How To Make Better Presentations That Sell

On this episode of the Engaging Marketeer I want to talk about presentation and public speaking, in effect, because it’s something I do a lot of obviously. I have a podcast, as you probably know you’re listening to, it but I also do a lot of talks from a stage, I do a lot of presentations. I basically go and flap my gums wherever somebody will listen and I also see a lot of other people giving presentations, particularly at networking events and seminars around the Northwest.

So I wanted to share a couple of tips, that I’ve picked up over the years, to help do better presentations that I think you would probably like to know. And it’s not just so much about making better presentations or being a better public speaker, it’s more about selling, getting people to know, like and trust you and get them to take the action that you want them to take.

So, for example, if you’re at a networking event and you’re talking about the services and the products that you offer, that the people who are there are actually listening to you and they understand what you do, they believe in what you do and they take action in what you do. And you’re not just doing what, quite frankly, the vast majority of people do when they go to these events and they just talk at someone and nobody listens, nobody takes action and they don’t get any business. I don’t know if you’ve been to many networking events yourself but most networking events will not generate any referrals, any revenue, any sales for you.

So it’s important that you take these opportunities to make the best impression, to essentially sell yourself, your brand, your service. So a couple of tips on presentations, on public speaking.

 

Now, the first one is mostly relevant to men, to be fair, ladies don’t tend to do this and that’s what you do with your hands when you’re speaking. So if you stand up to make a presentation, and in most networking events it’s going to be a 60-second talk, you’ll have been at these events yourself that everybody takes it in turns to stand up, they talk for 60 seconds and then they sit down again. What some men tend to do is they will stand up and as soon as they stand up, their hands will make a beeline directly for their pockets. It’s not intentional, it’s not something that you really aware that you’re doing, but when you put your hands in your pockets and you have change and keys in your pocket, you tend to rummage them. Again, it’s not something most people are aware they’re doing, but when you’re doing that and you’ve got somebody sat next to you whose head is, quite frankly, at groin height with you, all they can hear here is the jangling of your change in your pocket right next to their head.

So if you are a hand pocket dweller and it’s something that you’re unable to control, before the presentation starts, take anything out of your pocket and put it on the table in front of you. So that when your hands make a beeline for your pocket, then it’s okay, it’s not going to interfere with what other people can hear. You’ll just be rummaging around with, I was going to say nothing or whatever your hands can reach in your pocket. I’ll stop there, I’ll stop there.

 

Another one, when you’re doing a talk such as this, and many people who haven’t done any kind of public speaking before make this mistake. Is that they will talk as though they having a one-to-one conversation with somebody, often the person sat next to them, and their voice as they speak will start to get quieter and quieter until they’re talking at a very low level so only the person next to them can hear. Yet if there’s somebody sat at the other end of the room, they can’t hear a word you’re saying. You need to make a point of noticing who is the furthest person away from you, where are they, engage with them, speak to them, not to the person next to you. Because if you’re talking to the person next to you, the person at the other end of the room, quite frankly, can’t hear a single word you’re saying and if they can’t hear you they’re not going to be able to do anything that you want them to do. If you’re asking for an introduction to somebody, if you’re asking somebody to like your Facebook page, whatever it is you want people to do, if they can’t hear you, they’re not going to be able to do it.

Also, when you’re doing a talk such as this in in a room where there are maybe 15, 20, 30 possibly even 40 people, you want to make sure those people are paying attention to you. Therefore eye contact is important, you need to look at each one of those people in the eyes. Which, for some people is really awkward to do, really uncomfortable but make eye contact with them, not for a long period, you’re not trying to propose to them, you’re not trying to stare them out.

Just enough so that they know you’ve seen them, they’ve seen you’ve seen them, they know that you want them to pay attention and then move on to the next person. But spread it about throughout the whole room, don’t miss people out. Because if you miss people out, they’ll feel that you’re not talking to them, you’re ignoring them, you’re alienating them.

 

And, of course, you can’t make eye contact with people if you are delivering your talk which you are reading out off a piece of paper or a phone. Now this is perhaps the most difficult thing for people, reading something out is the only way they can remember it.

Now as I’m delivering this podcast, I am not reading anything, I have nothing in my hands, I have nothing in front of me, I am just going through this as I remember it. I will probably miss stuff out, I will probably forget things but you won’t know that because I am the only one who knows what I’m about to say and that’s the same with your business.

If you are at a networking event where you are speaking in front of people, you don’t need to write down what you’re going to read out for fear of forgetting a detail because nobody is going to know you’ve forgotten something!

They don’t know your business, they don’t know what you were going to say. Only you do, so if you leave something out it doesn’t matter but if you just read it out from a piece of paper or a phone or an iPad, focusing solely on the phone, paper or iPad, then you are not engaging with anybody in the room. You are not making eye contact with anybody in the room, you are simply robotically parting what is written in front of you and that is not going to work. That is not going to have the impact that you want . Some of you will think “No, I can’t possibly do this. I have to read it out or my mind will go completely blank!”

If your mind goes completely blank you shouldn’t be in business, it’s your business, it’s what you do!

You know what you do, if you if you were having a conversation with somebody one to one, you’d be able to tell them what you do because you do it every day. Then why do you need a piece of paper when you’re talking to more than one person?

