The Fuel Formula: How to Build a Message That Moves

Most executives focus on their words — more slides, more data, more information. But if your audience doesn't know why they should care, none of it matters.

In Part 3 of The Elevated Communicator series, Sam introduces the Fuel Formula: Audience Need × Clear Takeaway × 3 Supports = A Message That Moves. This is the exact framework Sam uses with coaching clients preparing for TED talks, corporate presentations, media appearances, and international all-hands meetings.

In this episode:

- Why information alone isn't communication

- The "chief sin" of executive communicators

- How to identify what your audience actually needs (not what you want to say)

- The three types of clear takeaways: remember, believe, or do

- Why the Rule of Three makes your message stick

- A live demo building a keynote in under 6 minutes

Take the free Competence-Communication Audit → samuellinton.com

Want to work with Sam directly? Email podcast@samuellinton.comEpisode 54: The Fuel Formula — Why Your Message Isn't Landing (And How to Fix It)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

When I got to the training, I was irritated right from the beginning. I had no desire to come to this meeting. I was coming because I was told to by the state of Pennsylvania. Fun fact: we are in the middle of building a multi-multi-million dollar church building. We're actually not in the middle of it, we're at the tail end of it. We're almost finished with it. And at the time, I was listed as the church's general contractor. Now, if you know me at all, you'll know how hilarious this is because I have never attempted to do something physical and not gotten injured. Like there's never been an attempt that I've made to build something. Like I built my daughter an Elsa castle. It was like a Timu Elsa Castle. It wasn't like a the Elsa castle was like$200 or$300. And I'm like, no, I'm building. Well, the Timu Elsa Castle came in this, it was, you know, it guaranteed to be bigger than the Elsa castle, but it was about this, it came in a box the size of a shoebox. So uh I built that. I ended up sustaining three injuries during that build. I had needed some counseling after. I'm just anytime I touch anything, I get injured. Well, the church made me the general contractor. So I had some real estate and I had some contracting stuff because of being in real estate. So I was able to get a contractor's license, apply for it, but you had to go through a training. And in order to maintain your license with the state, you had to go through this training. Well, the training was on lead-based paint. And I have never had to prep a house for lead-based paint in my life. I'm not going to do that as a part of my services, but I had to go to this eight-hour training. Well, the guy came in who was the trainer and young guy, good-looking guy, like he was dressed really nice. Like you could tell he was taking it serious. And he sat down and he ploeded onto a table a book that, for those of you that aren't, um, for those of you that are a little younger, it was probably the size of a phone book. I mean, it was massive. It had a lot of pages. And he opened up his talk to me and five other contractors that were local. And he said, Well, I've never done this before. Today is my first day. I'm really nervous. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to read all of this content to you so that you get it all. I'll read it word for word. And then at the end, I'm going to give you a quiz. And I looked at it, and this is all before AI. He said, I looked at it, and it's probably going to take me about seven and a half hours to read this. And then it'll take us 30 minutes to do the quiz. I can't, like we were on the second floor of a hotel in one of their conference rooms. And in that moment, I calculated if I jumped out this window, would I just sustain an injury that was bad enough to get me out of this so that I could still pass but end up at the hospital, but not have a permanent damage to my hips? And I realized I was at the age where you start to injure things. And I took a chance and didn't do that. But I have never been looking forward to something leased. Now, here's what was interesting. The guy thought he was doing everybody there a favor because he's like, I'm gonna cover