The other night my husband and I enjoyed a delicious meal at our favourite restaurant, the Terra Cotta Inn. I ordered a steak and it was amazing. Here’s why: a yummy steak is a combination of good quality meat, careful preparation and beautiful presentation. It’s like that with our sales presentations.
I was recently providing coaching feedback on the pilot of a new high stakes product presentation that was being launched for a client. The observers in the room commented that the presentation felt dry and needed more ‘sizzle.’ Here’s what we did to accomplish that:
- Reworked the content – made the key points tighter, slashed content that added little value and reordered it to create a more logical flow.
- Wove in Persuasion Elements to bring the content to life – added stories, analogies, examples and evidence throughout the fabric of the presentation to transform the content from dull and boring black and white to brilliant technicolor.
- Coached the presenter on his delivery – voice modulation, energy, inflection and pauses all put the icing on the cake. Because this was to be a webinar, we focused primarily on vocal attributes. Had it been a face-to-face presentation, we would have also focused on how eyes, hands and body would come into play.
- Reviewed the quality of the slides – The slides that were developed for this presentation were clear and well designed and no changes were needed. This is usually not the case and slide makeovers are often in order. Continue reading “Putting Sizzle in Your Sales Presentations”
When you must communicate a lot of dates in a presentation, how do you make them easy to understand without confusing your audience?
The easy way is to just list the dates in bullet point form. But this is not very effective.
Why? Because by listing the dates in bullet points, it’s not easy for the audience to find a date and be able to relate it to the other dates. So you might ask, does putting the dates in a table make it easier? At least it makes the dates easier to see, because they are all in one column. But it still doesn’t help the audience to tell how far they are from today or how the dates relate to each other.
To figure out better ways to communicate date-based information, we can look to what we learned in grade school. When we were in kindergarten, one of the key concepts we learned was the calendar. We had to learn how to tell the days of the month, days of the week and how they related to each other. Once we learned those concepts, we could easily relate to when tests were scheduled, when assignments were due, and, most importantly, when school was done for the summer!
Why not show date-based information as a calendar? We understand it instantly because it is familiar to us. This is one of the tips I’ll be demonstrating in my upcoming webinar on April 11th. You’ll see how clear the information is in a calendar format and how easy it is to create in PowerPoint.
Here are two examples, one with dates listed as bullet points. The other dates are shown on a calendar:
Another concept we learned in grade school gives us a second way to more visually show date-based information. In history class we created timelines to represent when events happened in a certain period we are studying. Perhaps it was when the first explorers arrived in the land, when they first settled the land, and when they first encountered the native people. We plotted a timeline that gave us a sense of how far the events were from each other.
If we have project-based information, using a timeline diagram can be a great way for people to instantly understand the timing of key tasks in the project.
Can we make time-based information easier to understand? We certainly can.
Today’s guest post is by Dave Paradi who will be my guest presenter on April 11th for our webinar on ’20 Expert Tips To Create Persuasive PowerPoint Slides’ from 12:00 to 1:00 EDT. Join us and you will see these two expert-level tips, along with at least 18 other ideas you will be able to apply immediately to increase the effectiveness of your presentations.
When delivering presentations, if you want to “WOW!” your audience and move them to action, pay more attention to your slides. The design of your slides is an overlooked opportunity for ramping up the persuasion factor to get real results: more ‘buy in’, more action, more sales.
In my UPFRONT Persuasion workshops, I see many presenters resort to the same old approach using boring, text heavy slides which serve then as crib notes. Then they joke about PowerPoint as a necessary evil. The real problem is they aren’t aware of what’s possible with PowerPoint.
Poor design and lack of clarity in the slide message have many consequences:
For the presenter: When your slides are boring, you are boring. When your slides are confusing, you confuse your audience. You have to work so much harder to relay your message with energy and conviction. When you resonate with your slides and they ‘sing,’ then you speak to your points with infectious enthusiasm and clarity.
For the audience: We often experience the following annoyances:
- The presenter is reading text laden slides – very boring.
- The presenter is trying to paraphrase the text that is on the slide – totally confusing because there are two messages being delivered at the same time that compete with each other and split our focus.
- The presenter has a complex, confusing graph and has no plan for clearly walking the audience through the critical information – total overwhelm. Continue reading “Your PowerPoint Slides Impact Your Persuasion Factor”
Canadian Venture Communications CEO and Dragons’ Den co-star Arlene Dickinson has released her book Persuasion: A New Approach to Changing Minds. In an interview, Arlene speaks about one reason people fail to persuade — the feeling that their opinion isn’t valued or valuable.
People have a thought in their heads but they don’t say it because they aren’t confident about how it will be received. In her interview she says, “If you don’t say how you really feel, then you are guilty of letting other people make choices for you, which is just a shame.”
This struggle has to do with our mindsets – our assumptions, our beliefs, our values and our confidence. Clearly, how we think has a direct impact on our ability to be persuasive.
Shifting how we think is one of the most powerful ways to tackle the art of persuasion and presentation effectiveness. But as important as it is, our mindset is only one aspect of what it takes. Continue reading “Presentations: Why People Fail at Persuasion”
Learn to prepare, construct and deliver presentations with professionalism, authenticity and confidence. This webinar series will help you master the ability to persuade any audience!
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The other night my husband and I enjoyed a delicious meal at our favourite restaurant, the Terra Cotta Inn. I ordered a steak and it was amazing. Here’s why: a yummy steak is a combination of good quality meat, careful preparation and beautiful presentation. It’s like that with our sales presentations.
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