Introduction

This is not just another book on presentation skills. Far from it. This book gives you insights that could transform your business presentations and significantly improve your conversion rate. It has been constructed to act as a reference source for the present, and a coach for the future, providing checklists, tips and guides to help you maintain high standards.

In fact, it is about persuasive communication.

This Essential Guide is intended to give you an understanding of what it takes to get results from business presentations, and how to prepare and deliver your message with impact. It includes the relevant elements of oratory and the platform skills of a professional speaker. It will help you to grab and hold the attention of a business audience.

The focus of this book is on helping you to understand how persuasion works. Its premise is that every business presentation should be designed to make some change in the thinking, attitude or behaviour of the audience. It therefore follows the rules of salesmanship, and includes the techniques of powerful platform performers.

Let’s be clear about the aims of this book. It is not about selling and it is not just for those who work in sales, but it is about getting agreement. It’s about making a proposition and getting that proposition accepted and acted upon. It’s about making your case in a way that gets results.

Presentations that worked

Starting with examples of successful presentations, Making Business Presentations examines why they worked, and contrasts them with presentations that fail, emphasising the costs of getting it wrong. The book provides some simple techniques, but explains the reasoning behind them, so that you can make lasting improvement and monitor your progress.

When you know what success looks like, and realise the contribution made by good presentation, you will never again consider a business presentation to be just a parade of PowerPoint slides. It will make a difference to your self-confidence when you stand before an audience.

In Chapter 2 there is a checklist of 30 essentials for successful presentations. It will help you to understand why so many presentations fail... and what you need to do to avoid making the same mistakes and improve your own results.

You’ll be guided to realising your own added value in the process, and the importance of your own point of view in the messages you put across.

One essential element that will make a huge difference to your business presentations is this: stop describing your product or service, and talk, instead, about how it benefits your customers.

What you will learn

You’ll learn a simple technique for going from blank page to first draft in 15 or 20 minutes. It will get you started, it will help you get out of trouble when you have a tight deadline, it will provide a working framework for all your future presentations, and give you an insight into the value and purpose of structure.

You will gain an understanding of how people listen to presentations, so that you can connect better with them and avoid ‘death by PowerPoint’.

Aids to memory

There are a number of aids to memory, such as the 4 Ps of preparation, which apply to presentations: Principles, Purpose, Planning and Pre-qualifying, as well as the three negative elements and three positive elements of presentations.

There is a whole chapter on persuasion, to help you make your case more effectively. Many business presentations concentrate on describing the offer or the nature of the business they represent. I show you how to follow the sequence that presses the right response buttons in your listeners.

The chapter on visual aids will guide you away from the slide abuse that ruins presentations, explaining how slides and other visual aids should be used to support but not supplant you, the presenter.

An extension of what you already know

This is a book you can read from cover to cover or dip into from time to time. Each chapter highlights the learning points, to enable you to refresh your memory as you go along.

I have assumed that you already know something about making business presentations, but have added some new thinking and assembled it all as a handy ready reckoner – with the appropriate explanations where necessary.

I have also included something on the oratorical devices that are used to such great effect by such brilliant speakers as Barack Obama. They are known and proven to work in pressing people’s hot buttons, and can make an amazing difference to the way you connect with your audience.

The final chapter is about revision and setting up a process to monitor your future performances as a presenter. It provides a quick-reference summary of all the chapters, to enable you to locate any of the main topics covered. In addition, it provides access to the website where you can download a recorded summary of the book, chapter by chapter, and burn it onto a disc to play in your car and elsewhere.