{"id":1048,"date":"2011-06-16T10:15:49","date_gmt":"2011-06-16T09:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=1048"},"modified":"2011-06-16T10:15:49","modified_gmt":"2011-06-16T09:15:49","slug":"apprentice-grade-presentations-on-the-apprentice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/apprentice-grade-presentations-on-the-apprentice\/","title":{"rendered":"Apprentice grade presentations on The Apprentice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!-- p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; font: 12.0px Helvetica} span.s1 {letter-spacing: 0.0px} --><\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 362px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"BBC The Apprentice\" src=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/apprentice\/series7\/_uploads\/images\/about_main.jpg\" alt=\"Presenting The Apprentice\" width=\"352\" height=\"136\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Presenting The Apprentice<\/p><\/div>\n<p>As usual, I avoided BBC&#8217;s <a title=\"BBC The Apprentice\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/apprentice\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Apprentice<\/a> last night. Again I was told I had to watch it to see the pitches.\u00c2\u00a0 So I did.\u00c2\u00a0 BBC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s iPlayer is a wonder, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it?\u00c2\u00a0 ;)<\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have been better off standing at the side of a motorway, just waiting for the car crash. What I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve jotted down below is being written as I watch &#8211; be warned therefore that my opinions may vary as I go on!\u00c2\u00a0 ;)<\/p>\n<p>__________________________<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Do you work with any&#8230;?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d &#8211; couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they have done some research about your audience first? No?\u00c2\u00a0 I thought not.<\/p>\n<p>While we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re at it, couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they have figured out who was going to say what before they\u00c2\u00a0 started in a two-hander presentations? No?<\/p>\n<p>Couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they have have got the damned visual aids the right way up before they unveiled it?\u00c2\u00a0 No?<\/p>\n<p>Could they have been worse?\u00c2\u00a0 Well yes they could, but they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have had to try.<\/p>\n<p>The whole thing looked and sounded shambolic, unrehearsed and &#8211; basically &#8211; gave the impression that if the mag was like the pitch, no one wants to get anywhere near it.\u00c2\u00a0 And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a critical point to pick up on in business: like it or not <strong>people are often going to make assumptions about your service or product based upon how you present it<\/strong>. Often that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a shame, because time and time again I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve worked with people who were great at what-they-did but couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t talk about it (it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why we make a profit, after all! ;) ).<\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not saying a great presentation can salvage utterly rubbish content, but a bad presentation can damn it.<\/p>\n<p>Some semi-random thoughts\/hints\/tips&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>As <a title=\"Last blog post on The Apprentice presentations\" href=\"http:\/\/wp.me\/pfYIA-gG\">last time I commented on pitches in The Apprentice<\/a>, the main problem was that the presentation was based upon the presenter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perspective, not the audience\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.\u00c2\u00a0 Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face it &#8211; if you have to say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We thought that&#8230;.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We were aiming at&#8230;\u00e2\u20ac\u009d then you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve obviously failed. If what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re pitching isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t self-evident then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a clear enough concept in the first place!<\/li>\n<li>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t own the room; they do.\u00c2\u00a0 At that point you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got almost no chance when it comes to the negotiation stages later on. <strong>Never<\/strong> interrupt other presenters &#8211; it allows your audience to do the same!<\/li>\n<li>I know this is TV, so we didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see the real thing in real time but assuming what we saw was representative there was precious little structure to the presentation.\u00c2\u00a0 If the audience doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know where you are and what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re getting at they start to spend more energy attempting to find the overview than to the content you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re giving them at the time. Sometimes it sounds corny but you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve just got to get blatant and say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to talk about X, then Y, then Z\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.\u00c2\u00a0 That way, if your audience is interested in Z they can at least be reassured it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s coming.<\/li>\n<li>Finally, where, oh where, was the big finish? Grinding to a halt with the dreaded word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Errr\u00e2\u20ac\u009d isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to help anyone, ever.\u00c2\u00a0 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 &#8211; the ending is one of them.\u00c2\u00a0 Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcstop\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, but \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfinish\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And on that note, I&#8217;m going to stop, not finish! \u00c2\u00a0;)<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As usual, I avoided BBC&#8217;s The Apprentice last night. Again I was told I had to watch it to see the pitches.\u00c2\u00a0 So I did.\u00c2\u00a0 BBC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s iPlayer is a wonder, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it?\u00c2\u00a0 ;) I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-tips","category-rant","category-reviews-case-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}