There’s a time and a place for a sales presentation, and conferences aren’t it.

People pay good money to go to conferences. In return, they want to learn amazing new things, discover future trends, and learn how others in the same industry have solved problems.

They don’t want a blatant sales hustle from the lectern. Conference sponsors find this hard to resist, having paid good money to support the delegates’ voracious appetite for liquor each evening. Even if you’re so kind as to pick up the whole tab, however, the audience will still resent a Brandpower-style eulogy on the wonders of your product.

In this situation, the best approach is to do a useful talk on some important industry trend, without the direct product plugs. You can still present the topic with a skew toward your company’s viewpoint, and people are OK with that. The brand benefits come from people thinking: that presenter from Acme Industries was really interesting and gave me some useful information. When it’s time to buy, I’ll trust them.

The TED conference is a shining example of how successful the non-hustle approach can be. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment & Design, with the motto ‘Ideas Worth Sharing’. It holds an annual conference in Long Beach, and tickets to it are  among the most sought-after in the events world.  It attracts a stellar lineup of speakers, all of whom you can catch on video for free.

And no matter who’s presenting, whether it’s Bill Gates, Anthony Robbins or Bill Clinton, they have to obey the rules. The ‘TED Commandments’ are a great guide for anyone who wants to really engage an audience, rather than the polite tolerance that most speakers receive.

1. Thou shalt no simply trot out thy usual schtick.

2. Thous shalt dream a great dream, or show forth a wondrous new thing, or share something thou hast never shared before.

3. Thou shalt reveal thy curiosity and thy passion.

4. Thou shalt tell a story.

5. Thou shalt freely comment on the utterances of other speakers for the sake of blessed connection and exquisite controversy.

6. Thou shalt not flaunt thine ego. Be thou vulnerable. Speak of thy failure as well as thy success.

7. Thou shalt not sell from the stage: neither thy company, thy goods, thy writings, nor thy desperate need for funding, lest thy be cast aside into outer darkness.

8. Thou shalt remember all the while: laughter is good.

9. Thou shalt not read thy speech.

10. Thou shalt not steal the time of them that follow thee.

Any presenter wanting to improve their style could spend literally weeks watching videos of TED presentations. You’ll learn more from it than a thousand cheesy how-to-present books.

The effects of global warming go to the highest levels of power. As things heat up, conditions become more jungle-like. And where there’s jungle, there’s monkey colony behavior, particularly among leaders of countries and companies.

Like displays of physical prowess from alpha warrior monkeys to warn off up-and-coming males.

Or making a very public display of mating with the most desirable females.

And then there’s this.

Steve Ballmer and his crazy on-stage monkey dances have attracted a lot of media attention and on-line ridicule.

But when you consider Ballmer’s situation, his approach makes a lot of sense.

Following Up Bill

Taking over from Bill Gates is a difficult follow-up act. There has been a lot of presentation analysis of Gates, usually as a direct comparison to Steve Jobs, focusing on his crowded slides and his Kermit-y vocal tones. I think this criticism missed the point of what Gates was: the king of the developers.

I worked on some of his roadshows in the 90’s, where he’d fly into town and do six or seven hour-long presentations in a day, to wildly differing audiences – clients, staff, government, hard-core coders. Everyone would try to catch him out with some obscure question about code compatibility, and he’d answer all of them with a level of detail that suggested he’d been working on nothing but that issue for the last month, rather than driving a global corporation.

His whole persona underlined the fact that, whatever his motivations, he was brainier than anyone else and that’s a quality you want in a software guy.

Stepping Into the Buzz Aldrin Role

Then in comes Ballmer. He could so easily become a Similar-But-Not-As-Good Guy, like the one that took over from Steve Jobs on the Apple speeches. Whatever his name is.

Rather than going for Gates-Lite, Ballmer has carved out a distinctive entity for himself, by working to his own strengths.

He’s enthusiastic, energetic and outspoken. Rather than try to tone it down like a regular CEO with conservative speech advisors, he’s turned it up to 11.

And he’s a big, dominant-looking guy. If he had a Gates physique, the monkey dance and the teeth-baring would look weird and creepy, like Tom Cruise on the Oprah couch. But the antics really suit Ballmer’s size and shape. His stage moves remind you of a scene from Jungle Book.

