Make People Feel Good
In his remarkable book, Unreasonable Hospitality, legendary restauranteur Will Guidara highlights that historically, we’ve always functioned as a manufacturing economy. Every pitch was solidly centered on what we made and how much of it we could sell. But the marketplace shifted, and we’ve recently evolved into a service economy where more than 75% of GDP is created by service-related industries. So why are we still out there pitching products like nothing’s changed?
Winning brands—and the speakers for those brands—recognize that lasting market success is now measured less by product and more by how we serve others. Because when people feel served, they feel good. Good about us, good about themselves, good about the value they represent. And when people feel good, they buy.
As speakers, that’s a powerful lesson we can and should use to craft and deliver the kind of meaningful presentations our customers, teams, or executive leadership will actually respond to. And take action on.
The center of the service story
Our modern differentiator as a brand or brand storyteller is to serve rather than sell. Feeling has become more valuable than explaining. Whether a company and its representatives make the choice to put products or people at the center of their service story is now what separates the greats from the rest of the forgettable pack.
Data proves that standard product-forward messaging treats an audience as faceless walking wallets, and the workforce as nameless cogs in a wheel churning out deliverables on demand. Neither story serves the human hearing that message. Or makes them feel good about themselves, or serves their needs or real value in the business relationship.
Guidara says that service is dramatically undervalued in our current “hyper-rational, hyper-efficient digital transformation work culture. Too many companies have left the human behind.” Why? Simple. It’s just so much easier to share technical statistics or corporate directives, and so much harder to quantify sales or financial success by focusing on the person instead of the product.
But the moment we shift that story (presentation, briefing, onboarding, strategy session) from sales into service, we instantly become more successful communicators. By serving rather than selling, our listeners feel seen, heard, and appreciated. People who feel valued feel good about what they do and why they do it. Which benefits us and our reason for speaking.
Every speaker’s real job
The average script puts pipeline above people. That gets the bulk of presentations thrown straight into the low-priority or no-priority waste bins. Speakers who fixate on metrics and reports alienate listeners through bottom-line thinking. Which rarely improves the bottom line.
The high-priority bin is reserved for speakers who focus on individual goals and personal stakes. These stand out by showing the listener just how much they matter. Minimize the numbers, maximize the service, and the bottom line scales. This is the speaker’s real job when speaking for our organization.
The more we do it, the easier and more natural it gets. Systemizing service turns helping others feel good about their time in our presence from an act of heroism into the expected standard. When we kick off script writing and PowerPoint design with a goal of serving our audience over our own interests or path of least effort, the more normal it becomes. And the more normal it gets for us, the more amazing and special it feels to those on the receiving end.
Which sounds so obvious. The best company content we can write or put onto a slide is whatever demonstrates to the listener how much we care about what they think and how they feel. That earns trust, and proves we’ve got their best interests at heart.
Bottom Line
Will Guidara calls it a cultural bonfire, one good story piled on top of another to lift up communities of speakers and audiences. The fastest way to build that bonfire is to give better talks others feel good about hearing.
It happens one line at a time. Look at your script, starting with the opening words, and think like your listener. Does statement one make you feel good or indifferent? If it’s the former, the fire grows, move on to the next. If it’s the latter, time to edit. Line by line, all the way through the closing ask.
Now do the same with your slide deck. Does what you’re showing on that screen serve the audience’s vision of success and desire to feel good about themselves and their roles? Or is all those sentences, bullets, and graphs just copy-pasted data designed to sell and make your design process easy?
A few years ago, one of my clients built a trade show exhibit game around company and product knowledge, with a great prize for the winner. No one wanted to play. Attendees either didn’t know how to answer the questions, or didn’t care enough to try because it was all about the brand, not the contestants. We scrapped the self-important focus and replace it with questions about the players themselves. Suddenly the exhibit was packed; high energy, high-demand, long queues to get in on the fun. We went from pure product priority to making people feel good, and the opportunities for new relationships skyrocketed.
Bottom line, it’s cool to care how others feel.