all of the content. You're gonna know everything about lead-based paint. You're gonna be a lead-based paint expert at the end of seven hours. So why did all of us groan? Well, because he didn't know how to handle his message, that content piece. And unfortunately, this is the piece that only people focus on most of the time. Most of us only focus on this part most of the time. We just focus on our message. And when I'm saying message, what I'm meaning is you're focusing on the words, the content. What's happening with that content? What's happening with those words? And how do those words impact what is going to happen to the listener? Most of us don't even think about the listener. What we're thinking about is the words. And most of us, as executive communicators, most of us, what we do is we build our messages around what we want to say. And so much of communication is not just about the message. It's about more than that. We already covered mindset and confidence. We covered that. And we talked about that gap a couple weeks ago. Well, now I want to talk to you when we get into the meet. And this is the part that I think a lot of people are going to download, and you're going to be sorely mistaken because you think that how effective you are as a communicator is about your words. When in reality, there's more to it than words. If it were just about the words, then that guy who sat down with that 600-page manual on how to prepare a house for a lead-based paint inspection would be the best presenter ever because he gave us all the words. By the way, I did convince him that if he summarized each chapter, I literally coached him. I was like, hey, I was like, I coach people in communication. What if you gave us like the high level and give us your knowledge and your experience? And I coached him and we got out of there in four and a half hours instead of eight hours. So I still believe that those other contractors in that room owe me a debt of gratitude, but that's a separate discussion. My point is, it's not about just the words. The words are important. So I don't want to, those of you that are like, well, I'm a surgeon and I teach people how to operate. Yeah, of course, of course the words are important. Of course you have to have the right words. But right now, we're living in an age where information is very, very populated, overpopulated, oversaturated. You can become an expert on just about anything with a web browser, Chat GPT, um, Claude, or any other uh tool of your choice. But how do you communicate that to your team? How do you get your team to see that the way they handled their sales quarter was abysmal? You could just give them the spreadsheets and show them, hey, we're we're low in terms of where we've been in the past. But are you gonna change their lives? How do you communicate with an employee who's got their performance review in front of them as an executive? How do you communicate what they want to do when all you have to do is send the performance review and tell them, yeah, this is what's wrong? Where do you fall in? Well, that is what we're gonna look at today. How do you fuel your message? That's part two. We talked about mindset. Now we're in the message. And I have a framework that I want to share with you that I believe is a no-fault framework, meaning I can't see anything wrong with using this with every single talk. You're like, but I'm in technical stuff, yes. Well, I'm in sales, yes. Well, I'm a surgeon, yes. Well, I'm just talking to motivate people, yes, yes, and yes. This framework I have used to prepare just about every talk. I've preached sermons at the church thousands of times. I have coached people through TED Talks, I've coached them through uh presentations, I've coached them through international all hands meetings where it's gonna be recorded and simulcasted. I've coached people through appearing on media. All of this to say this formula is the undercurrent of every single communication you should give as a leader. I know that's a big order, and I'm gonna share it with you completely for free right now. So the formula is called the fuel formula, and this is how to get your message to energize and get the people that are listening engaged with the content. So the fuel formula, here it is.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

