The Keys to Becoming A Better, More Dynamic Virtual Speaker: Andrew Churchill

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Mark Evans: You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in twenty minutes or less. It's one thing for companies to embrace virtual events, but what about the people who need to make presentations? What's it like to talk into a camera versus being on stage and being able to engage with an audience and see how people are responding? In this episode, I'm talking with Andrew Churchill, a pitch and presentation coach. Andrew helps people focus on better content and visual development as well as voice, body language, and other engagement strategies. Depending on how you look at it, Andrew is facing a big business opportunity or a big business challenge. And that's what we're gonna get into today. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Andrew.

Andrew Churchill: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Mark Evans: Let's talk about what you do and more importantly, how your business has been impacted by COVID and the lack of in person events.

Andrew Churchill: Yeah. So it's interesting with COVID, I, apologize sometimes for saying this because I know it hasn't been true for everyone, but my business has actually exploded. I I think the key to the key to the explosion is that people are no longer we we've removed the the emotional barrier to asking for help. So it used to be that people presented in person. Everybody thinks they're a good presenter. People don't really think they need help. It's kinda cool to be good at this. We all have that secret like, oh, yeah. I could do a TED talk. And what's happened when we moved online and and now we're working with video cameras is everybody says, oh my god. I have no idea what's going on. Help. So it's opened up, it's opened up a whole new group of people. It's it's it's given people permission to ask for help.

Mark Evans: So what you're saying is that people who may have been comfortable speaking in person are uncomfortable speaking virtually, but they still want to present, but they want to do it in the right way. They want to do it in ways that are engaging and they're coming to you for help, which is it's really interesting to hear that point of view that you are busy. You, a person who focuses on helping people make presentations, mostly in public, are busy during COVID. I I find that fascinating.

Andrew Churchill: Yeah. It's been good news for me. The a lot of my work is done through the university at McGill. So some of it and and the presentation world is still going on there, interestingly enough. A lot of the a lot of the presentation work I do there has actually increased because it's the one event, that can keep going. Right? So it's a way to actually so so doing virtual conferences and and virtual events, virtual talks, with each other is one of the places we can still create community because we can't travel. So I think the the demand actually for online interaction the the demand for interaction has gone up because we're not interacting with each other, walking down the street, sitting in our offices, sitting so we're all thirsty for interaction. And it's just a matter of of trying to figure out ways to meet that need.

Mark Evans: I wanna get into how people can engage their audiences virtually and drive interaction. But before we get into that, I'm really curious about your thoughts on virtual events. This has been a topic that I have been focused on, maybe you could say obsessed with recently because most virtual events that I register for and actually attend are pretty awful. It feels like a webinar. It feels like someone is broadcasting to me versus creating an environment where it's interactive. I feel engaged. I feel like there's a sense of maybe there's spontaneity. Maybe there's this there's there's serendipity, the the opportunity to learn and meet new people. I'm not not getting that at all, and I'm just curious about what your view is on virtual events given you've got a completely different perspective.

Andrew Churchill: So I'm so I have a new paradigm that actually, I haven't shared with anyone yet, so this will be good. I'll be interested to see how you've you react to this and see if it starts to resonate with you, Mark. And the and the paradigm is this. When we go to a conference, there are two things going on. One is the dissemination of information. So if we go to a conference and we sit in a we sit in a presentation for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour, however long the person was allowed to talk, that's a that's a dissemination moment. But there's another piece of conferences, and and just before we leave the dissemination moment, that actually works really well online. The online space is actually really good for disseminating information. The other piece though is the communal piece, and that doesn't happen when we're sitting listening to someone. That happens when we're getting a cup of coffee between talks, or that happens when we introduce ourselves to the person next to us before our talk starts. And that space has been completely eliminated in the virtual conference world, and I don't think people are have figured out how to replicate it. And I frankly am not even sure it's possible.

Mark Evans: That's an interesting perspective because to me, that's the conference goal. Like, when I go to conferences, to be honest with you, I could be I could easily be on stage, and I don't mean that in a in a boastful way. It just means that the information that I'm getting from most speakers, I already know. I'm I'm really not there for the content, although some of it can be interesting. What I'm there for is the people. I'm I'm there for the opportunity to bump into someone unexpectedly or to meet completely new people and open up completely new opportunities. That's the value for me. And I think you're right. I think a lot of conferences are struggling with that. I look at a platform like Hopin, which allows people to hold these it's almost like speed dating. So you're on a virtual event, and then they'll have the speed dating opportunity where you'll meet somebody random in a in a side room, which I think tries to replicate that conference experience. But you're right. I I just don't know if anyone's gonna figure it out, going to be able to replicate that whole conference experience.