 

Another tip that’s important, don’t focus on you. I know you’re talking about your business and what you do and how you help people or how you provide a product or a service and you want them to know that. But if you talk exclusively about you, nobody cares, they want to hear about themselves.

Say, my industry for example, web design. That would be the obvious one, it’s the one I know best. I’m a web designer, which I am funny enough, I wouldn’t stand up and say “Engage Web, we’ve been designing websites since 2009, that’s 14 years of designing websites. We’ve built loads of websites, we’ve got 13 members of staff and we can do websites for anything that you want!”

That’s boring, anybody would say that. I would talk about you, so I would say something like “You know when you’ve got a website and you’ve paid a lot of money for your website to be designed and developed? And you’re getting traffic to your website but for some reason you’re not getting business, you’re not getting leads, you’re not getting enquiries but you don’t know what’s wrong? That’s the problem with most websites, that’s the problem with most people who do digital marketing .They know how to build your website, some of them even know how to get visitors to your website but what they don’t know is how that website converts for you, how that website turns that traffic into business and that’s what you need. You need a website that doesn’t just look pretty, that doesn’t just get visitors, that doesn’t just make Google analytics think that you’re getting loads of traffic. You need a website that gets you sales, that gets you leads and that’s what we do at Engage Web, we help you become the online authority within your industry.”

There you go, how’s that? That was a 60-second pitch about what we do but I didn’t really use ‘we’ or ‘Engage Web’ until right at the very end, it was all about you. What you need, what you’ve got.

 

Let’s talk about slides, oh I love slides!

But most people haven’t got a clue how to use slides, you know the old PowerPoint. They’ll put up a PowerPoint presentation on a screen behind them and it will be full of bullet points or text and it will be the most boring thing you have ever seen in your entire life.

It will start with “Here’s some photos of my family, here’s some photos of my son, my daughter, my dog, my parrot, the snail we found in the garden. Here’s some holidays we’ve been on, here’s what I did in University, here’s my first job, this is what I did a couple of years ago, this is why I started the business.”

And you are bored senseless because that doesn’t work as a presentation style!

First of all, slides should not contain loads of text, slides should not contain loads of bullet points if you are just going to turn around and read them. Because if you’re reading them out I guarantee, every single person in the room has already read them. They have already read everything that’s on your slides, so as you start to read them out you are just repeating information they already know.

And this goes back to what I said earlier about reading out your 60-second presentations. You don’t need to text on the slides, you just need one image that is a reminder of what you’re going to say, because if you leave something out nobody is going to know! Nobody will know, you can say whatever you want and they will not know if you’ve left something out or completely changed it on the fly.

It’s just a visual reminder. You know your business, who your family are, where you’ve been on holiday, why you started the business. It does not need to be written on the screen, just have a visual reminder and tell the story as though you were telling a story to somebody in the pub.

 

Now where most go wrong with this, they’ve got the slides behind them. They will turn around and face the slides and read them out, completely ignoring the audience in front of them. Well that’s not engaging at all, there is no reason for you to turn around with your back to the audience, you should never do that. Certainly not while you are still talking because if you were addressing the audience behind you, you are not engaging with the audience that should be in front of you. If there are people in there who are hard of hearing and they need to lip read you, they cannot lip read you if you’re facing the screen! You cannot make eye contact with people if you are facing the wrong way! Yet so many people will give a presentation with their back to the audience, facing the screen.

I was at a presentation just the other day where somebody had their opening slide up which was effectively like a large business card with their name, job title, phone number, email address and the company logo. It was just a business card on a slide and it was on the slide for maybe 3 minutes.

And every 8 to 10 seconds they would turn and look at the slide. Why? It hasn’t changed, it’s exactly the same as it was 8 seconds ago when you last looked at it! There’s no new information on it, nothing on that slide is relevant to what you were saying and when they weren’t looking at the slide they were staring in off into middle distance, not making eye contact with anybody in the room as though they didn’t know they were even there. It was the least engaging presentation I have ever seen yet people do that within business, people do that because they don’t know any better. But now you do, you know better.

 

That’s just a few tips on presenting, there are infinitely many more I could go through but I want to keep this short because, quite frankly, I poured a coffee 15 minutes ago and it’s upstairs and it’s going cold. I will go through more tips in a later podcast because I said there are many more I can do, more in depth, more advanced than this because these are all fairly basic. But these are tips that many people get wrong, that many businesses get wrong, when they’re making presentations, so hopefully this has been helpful, hopefully you’ve picked something up from this.

And if you think there’s anyone you know, who has made these kind of mistakes that I’ve just talked about, then perhaps share this podcast with them. So they can see different ways they can improve their presentations, because it’s not a criticism of what they do. Please realise that I’m not criticizing anyone, I’m not taking the piss, I’m trying to help people do better so that they will get more results from it.

They will get better results, because if you give better presentations, you will engage people more, that’s what Engaging Marketeer is all about. You will engage people more, they will listen to what you’re saying, they will understand what you’re saying, they will believe in what you’re saying. And you will get more referrals, more leads, more business, you will make more money and you’ll be more successful.

All you need to do is share this podcast with people who who’ve made the sort of presenting errors that you’ve heard me talk about today.

 

About your host:

Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/

Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com

Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk

More To Explore