Do you ever experience pain when you pitch business? Do you ever cause some pain for your customers as a result of those pitches? If you answered yes to either question, then read these 10 Best Practices for creating ‘pain-less’ sales pitches.
Presentations
Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect!
I hate to trash a childhood fantasy, but Practice doesn’t really make Perfect … it only makes Permanent. Only Perfect Practice makes Perfect. I’ve ranted before about why presenters shouldn’t try to memorize their presentations. They should learn them through practice and refinement of message content and structure. Some thoughts for your consideration:
Presentation Anxiety – the Fear Factor
A recurring theme in my presentation training and executive coaching engagements is dealing with stage fright, the jitters, nervousness or the overall fear of public speaking. Presentation Anxiety (PA) – the clinical term for it – is a perfectly normal human response. But, don’t think you have to overcome it and become more confident and comfortable when presenting. Just appear that way. With the audience, perception is reality.
Surviving Q & A
Previous articles discussed some effective strategies for handling audience questions – you can choose to hold them until the end, invite them anytime or try one of the hybrid strategies described in detail. So, someone asks a question. Now what do you do? Here are some Best Practices to help you survive and thrive during Q&A.
Job Interviews & Workplace Presentations
A reader recently asked about the parallels between job interviews and workplace presentations. As a bit of background, one of my sustaining clients is an outplacement firm, where I serve as a part time career coach. I’ve also done hundreds of pro bono workshops for area job seeker groups on the topic of interview communication skills. Here’s a brief summary of some the Best Practices I typically share:
Slide into Successful Slides
Last time, we discussed how to avoid inflicting ‘Death by PowerPoint’ on your audiences. You should have added a few new or different tools to your Presenter Tool Kit as a result. So, let’s continue the process with a few more suggestions to enable you to Slide Into Successful Slides and maximize your audience-centric results.
How to Avoid ‘Death by PowerPoint’
How you use speaker support slides to reinforce and support your message has a direct impact on accomplishing your audience-centric outcomes. PowerPoint – or other similar software packages – has the capacity to provide you with efficient, effective and attractive slides. But, how and why presenters use this great tool makes all the difference. So, let’s add a few new or different tools to your Presenter Tool Kit and share PowerPoint Best Practices. To get us in the mood, let’s discuss Worse Practices first.
How many of you have been the victim of ‘Death by PowerPoint’? I see a lot of hands going up. Remember, it’s not the fault of the software, but of the user. PowerPoint will do most anything you ask it to do – even dumb things. It has user-friendly capacity, but no taste, soul or intelligence … yet.
Can You Hear Me Now?
With most typical workplace presentation situations you’re likely to face, neither the size of the audience nor the size of the room is large enough to need voice amplification. So, simply speak up with your one-to-group energetic volume level and they can hear you fine.
On those rare occasions when you do need a microphone, don’t let the technology tail wag the presenter dog. But do make the most of the technology you have at hand:
Get My Point?
A reader just asked me what I thought of using a laser pointer with his slides. I started the conversation with ‘Don’t let the technology tail wag the presenter dog’. The rest of my comments:
Handouts vs. Slides
A client recently asked me for some advice about a common practice with handouts. He noted that presenters often give audience members hard copies of their slides so they can take notes or use as a handout. Excerpts from my response: