Episode 61: How to Close a Presentation That Leads to Action

Most speakers spend all their time on the middle of a presentation — and almost none on the ending. That's a problem. In this episode, Sam Linton breaks down exactly how to close a presentation that moves people to action — not just applause.

You'll learn the three-part closing framework: the Callback Close (tying your ending to your opening), the Clear Call to Action (one specific next step, not three), and the Final Emotional Beat (the last thing they feel is the first thing they remember).

Whether you're presenting to your team, pitching a client, or speaking on stage, this episode gives you a repeatable structure for endings that stick.

Key Takeaways:
• Your closing is the most remembered part of any presentation — don't wing it
• The Callback Close creates a satisfying narrative loop that makes your talk feel intentional
• One clear call to action always outperforms a list of next steps
• End on emotion, not logistics — the last feeling is what drives action

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

So I was sitting in a keynote in Nashville, and I was listening to a presenter that was doing a phenomenal job keeping the audience's attention, moving people, and he really was. However, there was a moment where we were so captivated with his content that he had us doing an exercise, and then somebody got up and moved us into the next part of the session. And it left me and some of the people that were sitting with me wondering is this it? Like, am I, are we to do something or is this the end? And I recognized that despite how good of a job they were doing facilitating, even getting us to think differently about certain subjects, certain materials, when they didn't do what they should have done with the ending, it left us with a whole different impression of how it went. And therein lies the importance of closing a talk in a way that makes an action take place. That's what we're going to talk about today, because I think many of us, I will say without a doubt, many of us, we spend the majority of our time, the lion's share of our time, in a presentation about anything thinking through that middle portion, like what's happening in that middle portion, what's going on in that middle portion, where the content is, how much we're using, is it accurate? And we spend a frighteningly little amount of time on what do we want to have happen at the end. So today I want to talk to you about closing a presentation that leads to action. Because, in my estimation, if we aren't getting them to take action, we're not doing the right things. And when I say take action, I don't necessarily mean get up and go do something. That could be a part of it, and it might be a great part of it. But when I say action, what I'm referring to chiefly is I'm referring to what do you want to have happen at the end of the talk? And when I'm working with clients one-on-one, I will ask them that question. What do you want to have happen immediately after you're done speaking? Like as soon as your playoff music starts and you get you move from the platform to the seats or the teams meeting is coming to an end, and the everybody's doing that awkward thing where they say goodbye. Nobody wants to do it. I know you can't see what I'm doing right now. Nobody wants to do this. Like we would never do that in a meeting. If we were all sitting together, nobody would do this. But on Teams, like this is a mandatory, like you got to do this. You got to do the completely jointless wave of your hand. It's just you're doing this thing. And nobody wants to do it, but you have to do it. Nobody wants to do it, but it's a part of it's, I think if you don't do that, teams will crash if you don't do this, or Zoom will crash too. You have to do the the thing. Bye, everyone. Anyway, um, where was I? Oh, okay, yeah. So what is happening? Well, what's happening is however you set this up, however you built your talk and what you want them to do, it's gonna determine what that end looks like. Because the problem is if we don't know what we want to have happen and we haven't already set that up, we're gonna leave our audience the same way that we were left when I was in Nashville. I didn't know am I supposed to stand up, am I taking a bathroom break? Am I going to get a cookie? Is this an intermission? Is this the end of the night? Are we in a fire? Is this a fire drill? And you want to assume that the people that you're speaking to don't know what their action is. You want to make that assumption because if you don't make that assumption, then you're gonna think that when you're done, they're gonna be ready to move on. And that's not necessarily the case. So, a couple things, you know, and I'm gonna go through this quickly. Before I get into some of the considerations about this, I have to make the announcement because I am still in shock. I checked this morning, and as of this morning, it's still the case. My book, my latest book, The Confident Communicator, was just released uh two weeks ago now at this point, maybe, or no, a week ago. I launched it hard on Tuesday of last week, and uh, it's a bestseller on many different categories in Amazon. It went uh to number one in a couple categories, and then as the week progressed, it kept going to number one in other categories. I uh am blown away. That's the biggest understatement of the year. I'm more than blown away. I'm humbled. I'm humbled by people that are reaching out to me and emailing me and telling me things that they love about the book. I expected you to buy it. I didn't know if you would read it. It's it's it's a joy when somebody tells an author that they bought their book. It's absolutely life-changing and uh beyond encouraging when somebody tells the author that they read the book and that they are impacted by the book. So I do believe it's