Presentation Training

Take a page from fairy tale narration to fine tune your delivery. The trick to make sure you find the magic wand in your story? Create a cheat sheet.

Pitch Anything is a fascinating book. It’s about how to pitch, but much of it is about everything around the pitch – prospects who keep you waiting, decision makers who leave early, or even executives who sit drawing pictures while you are talking to them.

Why is it important to direct your audience’s attention to what’s happening on your slides and how do you do this when using a very large screen?

Do you hate presenting? Have you spent time working on your presentation skills? It probably didn’t work. Good news. It’s not your fault.

Your presentation style shouldn’t be based on Steve Jobs’ presentation style. If you mostly deliver presentations to small groups, for heaven’s sake, don’t model your approach on someone who was great at doing something completely different.

Tim Cook and Phil Schiller aren’t as charismatic as Jobs. So they ought to think twice before copying his presentation style and approach. It is very difficult to train people to be charismatic. It’s subjective, and requires a huge shift in personality and behaviour, which is a huge risk

I asserted that PowerPoint couldn’t do this… My conversational partner claimed I was wrong, this option was hidden in the settings and I just hadn’t looked hard enough! Quick – to the nearest PowerPoint equipped PC…

When presenting to a small group online, you really need to be thinking more in terms of conversation – and not in terms of a one-way presentation. With a webinar, you talk, everyone else listens. That doesn’t work as well when selling to a small group, or even to one person, online. People expect more

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Creating powerful sales tools is so hard that marketing teams – and agencies – often don’t give enough thought to adoption. People fall into the trap of thinking that their goal is to create a sales tool – when really, it’s to help people sell more. It doesn’t make sense to create a sales tool and then to throw it over the fence at sales.

Presenting face-to-face, we would always tell presenters not to use a script. Presenting a webinar is different. For a start, the audience can’t see you. They have no clue if you are reading or not. They aren’t in the same room as the audience – so you can’t make eye contact either. Presenting online should follow different rules to presenting face-to-face.