{"id":3439,"date":"2015-08-20T07:37:18","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T06:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=3439"},"modified":"2015-08-20T07:37:47","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T06:37:47","slug":"using-your-presentation-as-a-business-development-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/using-your-presentation-as-a-business-development-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Using your presentation as a business development tool.."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Flipping hard work, this designing a presentation. Honestly!<\/p><\/div>\n

Not too long ago, I wrote a fairly hard-hitting blog post<\/a> about the idea that if you can\u2019t 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!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I\u2019d like to take the opposite view today.<\/div>\n
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I\u2019m working with a bunch of lovely folks who\u00a0are launching businesses or are looking for fairly significant investment in their businesses as they expand. One of \u2018em is looking for a cool half a million quid (I\u2019m on a flat fee – perhaps I should consider working on a percentage! :) ) and so far it\u2019s taken us four hours to even figure out the structure of the presentation. Four hours, and I\u2019ve barely put keys to keyboard! Why is this? \u00a0It\u2019s not for the lack of mental sweat, I assure you – it\u2019s more because the ideas and technology involved are \u2018disruptive\u2019. Disruptive in this sense means that it\u2019s so new people don\u2019t even know they need it and it certainly means there aren\u2019t off-the-shelf descriptions for it. By definition, old analogies don\u2019t work and that means we\u2019re having to invent a whole new way of describing something. That’s not an uncommon problem for presenters.<\/div>\n
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[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!”]<\/p>\n

The downside is that it\u2019s taking forever. The upside is that far from working in the normal-best-way of<\/div>\n
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  • knowing what you want to say (and then)<\/li>\n
  • figuring out the best way of saying it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
    we\u2019re actually working out the processes and structures of the idea and the business as we go.<\/div>\n
    <\/div>\n
    In other words, the discipline of having to explain things is making the very thing we\u2019re trying to explain change for the better, as we get a better handle on what it is that they\u2019re doing (or at least should be doing!). It\u2019s becoming something of an iterative process…<\/div>\n
    <\/div>\n
    And that\u2019s good, right? \u00a0It\u2019s the wrong way around, but sometimes doing things backwards is handy.<\/div>\n
    <\/div>\n
    A few\u00a0of the tools we\u2019ve used to help us, and which you might find handy yourselves are:<\/div>\n
      \n
    1. Describe your key offering as a tweet – 140 characters (we weren\u2019t 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<\/li>\n
    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!<\/li>\n
    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! ;)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

      What’s your thinking… how do you make your content fresh and concentrated (a bit like orange juice! ;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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