Such a bad presentation I can’t help

I sat through two bad presentations and a great one the other day.  The great one was designed to simply give people information they could use to help market their businesses.

It was fun, fast and full of useful stuff.

The two presentations that came before it weren’t quite so good.  In fact they were so bad that at one point I had to restrain myself from banging my head against the wall.  The business-man in me, of course, stopped that kind of behaviour from manifesting and instead of seeing two bad presenters, saw two possible clients.  Hey-ho!

At the end of the presentations I had to leave pretty sharp-ish to get home but being a well organised chap (stop laughing) I followed up today by sending emails to the two potential clients.

Or at least I would have done if I could.  As it happens I couldn’t even do that, because I didn’t know how to contact the speakers.  Now, given that their presentations were, essentially, 10 and 15 minute long sales pitches, that’s something of a disaster from their point of view.

Clearly, I wasn’t trying to contact them to buy anything from them (their presentations didn’t inspire that kind of reaction at all!) but it’s a salutary lesson and an indication of exactly by how far these presentations had missed their mark.

Instead of sitting down and thinking “What would my audience need to know?” they’d sat down and thought “What can I tell my audience about my work?”.  That mind-set was the key thing wrong with the presentations and carried over so far that it didn’t occur to the speaker to give their audiences ways of contacting them.

Wouldn’t you think your audience might have wanted to know that??!!?