It's a handful of things.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

It's number one, audience need multiplied by, picture it like a math problem, not you know, like an acronym or anything. It's audience need multiplied by a clear takeaway, multiplied by three supports equals a message that moves. All right, once again, let me say this because you might not be able to visualize. It's audience need multiplied by clear takeaway multiplied by three supports equals a message that moves. Now, you might say, why don't add them? Why don't you just add them? Aren't they sequential? No. No. And here's why. Because if you don't have one of these things, if one of the values of those parts of the equation is zero, what happens to the whole thing? It's all zero. And I'm gonna explain to you how this is. And first I'm gonna build this for you and then explain to you why we mess this up. Okay, the first thing, notice I said audience need. Audience need. Now, I could spend a long time talking about audience need, and and I it's we can go there, but essentially, what is your audience there needing to hear? Not what do you want to say, not how comfortable are you speaking, not that, no, but what does the audience need? So, one of the exercises that I run through with my clients, if they are able to do this, sometimes you're not, if you're in a mixed room with a bunch of different people, you might not know exactly what every audience member needs, but there's really a handful of things that people are thinking about. They're thinking of their pains, they're thinking of their aspirations, they're thinking of their responsibilities, they're thinking of what kind of value are they going to get from what you're saying. Falling into those categories, nothing of it, none of it has to do with you, none of it. It's all about them. And everything is all about them. When I'm when I'm listening, when I'm going to a talk or when I'm helping somebody coach and they're speaking, I'm listening for me. I'm like, what can I glean here for me? What can I learn? It's the nature, it's human nature. And if you don't learn this as a speaker, it's to your own peril. If you don't get this under control, people aren't going to listen to you. Not only are they not going to listen to you, but they're going to think that you are boring. I was I was talking to a coach recently who was going to workshops. And workshops are the greatest place to see this in action because you'll get somebody that does a breakout session or they'll do part of the main sessions in a workshop, and they are regurgitating their greatest hits of content. And it might be clever, but they haven't thought at all about what am I there for? What am I trying to do? They have no idea, they're not connecting. And it's it's unbelievable how little we think about the audience when we're speaking. And I tell you, this is the chief sin of most executive communicators. We communicate based on what we want and we forget about what they need. Now, you, if you're an executive leader and most of the listeners I have are in that role, and you're trying to elevate your executive communication, you might say, Well, Sam, that's really nice. But my audience needs to get in line and do what the protocol is for this particular department, or they need to hit their sales quota, or they need to manage blah, blah, blah better, right? Like you might be saying that, and that's great. But they don't think they need that. You need that. That's part of your job. Let's be honest. Your job performance is based largely on whether or not they hit those goals. But your audience, they're thinking about how long is this meeting going to be? Am I going to be able to pick my son up from school? What's going to happen with the economy and tariffs and this war? They're thinking about something that happened. They got into a fight with their spouse. They're thinking about, you know, what's what's happening. And when we ignore their needs, we do so at our own peril. Now, you might say, well, in a corporate setting, it's more important that we focus on their needs as workers. Okay, well, we we don't do that either, right? So what do they need? Do they need they need to know exactly how this matters to them? They need to know exactly what difference this is gonna make in their day-to-day. They need to know what they're what's gonna happen if they don't do this. They need to know what is going to change as a result of them doing the thing that you suggest. So it has to be focused on them, or else you're gonna lose them right off the bat. If you just dump a bunch of information into chat GPT and get up and do an all hands, you're missing something that chat right now can't really give you. And that's an understanding of what your audience needs. And you can feed that information into chat, you can tell it, but most of us aren't doing any kind of audience analysis. That's why so many of my podcasts, so much of my coaching has to do with the audience. Because if the audience doesn't identify with what you're saying, you can say everything perfectly with regard to messaging, but it's going to fall flat. And people are going to leave, go, what the heck did that guy talk about? What did she talk about?

SPEAKER_00 13:52

The audience need what the audience actually needs next. Part two, part duh is a clear takeaway. What is the one thing?

SPEAKER_01 15:38

No, it could be multiple. I don't like that because a lot of times the multiples get lost. Now, if you're in a staff meeting, like we had a staff meeting yesterday, and there's different things going on, different projects, different departments, different things that are happening at the church. If you're if you're in that kind of role, then I get it. There's probably going to be multiple objectives. But when you are trying to tee up your messaging and you're thinking about what it is that that particular audience member needs, what's the clear takeaway that you want them to have? So this usually falls into three forms, that clear takeaway. Something that you want them to remember. These are going to be your motivational speakers. Remember that you were created in the eyes of God and to do great things. Like that might be my clear takeaway. What is something that you want them to remember in terms of the company's ethics standards? What is something that you want them to remember with regard to brand identity? I don't know what your messaging is. It's irrelevant, but there should be one thing. What's something you want them to believe? You're important to this organization. Our protocols matter to the outcome. If you adopt this change, it can change the whole organization. I mean, again, I'm being purposefully general because I don't want to muddy the waters with your context, but you know, what is it that you want them to believe? And then lastly, and this is usually what executives do in terms of their communication, what do you want them to do? So, what do you want them to do with this information? One of my favorite types of emails that I get is the email where the subject line says meeting at seven canceled, end of message. I love whoever decided to start making those emails. I love that. Because they're saying, hey, this is all you need to do. Don't come to the meeting because it's canceled. If you come to the meeting, you're bringing a sandwich and coming alone. I love that because it they thought about me. This is all you need to worry about. Like, I don't care why the meeting's canceled. I don't care, oh, you know, so and so got a cold. And a while back, her son, you know, he got a cold at his school, and then so and so because the teacher, no one cares. What you um I'm not, I don't have to go to the meeting. You don't want me to come to the meeting. If I come to the meeting, it's gonna be trouble. So don't come to the meeting. So that's something to do. Make sure you are doing quality control. That will be something to do. Make sure you are um filling out your TPS reports to borrow a really antiquated office space reference. Whatever you want them to do, it has to be clearly thought out in the message to make sure that when you bring them to that point, that it's clear what the action is. Otherwise, they're going to again say, what the heck was the point of that meeting? That could have been an email. Is that informational? Is this inspirational? What is it that you want me to do?