Andrew Churchill: I my question is that, fundamentally, I have a I have a question about whether or not so so a lot of talks going on about synchronous versus asynchronous. Right? And I think it's really difficult to do synchronous multi people conversations online, virtually. There's a there's a fundamental barrier of technology that people haven't really figured out yet of of how do we have like, there's a reason we're doing a podcast with two people, not seven. Right? Can't do it with seven people. But if we were in person, we could. And this is a this is a real challenge. I think one of the things that conferences need to figure out is how do they create space for people to interact organically, and then how do they create space for to disseminate information? And I think what's happening with conferences right now is they're just hyper focused on the dissemination of information, and they're getting that fine. But without the organic interaction, it's useless. Nobody wants to go. It's a horrible experience. So what we need to do is figure out how to do this organic interaction, and I'm not sure you know, to me, my best organic interaction in the last six months has been in the last sixty days, and it's all been on LinkedIn, and it's all been asynchronous. But you and I have you and I have had conversations on LinkedIn, and and sometimes there's four hours. Sometimes there's three days between those responses. But we've gotten to know each other. We've developed a relationship. We've gotten to know each other's businesses. We've now ended up having a conversation virtually with the two of us in the form of this podcast. But I do think that there's some asynchronous components that virtual conferences ought to be looking at and integrating things like Volley that's coming out with, a and and LinkedIn just started, right, where now you can send people a short a short audio clip? What do you think?

Mark Evans: It's it's a new landscape. It's a completely new engagement landscape, and we're all trying to figure it out. And I think that's one of the interesting things about LinkedIn that is happening right now. People are having making connections. They're commenting. There's all that activity going on, and I still believe that the real value to LinkedIn is conversations, is the ability to break through the digital barrier and ask someone if they're open to having a conversation. And my experience has been, for the most part, that you're right. As you said earlier, people are are thirsty for interaction. They're thirsty for conversations. They're thirsty to connect with other people. And so those barriers have totally disappeared. And I'm talking to people all around the world, and the conversations people are enthusiastic. They're interested. They're curious. And this is something that I don't think would have happened pre COVID. Now let's turn our our set a little bit to what you do and how you are helping people do a better job presenting virtually. So when I do presentations, like, I'm a very energetic speaker, and I move around the audience and I ask questions and people that's part of my shtick. Right? Right. But how do people engage audiences digitally when you're just looking at their face? What are some of the techniques that they can use to get their audience excited, curious, interested, all the good things that happen when you present in person?

Andrew Churchill: So this is another one where I'm I'm I'm coming up a little get against a paradigm wall here. And I'm starting to think about this word engagement. And and what does it actually mean? Because traditionally, engagement has been about speaker audience interaction. Right? So there's some things you can do. There there's some really good tools for increasing that online. Some of the things I do, like, I I will use polls quite a bit because it's really easy to get everybody in the audience to answer a poll. And I don't ask trick questions, but I answer I ask questions I tend to ask questions that every answer is correct. And then I ask someone who gave you know, I ask someone who said c, which maybe only 10% of the people answered c. I say, okay. Someone who said c, will you tell us why you said that? Because I think that's really smart, and and it would be great if everyone could hear from you. And I always get someone who who pipes in in those situations. So I haven't called on someone specifically, but I have gotten some audience interaction that that is more curated. So I think the key to the key to audience interaction when you're in the when you're in the online space is to curate it. In other words, you gotta you gotta set it up more than more than when you're in person. The some of the other things you can do so so I do simultaneous, simultaneous responses to a chat question. If you've never done that, it's super interesting. What you do is you ask a chat question, and then you give the audience thirty seconds to type in their answer, and then everybody hits enter at the same time. And there's this there's this weird, everybody feels like they need to do it. So people so so people actually do it. Like, I get response rates upwards at 90% when I do this. And then suddenly, as as a speaker, you have this incredibly rich say you have 20 people, 30 people, you have 20 or 30 comments. You can then build the next ten minutes of your presentation responding to the ones that that you want to. So so those are two tricks in the, traditional engagement space. But I said I was running into a little bit of a paradigm shift here, and the the paradigm shift here is that what happens if engagement isn't really audience what what what happens if we made an engagement not about speaker audience, but about audience content, which is really what we want to engage our audience with. Right? We want our engage our audience with the content, not us. And that shift to me so so I started just thinking about this question. I was actually thinking about it this morning because you had asked me this question a couple days ago, right, as we were getting ready to and I and I was giving this some thought. And in that case so if I want people to better engage with the content, then I fall back to to stories because stories engage people. I fall back to really powerful visuals. Like, you show you show someone a really powerful visual that triggers an emotional response, and and that engages the person. But those are two different ways to think about engagement, I think.