Sometimes Mad Is Good

Sometimes the possibility of mild insanity is a good thing in a leader, though Ballmer is clearly less mad than his stage persona. I bet the Microsoft staff appreciate having a fundamentalist warrior at the helm, confiscating audience iPhones and howling threats at the competitors. These are the leaders you follow, because they’re on a mission, and if that involves building a pyramid of competitors’ skulls in the lobby, all the better.

The unpredictability factor also helps keep the audience interest up. Most audiences can tell you what the average CEO will say before they say it. “These are challenging times. We must all work smarter, not harder. We shall be rolling out some exciting new initiatives. We are all one team. Etc.”

Not Steve. Just as decades of audiences went to see Ozzy Osbourne just to see if he’d bite the head off a bat again, Ballmer audiences know they could be just a moment away from an outburst that will melt Youtube’s servers. That’s a big incentive to make people turn up, and pay attention.

And it’s worked. The fact that we even know his name via mainstream media is a major endorsement of his communication strategy.

You go, Ballmer! Ignore the critics and keep it simian!

Here’s how to avoid snatching defeat from the jaws of victory as you finish a perfectly good presentation.

The situation we’re talking about is the important speech – maybe a product launch or conference plenary speech. The one with the large audience in the hotel ballroom, with the big sound, lights and vision. It’s part information and part theatrical performance, and the message they take away is shaped by a few critical points during the speech.

One of the most important factors is how it ends. End on a high note, and they leave thinking “now there’s an expert!’

You need to be in control of that ending. If it’s clear, energetic and draws all your points together, you’ll walk off stage to applause and admiration.

That is, unless you follow your snappy ending with a guaranteed barbiturate-strength room depressant: opening up the floor to Q&A.

It’s one of those presentation traditions that people can’t seem to resist, like ‘warming them up’ with a joke, another dangerous habit we’ll discuss another day.

When you finish on “So, are there any questions?”, one of two things will happen.

No Questions

Most commonly, nobody has a question.

Not because your topic or performance was unworthy, but because few people want to be the first to speak up in a big room.

Silence. The air conditioning is suddenly quite audible. The conference MC steps up to the lectern to drum up some action.

“Wasn’t that great? Anybody have a question?”

Distant clinking of cutlery in the hotel kitchen three floors below. Shoes are stared at all over the room.

“Surely someone has a question. No? Well, huh huh, you must have covered the topic so incredibly well that there’s nothing left to cover. Please thank our guest speaker…”

By now, the energy from your speech has fizzled out, replaced by creepy uncomfortableness and a feeling that nobody loves you. You slink off the stage to desultory clapping, feeling like a player on a losing Grand Final team heading for the change rooms.

Attack of the Smuggers

Alternatively, someone does have a question. The question is: what sort of someone will be asking it?

In 99% of cases, it will be a special sort of person – let’s call them smuggers. Smuggers already know the answer to the question, and are asking purely to show everyone how clever they are. Whatever you’ve suggested, they’ve worked out some kind of obscure exception to your rule.

“You make a persuasive point in noting that oranges are orange. But could you also say that in the case of the blood orange, its reddish interior suggests that your rule doesn’t apply in all situations?”

Some years ago I watched Bill Gates walk the Q&A tightrope in a huge auditorium full of software developers. Each questioner had clearly spent months preparing their question in a dark basement, driven by the chance to go down in programmer history as “The Guy Who Stumped Bill Gates”. One by one they reeled off lengthy, obscure questions about codes and protocols, and demanded to know what Gates was planning to do about it. In a virtuoso performance, Gates answered the lot in forensic detail, even politely correcting a few of them on their technical knowledge. Unless you have a Gates-size brain, don’t try this at home, folks.

Maybe you won’t cop a smugging, but you’ll never know until they open their mouth, and that’s introducing a level of uncertainty that you don’t need.

What To Do

Tell them that there isn’t time for questions, but you’ll be around after the speech if anyone has any questions. This way you can cover individual, specific interests without taking the rest of the audience off-topic.

There are exceptions to this rule. It doesn’t apply to small meetings, like conference breakout sessions or boardroom new business pitches, where the tone is more interactive. And at AGM’s, where the right to Q&A is enshrined in law, it sometimes actually adds some energy and entertainment to the proceedings.

After all that, if you’re still keen on answering random questions, study the work of the current world champion of audience interaction, Ross Noble. Mind you, it’s easier for him. He can wander off on tangents about hamsters, while the rest of us have to stick to subjects like mutual fund returns, clinical trials or new brands of detergent with faster-acting enzymes.