Three things that could be destroying your presentations
For many, speaking opportunities are designed to achieve at least two objectives.
The first is to deliver your core information – knowledge, training and coaching. The second is to sell directly to your audience at the conclusion of your event or to arrange personal meetings where you can gain the chance to engage individuals to become your clients.
If you have delivered presentations either in person or online in the past, you’ll know that a great deal of work goes into creating and delivering a quality presentation that’s informative, insightful and valuable to your audience. But even with all of that hard work, a good presentation can fall flat. If your presentations aren’t delivering the results you’d hoped for, there’s a good chance you’re making one of four fatal mistakes.
1. Poor body language
Body language has a tremendous impact on presentations. Studies have found that one of the greatest reasons for the success of TED Talks isn’t the big ideas they share but the delivery. In other words, it’s the speaker’s charisma, gestures and rapport with the audience that makes all the difference.
Some of the biggest body language problems include:
- Lack of body language – you’re just standing still.
- Um’s and Uh’s that distract from what you’re saying.
- Freezing behind the podium and not moving around in a natural way.
- Distracting habits such as licking lips, shifting weight from leg to leg or fidgeting.
- Signs of nervousness like shaking, sweating or shallow breathing.
The first step in improving your body language is to record yourself practicing your presentation. You’ll notice a great deal that can be improved once you are aware of exactly what you are doing.
2. Lack of knowledge about your topic
Follow the old five P’s saying: Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance!
When you really know your topic, and you know you know it, your presentation confidence grows because you stop worrying about ‘getting something wrong’. This allows you to relax more and when you’re relaxed you act more naturally.
3. Putting your audience to sleep
You are unlikely to be successful making your offer, making a sale or gaining subsequent interview opportunities at the end of a boring presentation. Your speech, presentation, training or education needs to be engaging from beginning to end.
Apart from your charisma, gestures and rapport there are a number of ideas and strategies you can apply to bring your presentations to life. For example, you can add stories to your presentation to make it more intriguing and introduce images and videos to liven it up. And give your audience plenty of opportunities to participate. Most of all, be excited about the offer yourself – your excitement will be contagious.
4. No winning process for making your ‘offer’
Just hoping that your great presentation and winning smile will be enough to get your offer across the line is doomed for failure. You need to build an effective strategic process into your presentation to maximise your success.
Most importantly you need to be open and transparent with your audience. People inherently know that you are attempting to ‘sell’ to them, so trying to hide that detracts from the relationship you are trying to build.
Tell them what you are going to do, (make an offer), but do so by providing sound, common sense reasoning that highlights the positive outcomes for them. To enhance your chances of success it’s also important to provide more than one opportunity for them to get involved with your offer. This means strategically introducing your offer as you speak and within the online and physical material you provide at your events.
Finally, you must include a smart, regular follow up approach after the event.
The team at Capstone can help you to take your business to the next level. To find out how contact:
Kym Turner
Head of Coaching & Development
Capstone Financial Planning
P: 03 8622 0719
E: k.turner@capstonefp.com.au
