Table of Contents
- 🙂 How Max Hoppy has used public speaking and presenting to improve his marketing career
- 🗣️ ‘Marketing problems’
- 🤝 The Hidden Hero
- 🧑🏫 The Keynote Club
- Key takeaway from Max’s presentation – most ‘marketing problems’ aren’t actually marketing problems, they’re public speaking problems.
🙂 How Max Hoppy has used public speaking and presenting to improve his marketing career
Read time: 3 minutes
Amongst many exciting and impressive things (like sitting on the TMM board, founding a marketing agency, running a lot, etc.) Max Hoppy is one of the co-founders of The Keynote Club – a place to help marketers get better at public speaking.
This presentation takes a look at why Max believes that most marketing problems aren’t actually marketing problems, and how public speaking can solve a lot of them.
In short, it’s about how marketers can speak with more confidence. You won’t want to miss it. Watch the full webinar back, or read on for the key takeaways.
🗣️ ‘Marketing problems’
Max began the presentation with a hypothesis:
“Most marketing problems aren’t marketing problems. They’re public speaking problems in disguise.”
Max revealed that for many years, he has been omitting a job from his CV and career story because he was embarrassed by it. For a few short months, Max was the Head of Digital at Iceland Foods, on a mission to sell frozen chicken. After significant research and deep diving, Max discovered that not selling enough frozen chickens was a wider business problem that marketing was getting the blame for. But he didn’t do a good enough job at convincing and educating the business on the situation. This is just one reason why Max began to form his hypothesis that:
“Most marketing problems aren’t marketing problems. They’re public speaking problems in disguise.”
Now Max runs a marketing agency called Bind. And over the last 5 years, he’s had the opportunity to study ‘marketing problems’ in over 100 businesses. Here are some examples of the kind of ‘marketing problems’ which show up time and time again:
Max believes that marketers already know the answers to lots of these ‘marketing problems’, but that they’re not so great at delivering the answers.
🤝 The Hidden Hero
Eventually, Max found himself standing on stage, being asked to talk about ‘The Chicken Problem’. And in his own words, it went terribly. He had a panic attack and fumbled his way through his slides. Two weeks later, he handed his notice in at Iceland. He was embarrassed and ashamed. This experience led him to ask a big question – am I never going to engage in public speaking again? Or am I going to get better at this?
He got to work by joining Toast Masters – an old, well-established, public speaking charity. From there he went on to speak as a guest lecturer at universities and at industry events like Brighton SEO. During this education, Max learned that two things are important when it comes to public speaking:
- Personal readiness – getting your mind ready.
Getting your mind into the right place is a highly individual thing. It’s about working out what your triggers are. Ask what makes you feel anxious? And then eliminate your triggers and build in more of the things that bring you calm. For Max, that looks like:
- Not drinking the night before a presentation
- Exercising on the day
- Practising mindfulness just before
- Building up a tally of the number of times he’s rehearsed.
- Speech readiness – getting your story ready.
This starts with research. All good talks are heavily researched and finessed. By not thinking about a structure for your presentation in advance, you will make things a lot harder for yourself. Use traditional storytelling models (flick through a children’s bookcase for inspiration) to help inform your structure and make it enticing. And then, focus on the delivery. Try varying your posture, body language and intonation to keep things interesting.
Max’s public speaking training came about because of ‘The Chicken Problem’ but he soon realised that the training and learning he was doing was helping him in his day-to-day marketing job.
When he got hit with ludicrous ‘marketing problems’, he was more prepared for how to answer them. This meant he was able to get business buy-in, which in turn led to him being able to find the right marketing focus.
To revisit Max’s hypothesis then;
“Most marketing problems aren’t marketing problems. They’re public speaking problems in disguise.”
🧑🏫 The Keynote Club
For Max, his short stint at Iceland is the most defining moment of his career to date, because it led to the founding of The Keynote Club – the public speaking club for marketers.
The club meets on Zoom for an hour every two weeks and together they:
- Practice impromptus speaking
- Learn about some speaking theory
- See a speech evaluation
Learn more and sign up for the next session here.
Many of us have the limiting belief that public speaking is not for us and when we prove to ourselves that actually, that’s not true, it can help us to reevaluate other limiting beliefs we have about ourselves.
Key takeaway from Max’s presentation – most ‘marketing problems’ aren’t actually marketing problems, they’re public speaking problems.
Read Max’s Linkedin post about why he has now added the Iceland job to his public facing CV.
Bonus tip – When you’re preparing for your next speech or presentation, think about what your first sentence will be. Make sure that it doesn’t include an ‘uhm’ or the word ‘so’. If you do that, you have done something that 90% of speakers do not do. Well done!