Apprentice grade presentations on The Apprentice

Presenting The Apprentice

As usual, I avoided BBC’s The Apprentice last night. Again I was told I had to watch it to see the pitches.  So I did.  BBC’s iPlayer is a wonder, isn’t it?  ;)

I’d have been better off standing at the side of a motorway, just waiting for the car crash. What I’ve jotted down below is being written as I watch – be warned therefore that my opinions may vary as I go on!  ;)

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“Do you work with any…?” – couldn’t they have done some research about your audience first? No?  I thought not.

While we’re at it, couldn’t they have figured out who was going to say what before they  started in a two-hander presentations? No?

Couldn’t they have have got the damned visual aids the right way up before they unveiled it?  No?

Could they have been worse?  Well yes they could, but they’d have had to try.

The whole thing looked and sounded shambolic, unrehearsed and – basically – gave the impression that if the mag was like the pitch, no one wants to get anywhere near it.  And that’s a critical point to pick up on in business: like it or not people are often going to make assumptions about your service or product based upon how you present it. Often that’s a shame, because time and time again I’ve worked with people who were great at what-they-did but couldn’t talk about it (it’s why we make a profit, after all! ;) ).

I’m not saying a great presentation can salvage utterly rubbish content, but a bad presentation can damn it.

Some semi-random thoughts/hints/tips…

• As last time I commented on pitches in The Apprentice, the main problem was that the presentation was based upon the presenter’s perspective, not the audience’s.  Let’s face it – if you have to say “We thought that….” or “We were aiming at…” then you’ve obviously failed. If what you’re pitching isn’t self-evident then it’s not a clear enough concept in the first place!
• If your audience feel they need to interrupt you to ask questions and give feedback then your presentation structure is flawed and, perhaps worse, you don’t own the room; they do.  At that point you’ve got almost no chance when it comes to the negotiation stages later on. Never interrupt other presenters – it allows your audience to do the same!
• I know this is TV, so we didn’t see the real thing in real time but assuming what we saw was representative there was precious little structure to the presentation.  If the audience doesn’t know where you are and what you’re getting at they start to spend more energy attempting to find the overview than to the content you’re giving them at the time. Sometimes it sounds corny but you’ve just got to get blatant and say “I’m going to talk about X, then Y, then Z”.  That way, if your audience is interested in Z they can at least be reassured it’s coming.
• Finally, where, oh where, was the big finish? Grinding to a halt with the dreaded word “Errr” isn’t going to help anyone, ever.  Just like the holiday industry has identified a few critical moments in a holiday that define whether the client is happy (such as when you first open the door to your hotelroom) there are certain fixed moments in a presentation that you need to nail – the ending is one of them.  Don’t just ‘stop’, but ‘finish’.

And on that note, I’m going to stop, not finish!  ;)