Using your presentation as a business development tool..

Updated on August 20, 2015 By Simon 3 Comments

Web design concept: Enter button with Gears on computer keyboard, 3d render

Flipping hard work, this designing a presentation. Honestly!

Not too long ago, I wrote a fairly hard-hitting blog post about the idea that if you can’t explain your ideas in a presentation it might not be presentation skills training that you need. It might just be that your ideas are rubbish. It got a lot of reads, and quite a few shares around social media but (interestingly!) no one dared comment on the blog itself. Be brave, folks!

I’d like to take the opposite view today.
I’m working with a bunch of lovely folks who are launching businesses or are looking for fairly significant investment in their businesses as they expand. One of ‘em is looking for a cool half a million quid (I’m on a flat fee – perhaps I should consider working on a percentage! :) ) and so far it’s taken us four hours to even figure out the structure of the presentation. Four hours, and I’ve barely put keys to keyboard! Why is this?  It’s not for the lack of mental sweat, I assure you – it’s more because the ideas and technology involved are ‘disruptive’. Disruptive in this sense means that it’s so new people don’t even know they need it and it certainly means there aren’t off-the-shelf descriptions for it. By definition, old analogies don’t work and that means we’re having to invent a whole new way of describing something. That’s not an uncommon problem for presenters.

[bctt tweet=”By definition, presentations often include ideas for which there aren’t convenient explanations. If they were, there’d be little point in presenting!”]

The downside is that it’s taking forever. The upside is that far from working in the normal-best-way of
  • knowing what you want to say (and then)
  • figuring out the best way of saying it
we’re actually working out the processes and structures of the idea and the business as we go.
In other words, the discipline of having to explain things is making the very thing we’re trying to explain change for the better, as we get a better handle on what it is that they’re doing (or at least should be doing!). It’s becoming something of an iterative process…
And that’s good, right?  It’s the wrong way around, but sometimes doing things backwards is handy.
A few of the tools we’ve used to help us, and which you might find handy yourselves are:
  1. Describe your key offering as a tweet – 140 characters (we weren’t too literal about this and allowed 146 in the end!) The discipline of this REALLY forces you to think about the absolute ‘crux’ of your offering an I can’t recommend this too much as a technique
  2. See if you can get your key message over in a game of charades. Yes, yes, I know, I know… you feel like an idiot doing it, but it really forces you to think!
  3. Much like the last idea, this one is about using a game approach. I can’t remember the name of the game but the idea is that you have 60 seconds to draw a key concept for your team to guess. Can you sketch your key concept(s) in a similar way? If you can, there’s a slide – if you can’t, you’re either terrible at after-dinner games or your idea needs work! ;)

None of them are rocket science.. and that’s kind of the point. All too often we think of overly-complicated ways to look at presentations because, frankly, we know too much, assume too much and work too hard. What we need are tools to take away the angst and allow us to look at our content afresh, and (critically!) from the audience’s perspective. They haven’t heard it before, don’t forget.

What’s your thinking… how do you make your content fresh and concentrated (a bit like orange juice! ;)

Simon is one of the UK's most highly regarded presentation skills trainers and professional speakers in the fields of presenting, confidence and emotional resilience.

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3 Comments

  1. Pingback: A Day in The Life of a Reasonably Successful Blogger | The Blogging Challenge to Grow Your Traffic
  2. conno ralfson October 30, 2015

    Excellent list–I am always looking to improve my public speaking skills. One thing I would add: write a thank you note. Not an e-mail, a handwritten one. People will remember that and may hire you again or refer you to someone else to speak.

    • Simon October 30, 2015

      Good idea!

      Personally, my handwriting is so bad that I think this looks a bit unprofessional, so I take a middle ground and send a printed but personalised letter, with a handwritten salutation and sign-off :)

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