Mark Evans: Okay. I've got a bunch of follow-up questions. One would be of course. One would be okay. From a technical perspective, like you mentioned earlier that you would give people options a, or c, and the person who you would ask someone who answered c to respond. So does that mean that you've got they can there's an open mic. They they have the ability to pipe up when they want verbally, or do you have to open up a different channel when you want that to happen?

Andrew Churchill: Most of my work I do with open mics or I do with a with a I can give them permission. So somebody can raise their hand, and then I can unmute their mic.

Mark Evans: The other question that I had when you talked about the thirty second go and do your own thing technique. How do you feel about silence? The reason I ask is that when I've done workshops, what I do is I'll give people an exercise and I'll say, Okay, spend the next five minutes working on this exercise and then we'll have a group you'll present and then we'll have a group discussion. And people love that. They love the ability to do their own work or work with a small group and then present and learn from other techniques and get other approaches and get that feedback from other people in the room. Now, is it possible? Does it make sense to do that online? So let's say that we're doing a presentation and we have a little worksheet that we want someone to fill out. Can we say, okay. For the next five minutes, do your own thing, and then we'll circle back. Is that does that work at all?

Andrew Churchill: I do it all the time. I do it Really? And so I use Zoom as as kind of the go to because that's what what McGill uses. And we and they have breakout rooms. So I send people I send people with an exercise room with a, exercise to do with each other in a breakout room. I think Zoom works really well with with groups of five and less. So that's kind of my cap on rooms is I I put people in rooms of five and they work. And when I do do individual exercises, I actually put everybody in their own breakout room because it's kinda weird being on Zoom when everybody's quiet. But if you send everybody to their own breakout room, then it's it's the feedback I've gotten from people is less it's less weird because then they're they're in a room by themselves working quietly, and it's not like, oh, yeah. People can see me now or people can hear me if I mistakenly put my mic on or people it it's kind of this, oh, yeah. Now I can go work and then I can come back. And there's that moment of coming back because you shut down the breakout room and everybody comes in altogether.

Mark Evans: Right.

Andrew Churchill: The other thing that is interesting, I think, working online is is working with stuff like Google Docs or or OneDrive where where you have a shared document, and everybody can be working on the same document at the same time or different parts of the same document at the same time. And then you can combine the two where you send people to a breakout room, they work in their breakout room on a document that's shared with the other breakout rooms. So you can have a conversation of four or five people going on about a shared document that 40 people are working on.

Mark Evans: Yeah. Because, I mean, if you have a common template and everyone's filling it out, then that would work. But you're suggesting that it would only work in in small groups as opposed to having 50 people completing an exercise on Zoom.

Andrew Churchill: 50 people can be completing an exercise, but 50 people can't be in the same room talking about it.

Mark Evans: One more question I wanted to ask you about this whole concept of engagement is that how do you keep people on point when they're at home and it's easy to be multitasking, checking their email, surfing the web, doing work, all the things that they probably shouldn't do because the reason they're at a virtual event is to attend the virtual event. Are there any tools, techniques, anything that you can do to make sure that people don't do that, or or does that come down to the the quality of the content?

Andrew Churchill: I think it comes down to the quality of the content and the quality of the presenter. And there's and there's one trick you can do. So the quality of the there's a little bit of an online shift with the quality of the presenter. The quality of the presenter online is all about voice. There's so little video with with most of the presentations because most of the presentation work, there's a visual support. Right? So you're looking at something like PowerPoint. It's different if you're doing a TED Talk where the primary visual is is the person. But as soon as the primary person is the is the visual being shared, not the person, then it's all about voice. And and the biggest mistake people make presenting online is they're sitting in their chair at their desk, and it's just a disaster. It's like you'd never be sitting in a chair giving a talk. Why are you sitting in a chair when you're when you're presenting? It's stupid.

Mark Evans: So what should I do instead?

Andrew Churchill: Stand up. I'm standing right now. We're our voice is better when we're when we're standing and when we're gesturing. So even though I'm not on camera, I I'm still gesturing. I'm walking around. I'm standing up. I like to have two different I have two different places because I do a lot of presenting because all my all my teaching is online and all my teaching is presenting or workshops. So I actually have one corner of the room where I have a bureau that's like one of those six drawer bureaus, so it's really high. It's chest height. I have a setup there for presenting with a green screen. It doesn't take up hardly any room because the green screen's only a foot behind me, and I'm standing right next to the bureau. And then on the other side of the room, I have my desk. I work from my desk, but when I go to present, I go stand up, and I'm in a different place. And psychologically, it's like going to work. Right? If you were going to a conference to present or if you were going to an auditorium to present, you'd enter the auditorium. I have a little hole in the green screen at the end, and I enter the presentation space. So I have a I have that mental switch that people aren't doing because they're sitting at their desk presenting from their desk.

