Let me give you some even greater clarification on messages and why it's so important to narrow it down to the top five. The reason I say five is that I've interviewed audiences all over the world to tell me about the best presenter, Speaker talker they've ever heard. From big, large keynote speeches to one on one meetings. And here's what I find consistently is people don't remember that much about the best talker they've been in front of. Sometimes they remember 1.23 key usually for every six months, somebody remember five points from the best talker they've been in front of. I've never had anyone remember more than five key points from the best keynote speaker at the biggest convention, or the best talker.
They met with trying to sell them something or present something. So that's why I'm begging you You can disregard a lot of what I say. But you will really harm yourself your chances of communicating. If you go and do a one on one presentation with this idea that you're going to communicate every single thing about your company, or about your skill set or your resume, less is more, you've got to narrow it down to your top five points. I don't mean less in the more in the sense that try to finish your whole meeting in three minutes. If the person walked out a half an hour for you.
It's not that I want you to rush. It is that I want you to focus your time on a handful of key points that are important to you are interesting to this one person you're meeting with. And here's the key thing. It shouldn't be just interesting to the person, but also be something that motivates them to want to do what you ask them to do. There's a lot of things that could be interesting to people in the world. But if, for example, you're trying to get them to give you $3 million to invest in your mutual fund or your hedge fund, a lot of interesting that you can talk about how you sold lemonade when you're six years old, that may or may not motivate them to want to give you money to invest.
So you've got to be very selective in what you decide to focus on. So that's your challenge. Now I need you to go back to your five message points, apply greater scrutiny to them and make sure you don't have five big themes with the idea of trying to cram in 25 different sub points underneath each message. That's not what I'm talking about, because then we're really back to trying to communicate 50 ideas. That doesn't work well in one on one meetings. If somebody really wants to know more, then you can always email them are handout, a big thick PDF or a book or ebook, or other materials, you can always give more.
But your first challenge is reading this person's appetite. To want more of you to want more of your expertise, whatever it is you do, you need them to have a strong sense of what's special about you unique about your skill set valuable to them. Let's focus on just a handful First, we can always add on. But if you just try to give them everything up front, and they are sort of drowning in this sea of data, and they don't know how to compare you to perhaps 50 other companies or individuals they're meeting with, you are going to get lost. So double check your messages, make sure that they're genuinely important to you. interesting and important to this one person you're meeting with, by the way, if you're having a whole series of one on one meetings, if you're going to do it right You need to change every single time at least part of it to personalize your meeting based on the concerns of this person.
Now, sometimes you're meeting people where their profile is exactly the same and you don't have to do much change but much personalization on your messaging as possible is always going to be best. So go back to your messages, tweak them, make sure they're really solid