Your Message Isn't Landing — Here's the Formula That Fixes It

You prepared for hours. You had every data point. You covered everything. And your audience still walked out wondering what the point was.

A guy once sat down in front of six contractors — myself included — dropped a phone book-sized manual on the table, and announced he was going to read it cover to cover. Seven and a half hours of lead-based paint regulations, word for word. His logic? If he gave us all the content, we'd become experts.

We didn't become experts. We became hostages.

This is the mistake almost every executive communicator makes. You think your message is about the words — the content, the data, the slides, the information. So you pile it on. More bullet points. More backup. More detail. And the more you add, the less your audience retains.

Information Isn't Communication

We're living in an age where anyone can become an expert on anything with a browser and a ChatGPT prompt. Your audience doesn't need more information. They need a reason to care about the information you're giving them.

Think about the last all-hands meeting you sat through. Did the speaker think about what you needed to hear — or did they just dump what they wanted to say? There's a massive difference, and most leaders never stop to consider it.

This is what I call the chief sin of executive communication: we communicate based on what we want to say and forget about what our audience needs to hear.

The Fuel Formula

After years of coaching executives through TED talks, international all-hands meetings, media appearances, and corporate presentations, I built a framework that works for every single type of communication. I call it the Fuel Formula:

Audience Need × Clear Takeaway × 3 Supports = A Message That Moves

Notice it's multiplication, not addition. If any one of these elements is zero, your entire message is zero. Let me break each one down.

Audience Need

Before you write a single word, ask: what does my audience actually need? Not what do you want to tell them — what are they sitting there thinking about?

Your audience is thinking about their pain points, their aspirations, their responsibilities, and what value they're going to get from listening to you. None of that has to do with you. All of it has to do with them.

If you're an executive running a department meeting, you might think the audience needs to hit their sales quota or follow a new protocol. But that's what you need. Your audience is thinking about how long this meeting will be, whether they can pick their kid up from school, and what's happening with the economy. When you ignore their needs, you lose them before you even get to your content.

Clear Takeaway

What is the one thing you want your audience to walk away with? It usually falls into one of three categories: something you want them to remember, something you want them to believe, or something you want them to do.

The best example I can give is an email with a subject line that reads: "Meeting at 7 canceled. End of message." That person thought about me. They gave me exactly what I needed and nothing more. Your presentations should have that same clarity of purpose.

If your audience leaves asking "what was the point of that?" — your takeaway wasn't clear enough.

Three Supports

This is where the bulk of your message lives. Take your central idea and support it with three pieces of evidence, insight, or story. Why three? I don't know why it works, but it works. Two feels like not enough. Four feels like it might as well be four thousand. Three is the sweet spot where people actually remember what you said.

These supports can be stories, data points, testimonials, or case studies — but they need to be relevant to the audience, not to you. Your opinion alone won't move anyone. What you can show them will.

I recently worked with a team that built a gorgeous slide deck — beautiful graphics, perfect branding — with about a bazillion points in it. We took the entire presentation and condensed it into three. Their delivery transformed overnight.

Build It in Five Minutes

Here's the thing that surprises people most: this doesn't take hours. When I built a sample keynote live on the show using this formula, it took about six minutes. Figure out what your audience needs, identify one clear takeaway, stack three supports underneath it, and you have a message that actually moves people.

Stop overthinking your presentations. Start thinking about your audience. The words matter — but only if someone is still listening when you say them.

This post is adapted from Episode 54 of The Sam Linton Show — Part 3 of The Elevated Communicator series. Listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch on YouTube.