{"id":99,"date":"2007-09-29T13:23:29","date_gmt":"2007-09-29T12:23:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/2007\/09\/29\/questions-questions\/"},"modified":"2007-09-29T13:23:29","modified_gmt":"2007-09-29T12:23:29","slug":"questions-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/questions-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Questions, questions&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>In business presentations, if you think it&#8217;s obvious &#8211; it isn&#8217;t<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>According to some research I&#8217;ve just re-read, there are only six basic types of selling-story: the most powerful stories are those while fall into the category called &#8220;I know what you&#8217;re thinking&#8221;.  People love to be understood and if your presentation can show them that you understand them, you&#8217;re onto a winner.<\/p>\n<p>One way of showing you understand them, of course, is to answer the questions that they&#8217;re about to ask you &#8211; <strong>before<\/strong> they ask you it.  Presentations shouldn&#8217;t be a simple Q&#038;A session where you ask yourself questions and then answer them, obviously (because that&#8217;s boring!) but here&#8217;s a handy tip for checking your presentation&#8217;s structure&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Go through each slide or each point you want to use and ask yourself this one, simple question: &#8220;<strong>does this slide answer the obvious question my audience will have at the end of the previous slide?<\/strong>&#8221;  It sounds simple, doesn&#8217;t it?  But try it &#8211; if your slides don&#8217;t generate obvious questions, ask yourself if they&#8217;re really telling people anything <em>important<\/em>: frankly you can usually cut slides that don&#8217;t raise a question.  If the slide generates one question but your next slide answers another&#8230; well, you&#8217;ll lose your audience quickly enough!<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a tougher technique than it sounds &#8211; you&#8217;ve got to be absolutely ruthless with yourself and put yourself in the position of your audience but I promise you it&#8217;ll be worth it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In business presentations, if you think it&#8217;s obvious &#8211; it isn&#8217;t According to some research I&#8217;ve just re-read, there are only six basic types of selling-story: the most powerful stories are those while fall into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-key-posts","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","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\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}