audience. So that's how you test do they remember, of course, the ultimate test is did the audience do what you want?

If you're pitching investors, and people come up to you afterwards and give you checks, you succeed, and people come up to you afterwards and tell you you're fantastic, wonderful, great. And no one invested. You didn't succeed. You're running for office and you're asking for people's votes and you don't get any votes. You didn't succeed if you win. You did succeed.