SPEAKER_00 18:37

Right? Now that's the clear takeaway. Um next thing is I'm going through my list here.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

I want to make sure I cover everything. Three supports. Now, when I say three supports, this is a great way to structure your message. So you figure out what they need, you figure out what it is that you need them to do, what needs to happen, and then to solidify that, this is where the bulk of your messaging comes from. Now, there's a million frameworks for this, a million.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

You know, I'm exaggerating, but there's a lot.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Um, but I would say that you can do a lot worse by implementing something called the rule of three. That's where you take that central idea and think about what it is that supports that idea. Could be evidence, it could be insights, it could be testimonials, and then you put it in format where there's three things. Why? I don't know. I don't know why this works, but it works. Psychological tactic. People remember things in threes. Two, seems like it's not enough. Four, seems like it might as well be 4,000. But three is that sweet spot where I kind of remember all the things and it supports what it is that you want them to do or want the clear takeaway. And again, if you're running a staff meeting that has, and we can talk about this individually. If you, if I ever coach you, I could help you to solidify this. But if you're running a staff meeting with multiple departments and it's an all-hands type of meeting, you might have to change this format slightly. But if you're trying to get each department to do one thing, the three supports are going to be your best friend because you're going to show them that you're well thought out, that you have thought through what they need, not what you're like, well, there's 18 supports. I I just did a um workshop with someone with a with a team, and they put together a slide deck that's probably nicer than just about anything that I've ever seen. It is really, really nice. And in the slide deck, what they did was they they had all the graphics, they had all the brandings, they had everything, but guess what? It had about a bazillion and a half points to it. And I said, We are gonna take your entire presentation, all of it, and we are going to put it into three. And they were like, What? You know, and it was like mind-blowing because when you tell somebody something they built that it's too hard to that I can't change it, you gotta remember that people aren't gonna remember. You want them to remember three. So three is the the way to go. This could be stories. Uh you tell a story. I got I got three stories about why this protocol is working. Three stories about why this works. Um, and then you can tell them how you see Sammy, you're on a podcast, dude. So of course my son is coming in during this time when I'm filming this. And I'm not gonna edit it either because I want you to know I have a family. All right, come on, you have to you have to be quiet and and don't go in there. Um he's my first unofficial guest. So when we have the movement of these stories, some sort of evidence, some sort of data point relevant to who? To them, not to you, relevant to them, then it makes the takeaway stick. It's the only thing that does. Otherwise, it's just your opinion. Like you should be doing this. Why? I don't care what you think. I'm just being honest. They don't care what you think. They they have their own agenda, they're doing their own thing. You're an executive, you have your job, they have their job. They don't, you don't know what they do. You're not there with them. You're not there during the customer service times, you're not there when they're trying to uh use Claude to write code to fix something. You're not there for that. They don't want to know what you think. They want to know what you can show them. And the three supports are essentially the way to go about it. And this is so much more helpful when you are presenting because now you only have to remember a handful of things. You're not having to remember that 38 slide slide deck. You have to remember three supports that are gonna move your audience into action. Now, again, why this format? Well, because it's simple. If any of these is zero, your message is gonna flop. If any of these is zero, your message is going to flop. So I'm gonna give you kind of an Example, all right. And I'm gonna build this live without a net. All right. So here's here's live without a net. Um I am doing a let me think here. Okay. So I am gonna be presenting to a group of entrepreneurs. I'm gonna be one of the keynote speakers at this entrepreneur event. All right. So I'm gonna build my talk with you in real