probably one of the best books that I've written because it really sums up about 20 years of communication experience into one short book. This is a framework that I built. I tried to make it easy. I tried to make it funny, I tried to make it charming because I'm all of those things. I'm not easy, but I'm charming and funny. I tried to make it simple so that anyone could use it. If you're trying to prep for a keynote, or if you're trying to deliver a commencement address, or if you're trying to do a best man speech, this is gonna help you because there's some things you have to consider. And it's the framework that I use when I uh coach my clients and how I built all of my other coaching frameworks, which, you know, we talked about the elevated communicator, which is now my chief signature framework that I'm using to coach all my clients. This is the confident communicator, this is where it all started, and this is what informs all of my communication. I'm not trying to build it up. I already did that, but thank you. If you publ if you purchase this, thank you. If you read it, thank you. If you care about this content, thank you. It really, really, truly is humbling to think that people are getting a lot out of what I'm doing. So thank you, thank you, thank you. And I'm excited about my next project. I have a really, really, really big project that I'm working on. I don't wanna, I don't even want to talk about it because I'm one of those people, if I talk about it, I'm gonna stop doing the other things that I have to finish. I'm I'm I'm most excited about this one. I haven't been this excited about writing nonfiction in a while. And this particular project that I'm working on right now is it's probably one of my big, it's my biggest nonfiction uh project that I've worked on. And I don't even know how it's going to go. I don't know how to begin it. It there's a lot of moving parts to it, but it's it's ambitious. And I think it's gonna be pretty over the top. So I'm not trying to spoil anything. I'm just saying I'm always working on something, I'm always trying to find ways to add value to you. Everything I'm doing is not to build myself up. I'm trying to figure out the best way to help you. And this new project I'm working on, I think may be one of the best approaches to understanding speaking that I've ever come across. I can't find a resource like the one that I'm writing. So the goal of writing a book, and I know I'm over time and talking about this, but hey, you're still here. The goal is you want to give people something. Like, let me rephrase that. I always wanted to write a book that I wish I could have found like five years ago. I know that sounds kind of woo, maybe a little too visionary, but uh my I my aim is to be able to write something for the past version of myself. And one of the things that I'm grappling with now, and you're gonna hear this in the coming weeks on this podcast, is what could I do as a speaker to become comfortable? And I'm not just talking about commanding, confident, and and effective, but what would what would I need to do to become a comfortable communicator? Like the way that I felt, if I was sitting in my favorite chair, I have a chair behind me that's a leather chair, and occasionally I'll sit there and I'll read. I don't do it as much as I should. I'll sit there and read there. I might work there. It's comfortable. Every part of it is comfortable. So my body, my mind, my affect, what I say, how I say what I say, is influenced by that level of comfort. And the premise of this next book is what could I do or what should I do to tap into that level of comfort when I'm speaking? You're like, well, you shouldn't be comfortable when you're speaking. Why? Some of the best speakers on the planet, you could tell they're comfortable up there. I mean, it might be a it might be a facade, sure. And it might be some fake it till you make it going on, maybe. But some of them genuinely, I was listening to an interview with someone that I'm writing about in the book, and they said, I felt like the time that I spent from the stage went by like it was two minutes. And I was like, wow, I've dealt with so many executives who the only thing they think about is how soon can I be done? Like, get me out of here. When does this, when is this over? And I thought, well, if there was a way I could show people how to feel as comfortable as I do, and I don't necessarily feel comfortable all the time, but I will say I feel more comfortable doing that than I do other things. Okay, so I'm gonna get back to the closings, I promise, but I'm gonna give you an example. I just did a uh a program in North Carolina with a car a colleague, Neville Delusha from Adale Carnegie. And he and I worked uh on a Dale Carnegie program. It was awesome. He's a phenomenal, phenomenal, phenomenal facilitator. Like I learned so much watching him facilitate and speak on communication. So I didn't have a problem working with one of the best trainers in the world. I wasn't nervous about that. I wasn't nervous about wonder if if he's gonna think that my style is different than his. And nope. It didn't even cross my mind. I well, I wasn't worried about the size of our group and it was really highly trained professionals. And I wonder if they're nope, wasn't nervous about that at all. What I was nervous about, what I was nervous about was somebody asked me, there was a chance that we were gonna have to play a round of of uh golf, disc golf, or I think disc golf, yeah, at the end of the night. And I was more nervous about that than anything. If you're like, can you speak in front of 300 people this afternoon? Yeah, I'm good with that. Hey, can you come with two people after and play at top golf, like just driving some balls? I'm gonna throw up in my mouth. I know that sounds dumb. I know this is what you have to realize. I'm way more uncomfortable