Mark Evans: Yeah. I love the idea of gesturing by yourself in a room because it feels like I don't know. It feels like, I don't know, singing at the top of your lungs in the shower. Right? Because you feel like you're performing, but but no one can no one can see you. So it seems kinda weird, but I guess in time, you get used to

Andrew Churchill: And in the and if you think about the virtual reality space, which is kinda what we're playing in. Right? There's this there's a concept of immersion that happens. Right? That's what you need to do for your audience. You need to do the immersion piece for your audience so your audience feels like they're there in the room with you even though it's on screen. And that comes from voice. It comes from gestures. It comes it comes from all the same things that happen. So the so the people who are good at presenting, in person are good at presenting online as long as they shift as long as they do what they would be doing in person. Right? So as I channel that in person presenter even though there's no one there, and it feels a little silly. Like, you're like I'm, like, gesturing at my wall.

Mark Evans: Okay. One final question, and this is probably a loaded question, is what are some of the mistakes that speakers make virtually, and how can people prepare themselves properly before they make a virtual presentation?

Andrew Churchill: So one is to stand up. Sitting sitting down is a big mistake. There's another there's another in line in person shift that's a that's a technical one, and that is thinking that our PowerPoint or our visuals that we're sharing are doing the same thing in the two spaces, and they're not. They're they're very different. So there's some there's some, science to suggest we only look at a still image for somewhere between seven and fifteen seconds before we move on. So if you're talking about keeping people on the image you're sharing rather than going to their email, right, which is also on their computer screen, that image needs to evolve every seven to ten seconds. There needs to be some sort of visual movement. Doesn't need to be much, but it needs to be a little bit. So Right. So we do this exercise. I do this exercise with people called activate your PowerPoint. If you're working in PowerPoint or whatever visual you're working in, and it's just simply making it active. So you animate it so so and one idea comes in at a time instead of all the ideas coming in. You use morphing so that if you have four or five ideas, the idea that you're talking about gets bigger, and you talk about it, and then it gets smaller, and then the next one gets bigger. In person, you don't wanna do this because in person, if your PowerPoint slides, like our little lizard brain, right, when when we're in person and there's movement in our peripheral vision, we wanna look at it. So when our when our PowerPoint's active and we're in person, people aren't looking at the presenter. They're constantly being distracted by the slide. But online, you're not really there. You're really just there vocally. And there's and there's good research that's actually pretty old because it's about online courses. And if you if you've taken some online courses, you notice that the presenter's there in the beginning, and then the presenter disappears and only comes back every once in a while. And it's because when people did the eye tracking of what people were looking at with online courses, they they weren't looking at the presenter after the first minute or so. They were looking at the the material being presented. And the same thing if you look at online courses and the way those visuals are developed, those are very active PowerPoints or or whatever else is being delivered, but but subtly so. Not like crazy, you know, things flying in and flying out. We're not trying to make it obnoxious. We're just trying to to take care of the little lizard brain that needs, needs to see movement or needs to not be stuck on stillness.

Mark Evans: Well, Andrew, this has been great insight. And to be honest with you, I feel like I got a free consulting session on how to be a better better virtual speaker. I do a lot of it these days, and you're right. There is there is a difference between doing it in person and virtually, and I have tried some different approaches. But some of the things you said, particularly around standing up and changing your slides on a regular basis really resonated. I think that's great advice for anybody who is virtually doing virtual presentations or is thinking about it. So where can people find out about you and learn more about what you do? And and how do you work with people that are looking to improve their presentation skills both in person and virtually?

Andrew Churchill: So the easiest place to find my presence is on LinkedIn. That's kinda where I've where my owner business profile has become. So so work work beyond Miguel. I have a I have a, business that I've started. It's called Hone Communications. So honecommunications.ca is the is the website, but I'm and I have a blog there, but the but the LinkedIn activity is is, more active than the the web blog. And then I I have some YouTube. I have a YouTube channel that's also home communications where some of this some of the things that we've been talking are on there. And and every once in a while, I do, like, a, you know, a a two minute tutorial on, like, activating your PowerPoint, and that's on and and I'll, post those on on YouTube.

Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Andrew, visit marketingspark.co/blog. Now if you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest, or wanna learn more about how I help b to b companies as a fractional CMO, consultant, and adviser, send an email to Mark@marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.