Public Speaking – It isn’t what it used to be

You may think that the presentation techniques that great orators use to engage with and command an audience’s attention haven’t changed much over the years. Certainly the many of the core techniques that were relevant when Julius Caesar was speaking to The Senate are still relevant today.

Most presentation training courses cover such things in excruciating detail and they include:

• Rehearsal
• Eye contact
• Appearing confident
• Removing noise words like err and umm
• Standing upright
• Breathing
• Body Language
• Knowing your audience
• Remembering what to say
• Having a structure
• Being Concise
• Minimising distractions
• Using the rule of 3
• Using rhetoric
• Engaging your audience

But there are two main aspects of giving a presentation which have changed significantly over the last few years as technology continues to improve and audiences become less forgiving.

The first of these is the reduction in the use of bullet points and text on your visual aids, replacing it with graphics, pictures and images. I have recently covered this in my post “Less text – More Imagery”.

As well as having more impact, using less text and more imagery will stop you using your visual aids as a crutch and stop you reading from the slides.

The second major change is in the audiences’ attitudes towards the presenter and his/her content. These day, people are far less forgiving of poor presentations. The sheer volume of information available to each and every one of us, means that everyone has had to become far more selective in deciding what information we need to listen to. Attention spans have shrunk through the constant bombardment of 140 character messages, speed scanning of websites, text messages and the ever increasing speed of change.

To compete with all the other demands on people’s attention, your presentations have to deliver exactly what your audience needs and fast.  Waste time introducing yourself and your company at the start of a presentation and you will probably have lost your audience even before you get to the interesting bit. Your presentations need to hit the ground running, focus on the import point to get your message across and then prepare your audience for what comes next.

Too many corporate presentations spend too long talking about “who we are” at the start of the presentation. Boasting about the number of offices, geographical coverage, turnover and number of employees and what awards that they have won. These days you are better off getting straight to the point as to what you can do for your prospective customer. Tell them how they will benefit and then tell them what they need to do next, to make it happen. Then sit down.

Maybe that is not so different from what the good orators did years ago, it may just be that lots of people thought that their business presentation should be about themselves when it should be about their customers.

By Graham Young

Young Markets

www.businesspresentation.biz

Less Text – More Imagery

The rules for creating  the oral part of a great speech have remained constant for thousands of years. Great orators have always just stood and talked, enthralling their audiences with their wit and eloquence. However , there is one aspect of presenting which has undergone massive changes over the last few years. That is the use and content of the visual aids. This has radically changed most business presentations over the last few years.

Over the last ten years there has been a trend to reduce the amount of text on slides and increase the amount of high quality imagery. No doubt the growing capacity of even the smallest laptop to store and display high-resolution visuals and the availability of such images on the internet has been at least partly responsible.

Research has shown that an audience’s ability to remember what a speaker has said is greatly increased if pictures are used to illustrate the points being made. Even good old Confucius said “I hear  I forget, I see I remember”. Now in the early days of PowerPoint people misinterpreted this to mean that if they displayed a slide full of bullet points their message would be better understood and remembered for longer.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. These days if you put up a slides full of bullet points your are more likely to hear yawns from the audience, and get accused of causing death by PowerPoint. The trouble is that many people just don’t know what else to do.

In this article what I am going to do is show you how to evolve your slides from paragraphs of text, to bullet points and then on to picture based slides which will have far more impact on your audience, and get them to remember what you were talking about for far longer.

An Example

Say you were giving a presentation about the three key components to a healthy lifestyle. In the old days you may have created a slide like this:

Then people started using the PowerPoint templates and with the addition of some clip art it look more like this:

As the importance of graphics becomes clearer you may have created a slide like this:

This one uses a custom template design, but although the images are now, photographs rather than clip art, most of the text is still there.

Finally, the modern approach might be to split it on to three slides, thus obeying the rule ”one point - one slide”, with very little text on the slide. The onus is now on the presenter to fill in the additional information which is no longer on display.

The pictures now take up the whole screen, so the corporate template with its headings and logos has disappeared, but the audience get the full effect of the pictures. And as the old saying goes A picture is worth a thousand words.

Hopefully you would agree that seeing the three separate slides being brought up as the presenter talks about the importance of good quality food, regular exercise and good sleep, would be more effective that the initial all text slide.

My question to you is:  How old are your slides? Are you still using bullet points?

I would like to gain an overall impression of how advanced people’s slide design is, as such I have a very short survey which I would like you to complete. You can find it here on Survey Monkey.

The design of visual aids has changed, if your presentations have not kept pace with modern thinking, your prospects and customers may think that your business is old fashioned too.

By Graham Young

Young Markets

www.businesspresentation.biz

Positive Power of Power Posing

Most people are aware that our body language affects how other people view us but did you know that it
can also affect how we feel about ourselves and even affect our body chemistry

According to research by Amy Cuddy a social psychologist from Harvard Business School, ”power posing” — standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don’t feel confident — can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain.