with that kind of stuff, sports and social settings like that, than I am being in front of people and trying to give people value. They're they're night and day. So I thought, what if I could get people to be comfortable doing speaking the way that they're comfortable doing disc golf? Like, what if I could do that? What if that could be something I could do? So that's the current project. I told you I wasn't gonna talk about it. And now you made me, now look what you made me do. Look what you made me do. You made me talk about it. And this is your fault that we are 15 minutes into this episode and I've just been talking about random things. So I want to close that off and transition to closings. Do you see what that's called? That's called a bridge. I built it and we just drove over it. Now we're back into the closings. Closing. So here's what you never want to do. Let me give you some nevers. Really, really important. Number one, you never want to say, that's all I got. Well, I guess that's it. Or, uh, okay, my time's almost up, or we have a couple minutes. I'm gonna end early. Have I done all of that as a close? Oh, 100%. Yeah. Have I done that before? Sure. Do I think that's effective? Not at all. It's not effective. It's not a closing. You focusing on what you have done. Oh, that's all I've got. Or hope you like that. Or, well, I hope you had fun, or hope you got some sort of value. That's a me focused closing. That's not, I'm not focusing on what they're doing at all. I'm not focusing at all on what it is that needs to happen. So that's a that's you don't want to close that way. It's it's more like a slow fade. You know how a song, you know, has it fades and it's the same chorus that doesn't really have an ending. It doesn't have a definitive ending. It's just the chorus keeps repeating and repeating and repeating and repeating and repeating, and then it like fades. That's what that is. It's like I don't really know what to say. I don't want to just drop a mic, but I'm gonna probably just drop the mic and leave. So you want to make sure that the closing is thought through in advance. So the way I view a closing is asking yourself the question, what happens next? Our audience will ask that a little bit different. What happens now? What am I supposed to do now with what this dude or with what this lady just said? What is it that I am supposed to do now? And this is really transformational because it's going to set up how you structure the rest of the talk. Because everything that you're doing, if you, unless you're rambling, is gonna essentially lead you to that place of describing what I need to do now. And when people hear this, number one, it removes any ambiguity about what it is they ought to be doing. They know, now they might not do it. That's a separate discussion. It's more about persuasion, but at least they know what you want them to do. It makes them feel personally connected to the message. If they know what they have to do, then they know that they've listened enough to know, in a sense, what you're talking about. It makes the next step obvious and it makes the cost of not doing something tangible. And so this is a reframe on the closing. A closing doesn't just end your talk, it starts their response. A closing doesn't just end the talk, it starts their response. For a meeting, for a keynote, for a one-on-one, it doesn't end the talk, it starts the response. So let's re kind of reorient what that might look like. So I'm gonna give you a list of some potential, how do I say this, actions. And you can pull from my list. You might have your own list because you have your own business, you have your own meetings that you run. I don't know what's in your meetings, but I'm gonna give you some of the possible actions that you might want people to do. All right. And then each of them is going to determine essentially what the close is gonna look like. So the first thing is you decide the action before you write the closing. So here are some possible actions. Call me, schedule a phone call. This will be a soft sale or a call to action. I did a talk for a group of people that were public speakers and keynote people, keynote people, keynote deliverers. That doesn't sound better than keynote people. We're misfiring everywhere. Um, and one of my closings was hey, you're the first people I'm gonna know. I'm releasing a book in a couple days. I'm gonna give it to you for free. So if you're interested, sign up for my email list and you get my book. And I gave the book away. So uh it was a value-added thing. And my call to action was take the book. You there you go. Best-selling book. I should have charged them, but I didn't. I didn't know it was gonna be best-selling. I'm just kidding, I wouldn't have charged them. But I uh I wanted to give that to them as a gift. So that was my call to action. Um, possible action is you schedule a call, you want them to evaluate are they gonna jump into your business? Are they going to make an appointment? I don't know what your business is. Schedule a call, make a decision. Today, stop doing this, right? Like you're gonna make a decision to stop doing whatever. This maybe might be a call to join a team or jump onto a project. If you're running a meeting where there's a lot of moving parts, we had this not too long ago with our ministry team at the church. As you know, I'm a pastor. So there was a discussion of who was doing what. The executive pastor, the operations pastor, I should say, is the official title, was kind of divvying up who's gonna do what and where. And so the call to action was which team are you gonna be a part of? Maybe if you're a nonprofit guy like me, your call to action might be give. We did a capital campaign fundraiser and we asked them to give. We talked about giving and we wanted our call to action not to be go think about giving or be excited about the