Olivia Mitchell starts an interesting discussion on whether to begin your presentation with the conclusion right up front. It’s always a choice with risks attached. Do you give the game away and risk people jumping to conclusions before they understand the ‘how and the why’? Or do you risk annoying the crowd by keeping them…
This was going to be a reasoned summary of all of the latest thinking on retention & memory, to help presenters get their audiences to remember what they’ve spent ages preparing to tell them. But it’s now something different. Why? Because I began to wonder, yet again… Why it is that when I’ve read Macbeth…
It’s a question I’m often asked by clients- The honest answer is, obviously, ‘It depends on who’s in the audience’ but in reality you have to choose an influencing strategy before you start to prepare your pitch. Most people only have one approach, and use it without thinking, and some people know a few strategies, but are…
It happens a lot doesn’t it? We have a proposal to present to a group of clients, and we know that the clients don’t agree on how to proceed, but we have a plan and we have to present it. Our success depends on our ability to find favour with all of the influential interest…
It happens a lot doesn’t it? We have a proposal to present to a group of clients, and we know that the assorted senior people from the same firm, don’t agree on how to proceed, but we have our plan and we have to present it. Our success depends on our ability to find favour…
Here’s a refreshing article from ‘Presentation Magazine‘- about a Venture Capitalist, the improbably named Guy Kawasaki, who has spent many of his working years as follows- “…I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending”, “first mover advantage”, “all we have to…
I was working with Dystin Johnson, a British actor and screenwriter the other day, and in our discussions when trying to help a client run an effective training session for salespeople for a really exciting new product- we got into a discussion about ‘the story’. I was thinking that the story is the thing that…
England was humiliated yesterday. Not by its football (soccer) team, or football ‘fans’, for once, but at the FIFA held unveiling of the countries chosen to host the football world cups for 2018 and 2022. England pulled out all of the ‘big guns’ to help. The shiny new Prime Minister, a squeaky clean sporting royal in the perfect…
As a presenter, you’re always trying to do something to the audiences that you meet. Explain the new product, sell the benefits, clarify, motivate, inspire and convince being but a few of the more common ambitions. It’s just that often it’s at an unconscious level, and so it’s out of our awareness. Poor presenters are very often ‘trying‘ to do one…