Testosterone is a hormone which is usually associated with power and dominance, people in a position of power usually have higher than average testosterone levels.

Cortisol is another hormone which is associated with stress levels, and people who are felling stressed usually have above average cortisol levels.

Amy conducted a study which showed that by adopting a power pose, i.e. one where we stretch out our arms and /or legs, to take up more room than usual, for 2 minutes, actually raises the level of testosterone and reduces the levels of cortisol in our bodies. While sitting in a huddled position, minimising the amount of space we take up, for 2 minutes results in a decreased level of testosterone and an increased level of cortisol.

What does this mean to you?

To increase your confidence and authority prior to a presentation, instead of sitting hunched over your laptop reviewing the slides, stand up, stretch your arms out and “power pose” for a couiple of minutes. You will feel more confident and your presentation is more likely to succeed.

For more information check out the video of Amy’s TED talk on Youtube.

By Graham Young

Young Markets

www.businesspresentation.biz

To Move or Not to Move – When Presenting

Looking at various article and blogs there would at first sight appear to be a dilemma in the minds of presentation experts as to whether it is good practise to move around when giving a presentation. Some people state that the speaker should stand up straight and still, feet slightly apart, with most of your weight on the balls of your feet and hands at your side. While others suggest that you should step out from behind the lectern and move around the stage area while you talk.

So which is it to be?

Let us start with the basic premise that the speaker is the most important visual aspect of the presentation. Audiences want to see who is talking; they want to see some positive body language reinforcing what is being said. They rarely like the “voice for the gods” effect created by a speaker who is not clearly visible.

So, for my part, I totally agree with the idea of moving out from behind the lectern. Let your audience see you. Lecterns basically just get in the way. They create a barrier between you and your audience and create the feeling that you are talking down to your audience, rather than talking with them, which is a far better approach to gaining your audience’s engagement.

Movement attracts attention. It stimulates our visual senses and people pay far more attention to something that is moving than something that is standing still. So logically, if you want to be centre of attention, which as a presenter you should, then moving around will attract more attention to you as a speaker.

However, if there is too much movement that law of attraction can have the opposite affect. People are so attracted by your movement that is all that they concentrate on, the movement, not what you are talking about.

Many novice speakers move because of nervous tension, rather like a tiger pacing up and down the edge of its enclosure. The movement helps to relieve some of the speaker’s tension, but will end up distracting an audience from what is being said. Hence the advice from many presentation coaches to stand still, when giving a presentation.  Regular to-ing and fro-ing also tends to break the “little repetitive things irritate” rule of presenting.

So if you are going to move, move with a purpose. Make the movement fit with what you are saying. Some research suggests that if there are, for example, three aspects to your presentation you should stand in three different locations on the stage (or front of the room) for each different point. E.g. stand stage right when you are talking about what happened in the past, move to centre stage when you talk about what is happening now, and then stand stage left when you talk about the future. The audience then associate your journey across the stage with the journey you are describing. If later on in the presentation you want to refer back to “how it used to be” walk over to stage right, to compound what you are saying.

In general, if you can move closer to your audience, it will help to reinforce, an important point of your presentation.

But of course there is one definite rule, do not cross the beam of your projector. Set the room up so that you can move around without creating a shadow on your slides.

Overall, the answer has to be “To Move” but to move with a purpose, other than just letting off steam.

By Graham Young

Young Markets

www.businesspresentation.biz

Are corporate presentations worthless?

Recently, I ran some training for the UK division of a multi-national company. The participants were all senior business development managers. During the training each of the participants had to gave a presentation to a pre-defined audience, for example one had to give a company overview to the CEO and board members of a prospective customer; another had to present to the CTO and technical team; others gave their presentations to the CFO, or a project team.

While the standard of speaking was very good, as you might expect for such experienced managers, there was one negative aspect across the all the presentations. Everyone was using PowerPoint slides from a corporate set.  While not all presentations were the same, the same company introduction slides kept cropping up in everyone’s presentations.

These slides contained a lot of text and were very information rich. To their credit the presenters were not slavishly going through each slide bit by bit but were highlighting the parts that fitted in with the theme of their presentations.  When I asked why they were using slides with so much redundant information on them, I was told that they were the corporate slides, produced by HQ and that everyone was expected to use these slides. The other excuse was that they didn’t have the time to create their own slides.

In my mind this raises the question “Are corporate presentation worthless?”

The problem with corporate presentation slides stem from the remoteness of the marketing people who create them. They sit in their ivory towers and create presentations about their organisation, their products, services and solutions. They know all about the benefits and the USP’s  (unique selling propositions) of their solutions, but very little about individual prospect’s needs and wants. They try to create a one size fits all presentation which covers everything a prospect may want to know about their company.

In addition, central departments like to spell things out, they feel they have to cater for the lowest common denominator, i.e. the fresh-faced new sales recruit who knows very little about the company and its products. The result is that they tend to use more text, to ensure the correct message is given during the presentation.   In essence, they like to spell everything out, literally.