building, it's give. Sometimes, if you are looking for coaching opportunities, you might tell your people it's time to have a hard conversation with people on their team. Or change a habit, stop doing this. Start a new habit, start doing this, practice a skill. Hey, we have a new database. Um, again, our operations pastor is forward thinking, way more than me, smarter than me by leaps and bounds. And he has the whole entire staff using AI. And even people that I'm shocked on the staff would use AI. I can't fathom that. But I was a big AI user, and now he's got everybody using AI through everything, and it's really helping our workflows a lot. So he got them to adopt a new habit. And so, and then another action if you're doing it from an executive standpoint, is maybe lead differently. Maybe there's some things you're doing on your teams, and we'd like you to readjust and lead in a way that reflects whatever. So you don't want to leave with something fuzzy where I just want them to have a good time and I want them to feel encouraged. No. What do you want them to do? If you can't name the action, you can't create the moment of that closing. So keep in mind that the action is gonna dictate the type of closing. All right, next. You want to think about a closing right before you tell them to take action is some sort of recap. So um, this is especially useful. I would say non-negotiably useful when running a staff meeting. And AI and other um artificial intelligence-based tools are phenomenal at this, but you want to use some sort of recap. Hey, we talked about this, we talked about that, we talked about this. If you are running a physical meeting where there are physical participants who are physically coming to the table to talk about what you're going to have them do, you could do a lot worse than printing out an agenda. The agenda is the pre-packaged recap already there. And if you have somebody good running the meeting, they're gonna stay tethered to that agenda. Doesn't mean you can't break it, but what it means is that agenda is gonna dictate what's expected after the meeting. And if you don't have that agenda, a recap will do the trick. A recap is where you just essentially regurgitate what you talked about with no details. So you don't want to relive the whole entire meeting. We talked about this, and Bob said this, this, this, this, and this about this. And then Karen disagreed and this, this, and no. We talked about what time we're meeting, we talked about the deliverables, we talked about the budget being over, and finally we talked about who's doing what. Boom, out the door. You want the recap to not have the details. The details were in the meeting. The recap essentially. Re-engages them with the fact that there was other things we talked about than just this closing. So the recap gives them a summary and it reacquaints their brains with the value that they just experienced. It's like a refresh that brings them back to the beginning. All right. So that's another type of closing. You could do this right before the final close, but you want to recap that. And then another component of your clothes, aside from the recap, aside from that action you want them to take, is what are the stakes? If they don't do what you want them to do, or if they do do what you want them to do, what's at stake? I mean, is this just good vibes are we working with? Is this a matter of a big disruptive thing if we don't do what is suggested? So what is it that's at stake? If we don't do what you're asking, what happens? And a couple ways to form stakes, and not the stakes you cook on the grill, obviously. I'm talking about the things that are at that are at risk if this doesn't happen. So two types of ways to formulate a stakes and formula. Ready? First, if you don't blank, then blank. So if you don't turn your time sheets in, then nobody gets paid. That's a high stakes. If you don't each pick a team to be on, then the teams are gonna be overbalanced and we're gonna fail. All right. So that's one stake. Second, but if you do blank, then blank. So this is from the positive standpoint. If you do jump onto a team, then we will have a chance to be able to put you on the appropriate team and start firing on all cylinders. So I'll give you an example, a couple other examples. If you don't clarify your message, your team will keep mess, uh keep guessing. But if you do clarify your message, you can turn confusion into momentum. That's an example of the stakes formula. If you don't decide what kind of leader you want to become, pressure will decide for you. But if you do, you can lead from conviction. All right, that's an inspirational. You're talking to your leadership team, your executive team, your core. Okay. If you don't practice the close, you may deliver a good talk that goes nowhere. But if you do, you give people a path to respond. You see that? That's a stakes, up and down, a stakes conversation. And this is creating something that almost no leader uses. And it's called urgency. When I was certified to do Dale Carnegie's programs, one of the things that they hammer us about in being a Dale Carnegie trainer is you want to come across with a sense of urgency, that there is something at stake if people don't do the things that you're working on. You wanna, you don't want to make it where we're just here having fun, but that there's something at stake if action isn't taken. So you want to make sure that when we are closing a meeting, that there's some sort of urgency, that if we don't do the thing, then it's gonna have, we're gonna have some problems. So raising the stakes is good. Raising the stakes at the end is phenomenally good. And then another thing to build into this, and again, I'm giving you the ingredients. I'm not necessarily telling you how to formulate it because this is very general based on a bunch of different types of