Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Experience Better Business Success with Better Presentations
Your
presentations help you get business done!
They may help you close a deal, persuade leaders to make a decision, teach something new, or gain alignment.
To get business done as efficiently and effectively as possible requires thinking about the outcome of your presentations on two levels. This article explains what those two levels are.
Your success as a business presenter always exists on two levels. On one level it is determined by whether the stated goal of the presentation is reached. Did the buyer agree to buy or did your team see the need for the new procedure you’re asking them to follow?
This type of success is fairly easy to measure. The other level of success is more difficult. It is a measure of how effectively you managed the process of presenting. Or, did you manage the conversation in an appropriately orderly fashion?
The second level of success often determines the first. Many times poorly managed presentations leave the audience frustrated, indifferent and a waste of time. Such presentations can hardly be considered a success.
The thing to remember is that presentations are part of everyone’s day-to-day work. So when presenters fail to manage the process well, they’re making it difficult for audiences to do their jobs. When that happens, audiences are stuck. After all, many times audience members are captive! They don’t have the option of walking out or flipping to a new channel. So what they often do is silently disengage. They might feel a sudden need to check their email / social media or think about dinner, doing whatever they can to cope with a bad situation.
Most of the time this reaction has little to do with the goal of the presentation and everything to do with whether the presenter is managing the conversation effectively.
For example, if you’re delivering market research to a group of sales people, your audience wants to understand the research, but they also want you to make understanding it easy. That level of success goes beyond the information itself. It involves:
- Emphasising context and relevance
- Providing perspective
- Leaving out information that isn’t useful to your audience (whether you want to or not)
- Caring about their understanding and buy in
- Being responsive to the in-the-moment needs of the audience
Business presentations are a collaborative process. Pulling your slides together and having a specific goal is only the first step, and that step alone will never guarantee success.
A successful presentation is one in which the audience and the presenter work together in a fruitful, efficient and effective process.
All the best with your future presentations!!!
Posted in
Business presentations Conference presentations Presentation skills training Sales presentations
by effectivecommunication.com.au
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Sanya saxena January 8, 2015 at 1:43 AM