time. You'll see how this works. So, what do entrepreneurs need? Let me think what they need. They need cash flow. Uh, they're needing uh they need to figure out how to get more leads. They need to figure out how to handle working with employees, uh, they need to figure out how to fire the person that's dead weight, right? They need all those things. Um, sit down. And when you think about that and coming in, they're not coming here because like, oh, I'm gonna get wooed by this guy who's an inspirational speaker. No, they want me. So I have to think about their needs and what's one clear takeaway I want them to get from my communication. What my clear takeaway is, if they learn how to speak the language of their ideal customer, if they learn how to speak the language of their ideal customer, then they will be able to simplify their messaging, get more leads, drive more business, and have more of an opportunity. But they have to speak the way their customer wants to hear them speak. So that's a clear takeaway. They have to speak the language of their ideal customer. All right, three supports. Okay, first support, I'll throw it out of the gate. The first thing is the message that I used at the beginning about the guy with the massive book. It's kind of funny, it works. You know, I have this message and it's not relevant to me. But when he made it relevant to me, it helped, blah, blah, blah. All right, so that will be my first, that's a story. Uh another story with evidence. Uh, Subaru found a uh that when they were, and this is this is kind of funny, but when they were releasing their Forrester, they found that they had a uh overwhelming response in their data with people that were wanting a safe car. So what did they do? Their messaging shifted to safety, not like, oh, it's cool. I could put a spoiler on it, or ooh, it's cool. No, they talked about safety ratings and crash testings and reliability in regard to that. So them changing the messaging to focus on the guy or the gal that wants to keep their family safe, they are now getting more sales because of that, right? With the Forrester, with the Outback, any of those things. So this is might be evidence. Of course, you want to get the exact thing, the real thing, and make sure that the data points. And I'm making this up because I'm showing you that you can do this without a lot of prep. All right. And then um, you know, more evidence. Uh, you use statistics that people remember and statistics, 80% of all statistics are made up 90% of the time on the fly. So you can say that um half of all people are coming into a meeting with a potential client, wondering just how quickly they could end that meeting with a potential uh vendor. So they're trying to get you off the phone. They're not trying to hear more from you. So, right off the bat, you're telling them that their audience as a vendor, as a potential client, you're telling them that their audience doesn't have time for them. So the way to speak is you speak briefly. So I'm trying to give them this win of brevity wins. The less you say, the better you sell. And so these are the three supports based on those evidences. So the clear takeaway speak in terms of the language of your ideal client, and you'll have more clients, right? So I gave this example. Now, this was muddy, it's nasty. I could throw it into Claude, we could, we could make it better, but you get the gist. We built this together. What did we take? About six minutes to do this, seven minutes, five minutes? And we overthink the presentation because you're just thinking of the information. You're not thinking of what the audience is thinking about, what the audience needs. Remember, if any, if any of these things are zero, the whole message is zero. So that's what's gonna help you. Use this in every single message. Use it as a good framework, a good skeleton to hook your points and evidences on, and then watch what happens to your communication. Now, next time we talk, we're gonna talk about really what I specialize in and what almost nobody practices. You'll spend hours on this content, but you're not willing to spend time on the thing that most people are gonna remember, and that is what I call the command triangle, how you appear when you speak, whether it's on camera or whether it's in person. Next week, you're gonna love that, and we're gonna show you how to really make that message matter to people when you add in the movement that goes with it. So, with that said, thank you for tuning in to the Sam Linton Show. You're a part of the Elevated Communicator series. And if you would like help with your speaking, podcast at samuellinton.com. And I would love to show you some of our packages that are available to make you the best communicator that you ever thought you could be. See you soon.