meetings. It depends on what you're doing, the order that you might use these in, but I'm just saying don't close with nothing. So the next one is give them one clear action step. So you could use this in the next thing, like tell me what those clear action steps would be. This is as concrete as you want to get. Write down a person's name you need to have a conversation with. Two, schedule the meeting before Friday. Three, choose one story to close your next presentation. Four, ask your team this one question before our next meeting. Five, stop by my table at the end of the presentation. Right? These are all concrete, like, here's how you know it's concrete. You know it's concrete because if they don't do it, they'll know that they didn't do it. Inspiration sometimes is not concrete. So get out there and slay the dragon. You're like, yeah, slaying dragon. Woo! I'm gonna slay the dragon. Then you get out into the corridor of the hotel where the conference is, and you're like, yeah, dragon, where's the dragon? Okay. Did slay the dragon mean go to my room and get Alka Seltzer? Did slay the dragon mean go to work on Monday instead of quitting? Did slay the dragon, what does that mean? So I'm not, I'm all for inspirational language. I'm all for that. But a good concrete do this next is going to really pay high dividends for the efficacy of your talk. And it really, really helps. So you want to make sure that it's the more concrete, the better. One of my old colleagues, not that she's old, but a former colleague, would say specific is terrific. And I know it's so lame to say it. And I feel like I feel like my face turns into cheese when I say it, but boy, it's memorable. Specific is terrific. The more specific you are about what you say, the more advantageous it'll be for people to respond. And also the more likelihood there is of people actually taking the next step. So the last thing, and I'm gonna give you kind of my take on this. I'll do a quick close this off because I've already talked too long, longer than I wanted to. I mean, you might not think it's long, I think it's long. Um, but you want to land with some sort of emotion. So you want to try to bring in some emotion to that discussion. And the way to bring emotion in is threefold. Of course, story, Glenn's storytelling group, literally the name of my company, story. So any story, uh, it has to be relevant to the audience, though. It can't just be you're the uncle at the punch bowl telling every story. Um, it has to be relevant to what you're wanting them to do, a story that teaches a lesson, an image, something you could show them. This is where your visual aids come into play. If you're running a meeting, what's the graph? Like you see, the downward spiral of where we are and the projection of 2028, we're gonna be in the hole unless we figure out where the bleeding stops, right? Like you can paint that picture with an image or ask them a question. I I should be saying this, I shouldn't be doing this, but I have another thing I'm working on. And this one might not materialize, but I think it's going to. I I have a project I'm working on from a nonfiction standpoint that's not necessarily speaking related, uh, but it kind of is, and it's it's about asking questions, asking bold things, making bold requests. And one of the best closes that elicits emotion is asking a question. You know, so you've been in that situation. Here I'll give you an example. What would change if your team no longer had to guess what matters most to them? Just let that linger. Hey, what one step do you know you already should have taken? Let it linger. You're thrown into the universe. It's volleyball. Let them let them try to catch that. But what if the problem isn't that you're unqualified, but that you've been unclear? A question. Why? You're like, well, the thing's over, right? Like now you're gonna make them answer a question. Yeah, they're not gonna answer the question, but it's gonna elicit an emotional response about what they just heard. People might forget your exact points, but they're gonna remember the emotion of those last moments. The story, the image, and the question. So that's that's a threefold way to inject emotion into your talk. So I think we've covered all the details. I guess that's all I have to say. Do you see what I did right there? No. But remember, people remember the opening and the closing. We've talked about openings. We might go back there again on the next episode, but the closing is going to be the last thing that they think of. And you want them to be thinking of something that's going to give them a win. You don't want them to be leaving wondering, is this break time or am I supposed to be doing something? If you want to communicate effectively, you have to know what you want them to do. And if you are bold enough to tell them what to do, they might just do it. And maybe, just maybe, you'll change the world. So, with that said, thank you for tuning into the Sam Linton show. Again, one more time, thank you for the success of this little itty-bitty book that has a lot of punch to it, The Confident Communicator. I'm really excited for you to read this. Uh, you could get the link in the show notes, it's on Amazon. Just search Samuel Linton, Confident Communicator. Pretty soon, I'm gonna release it to all the bookstores. But right now, Amazon is my jam. So you can get the Kindle version, you can get the paperback version on there, and uh you can put it on your coffee table and say, look, as I just learned this, it's got pictures. There's a picture of a train diagram in there. Look at that. You can't see it, but it's a picture in there. So I really encourage you to pick it up. And if you are looking for any help in your communication, podcast at samuellinton.com. So thank you so much. End with strength, and we will see you on the flip. Thank you again for your support.