Your talk has one compelling point. But that's not true, I'm the CFO of a major corporation, ten units, each composed of 100 people report to me, I've got to talk for four hours presenting my whole company. I don't have one point, I have 500 points. Putting aside the point that any talk longer than 20 minutes is trouble best practices number eight is that your talk only has one compelling point. But, how can that be? Maybe it's true, maybe you are that CFO. The reason your talk has only one compelling point, is because people can only take in so much information in oral delivery. Again, you could give your listeners, your audience, a laminate card. You could write them a letter, you could present them with a spreadsheet for them to study. You could do all this and go have a glass of wine on your own time. The point is when you stand up to talk you've got to establish the common denominator that dominates all of those separate points. You cannot hold 500 points or even ten points as equal. You have to funnel them down to one compelling point and you have to present that point at the beginning of your talk. And the reason this is, the reason you have to do it this way is because you have to focus your listeners at the end of your introduction and what you want them to walk away with. If you don't, they'll walk away with whatever they take and whatever they remember and you've lost control of your presentation. So stop and think about that common denominator. If you are that CFO with many different points, take the time to focus, to weed through the points and find out which one, figure out in your mind which one is the important one. And let me tell you this. If you sit and think about it, you add up all those hundreds of points an you condense them down to one compelling point and you get up and in the first four minutes of your talk you deliver that one compelling point to your audience and they get it, then you are done. Then you've done it, the rest is downhill. If a cellphone goes off or if there's a fire alarm you've delivered your one point and the audience knows it. You pushed the boundaries, you've been creative and you've accomplished your goal. For all you care, the talk is over. And you can comport yourself with that attitude. Because delivering the one compelling point at the end of the introduction is all you have to do. Now, we can stand back a bit. And look at the whole introduction. We can see that it's really a three by three grid. It starts with the salutation which has the welcome, the place where you introduce yourself and the acknowledgements. It moves on to the review of the structure which simply covers the beginning, the middle, and the end. And then it hits the one compelling point Which in itself has the setup for the one compelling point then it says the point and then it tells them why that point is important. That's the formula for the introduction.