Inevitably, any such corporate presentation becomes very organisation centric, as the person who created it knows a lot about the organisation but very little about individual customers.

Good presentations are about the audience not about the presenter.  By using the corporate slides, in my example, the audience were suffering from information overload, which detracted from what the speaker was saying. In my view the presenters would have been far better off, radically simplifying each of the slides that they used, to ensure they were only depicting the point being made at that part of the presentation.

Given that corporate slides shows are always likely to be more about the corporation than the customers, and will by definition tend to be very generic, are they still worth creating?

I would value your feed back on this question.

Do you “FoF” before you demo?

Imagine, you are about to give another demo of your company’s excellent technology solution. You have re-initialised the demo setup, so that all the changes you made in the last demo have gone. You have hooked up the projector, adjusted the keystone so that it displays properly on the screen, and set all the chairs out so everyone can see your demo.

Everyone files in and sites down eagerly awaiting your demo. After a short introduction from your host you’re ready and off you go, showing the best of your technology off first. Fingers flying across the keyboard, well practised benefit phrases accompanying every feature that you show.

Your audience are sitting there mouths open, eyes shut, snoring gently.

What has gone wrong? The last time you did this demo the audience were in raptures, they couldn’t get enough of it, what’s wrong with this lot? Don’t they understand how wonderful this solution is? “What an ignorant audience”, you think.

Sound familiar?

So what has gone wrong? 

Did you remember to “FoF”?

“FoF”? I hear you say. What the …. is “FoF”?

“FoF” stands for “Find out First”, and is an essential part of every demonstration. Giving a demo without “FoF” is like a doctor giving you a prescription before he examines you, or an estate agent (realtor) taking you to view a property, without asking what type, style, size and price you have in mind.

Before any demonstration, you need to “Find out First”, i.e find out:

• what your audience are interested  in?
• what problems they are experiencing with their current system?
• why the are looking to acquire a new system?

 In short, you need to know what they want or need to see, otherwise you may be showing them things they don’t want or don’t appreciate.

Okay, you think, next time I’ll check first.

So at start of the next demo you ask “What would you like to see?”

But the problem is most audiences will respond with:

 “I don’t know.  It’s your system,  just show us how it works.”

So you are no further forward.

One of the best ways to find out is using the SPIN questioning technique as taught by Huthwaite’s. This is a questioning technique which starts by asking questions about the current situation, then expands on this to identify problems which the respondent may or may not already be aware of. Further questions surrounding these problems probe to find the implicit and explicit needs that these problems are symptomatic of and finally you end up asking the  need (or Payoff) questions to confirm exactly what is needed by the prospect and how much it would be worth. 

Armed with the answers to these questions, you will have a much better understanding of your prospects needs and wants. Not only will you know what they are likely to be interested in, you will know what their most pressing problem is and hence you will know what to show first in your demo.   

So next time, instead of rolling out the same old canned demo, which you have done may times before, remember to “FoF”, and create a new demo which solves the problems of this particular audience.

 

 

Presentation Endings

According to the results of a recent survey I undertook, 80% of people finish their presentations with either a summary of their main points or a Question & Answer session. While both these activities have their merits and should usually be included as part of a presentation, I think 80% of people are missing a trick.

Before I reveal what is being missed, let us start by looking at why we give presentations in the first place. In business there are three and only three types of presentation. I talked about these in an earlier post on Presentation Endings.  They are:
A. The Entertaining Presentation, the objective of this type of presentation is purely to entertain, make the audience laugh and smile.
B. The Informative Presentation, designed to transfer knowledge from the presenter to his audience.
C. The Influencing Presentation, which tries to influence the audience in some way, i.e. to make them think differently after the presentation then they did before.

In my view, the vast majority of business presentations are “Influencing Presentations”. They are trying to sell something, it may be a product, a service, a solution or maybe just an idea, or a new way of thinking or working but they are inevitably about instilling some change in the audience.

To get people do something you have to tell them what it is they should do. You can’t just hint at it, you are always best telling them straight, so that there is no ambiguity and it is clear exactly what they should do. This is where a “call to action” is very important. By having a “call to action” at the end of your presentation you can make it very clear what the audience should do next. Summarising the main benefits or having a question and answer session after your call to action dilutes that call. So 80% of people who do not finish with a “call to action” that tells their audience exactly what to do next are missing a trick. The have spent all their time and effort getting their audience all revved up, but not told them where to go.

There is an old saying in presentation circles, “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them”. While the sentiment is a good for a knowledge transfer presentation, if you are trying to influence people, it ignores the need for a call to action. I think a better phrase would be” tell them why they should listen, tell them, tell them what to do next”.

After all, the objective of an influencing presentation is to get people to do something. So when you are creating the presentation that place to start is with the statement that tells people what to do, which is the last thing you are going to say. Then work backwards from there to where your audience are now, in order to justify the call to action and make people willing to take the action. That will define the route your presentation has to take, which will take your audience from their initial state through the tipping point to where you want them to be when you issue your call to action, confident in the belief that they will be ready to take that step.