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Failure to present is too often driven from the widespread fear of public speaking. Modern presentations are nothing more than the preparation to close the sale. It is your opportunity to show your prospects the solution to their concerns. You only have one chance to make a relevant impression that will have an immediate impact on the audience. Reduce your fear and learn through Modern Presenting. Modern Presenters demonstrate they have each of these vital ingredients:

Ensure you have unqualified business or product knowledge.

Take time to grasp the ‘big picture’.

Ask intelligent questions related to the customer’s needs and wants, turning those responses into customer benefits.

Questions to finalize your next presentation

1. In one concise sentence, what is the purpose of this speech?

2. Who is the audience? What is their main interest in this topic?

3. What do I really know and believe about this topic as it relates to my audience?

4. Customers will look to see how your product features will become the solution for their concerns. What is unique about my/our solution? How can I best relate my solution to this audience? Can you demonstrate it? When you demonstrate a product it may sell itself. How will you reinforce it? Show them how it meets their needs and wants.

5. Know your product and know the prospect. Set your game plan and don’t deviate from it. What are the two or three key messages that I want to share in the presentation? What is the logical foundation of your presentation?

6. What supporting information can I use to support each of the main points? Point out a feature, tell your prospect what it does, paint a picture in their minds why they need that feature and constantly involve them by asking questions that force them to be involved.

7. Plan the ending before you start – Customers tend to remember the beginning and the end so plan the ending carefully. Do I have an effective opening or ending to make the right impression and get their attention?

8. Make your presentation brief – You will know which features to highlight as a result of the questions you have asked previously. How will I plan to answer their concerns with my product or solution?

9. Speak in a language your customer wants to hear – Always speak in the simplest terms without ‘talking down’ or using industry jargon. Have I used a consistent language and style throughout the presentation?

10. Have I taken care of the little details that will help me speak confidently? Engage eye contact – Involve the prospect constantly for feedback and attention. Remember you only get one chance to show your prospect how creative, flexible and worthwhile doing business together will be.

Modern Presentations allow you to address your client’s concerns and close the deal. Welcome the opportunity, increase the effectiveness of your presentations, you will increase profits and be Mastering Modern Selling.

The clock doesn’t lie!

If you are giving business presentations, no doubt you’re working within a timeframe. Your clients and prospects are busy people. They want to get the most value out of time spent in your presentation.

Professional public speakers often record their talks — and practice delivering to fit within specific time slots. One hour? Got it. Twenty minutes? No problem. Ten? It’s a snap.

What is it that professionals know — that you can use too?

These 4 secrets can help you time your performance for perfect success.

Secret 1: Time Your Opening

Most likely, you will use the same opening, even for presentations that vary in length. When you practice your initial start and focus on your key points, you can develop a highly persuasive introduction.

In addition, your opening sets the tone for your entire presentation. When you start strong, you’re going to grab audience attention. Then, you are in a good position to hold attention for the duration.

Secret 2: Rehearse For Every Timeslot

Even if you are very familiar with your topic and presentation, rehearse and practice for each timeslot. Your stories will vary. Audience interaction will expand and contract based on time available.

During face-to-face delivery, you are likely to speak more slowly than in rehearsals. This is due to adding impromptu comments, adding stories, and interacting with your audience.

Alternatively, if you are extremely nervous about presenting, you may talk faster — and race through your talk without taking a breath. To avoid this downhill slide, practice so you are comfortable with the best pacing for every amount of time.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking; “I could do this in my sleep.” If you could, you just might sleep through the alarm signaling the end of your allotted time.

Secret 3: Practice Questions and Answers

Answering questions is one of the most critical areas to stay within your timeframe is answering questions. Practice giving brief and concise answers with your presentation coach or with peers.

Focus on the questions you anticipate most from each specific audience. Practice giving shorter and longer answers – while still remaining personable. This provides several options for being able to manage your time – and create interaction with your audience.

If you are giving an extremely short summary, it is acceptable to say, “I’m so sorry I don’t have time for questions right here. But I will be available to answer your questions one-on-one.”

Alternatively, you can provide your contact information and say, “I’m sorry our time is so short. I’m happy to answer you questions personally. Just contact me directly.”

These comments encourage participants to ask their questions — at a later time. In addition, comments such as these also show your willingness to share your expertise and make the best use of the limited time you have to present your information.

Secret 4: Work With an Expert Coach.

Whether you are new to presenting or highly experienced, a professional coach can give you objective feedback. He or she can instantly spot small changes, which can dramatically improve your performance.

One of the most fascinating areas of feedback will be on how to be effective in any time slot. In working with your coach, be sure to ask for timing feedback. This can help you increase confidence and be ready to happily adapt an hour presentation into a 10-minute summary.

Develop your presentation skills so you can communicate effectively to any audience. Timing is one of the trickiest areas and is critical for success in business presentations. 

This article will elucidate the rules of presentation visual design that, if heeded, will almost always assure that your audiences will be able to follow your ideas every step of the way. Of course, you must keep in mind that visual design is only one-third of the package required for a successful presentation, the other two being content and delivery.

Like a fine dining experience that requires equal parts food, service and atmosphere to really work, the visual design part of the presentation process is every bit as necessary as the others to achieve the desired result – in this case, true knowledge transfer.

So without further ado:

7. Maintain paragraph integrity. First, all 1st Level Paragraph text must be the same size in every slide. Likewise, all 2nd Level Paragraph text must be smaller and of a different color. Lastly, don’t go beyond the 3rd Level, and this text should not be smaller than 20 points.

If all information of the same importance is of the same size throughout your presentation, your audience won’t be raising question marks as to just how important this information is with each click of the slide. Take this concept one step further by ensuring that all material of the same nature is the same color. If, for instance, you use a lot of numbers in your bullet points, make them all one color, different from the text. Once your audience recognizes this pattern, they’ll spend less time digging through the text to find their figures.

6. No boring fonts. Rarely is there a need to use more than two different fonts in any presentation. However, there is a HUGE need to use any two fonts other than the PowerPoint defaults Times New Roman and Arial!

The problem is that because everybody else uses these two fonts 99% of the time, if yours is the fifth presentation your audience is seeing that day, pretty soon all the text starts to look the same, and you lose much of your meaning and impact. We often hear from clients who have to sit through presentations themselves that after a while, they can’t remember which vendor said what – it all becomes a big blur. Make sure you’re not part of the blur.

5. Use proper builds. Without a sense of good design, which in most cases means simply showing restraint, animations can quickly overwhelm an otherwise well laid-out presentation. The trick then is to introduce concepts one at a time in a way that doesn’t draw more attention than the concepts themselves. Builds are essential elements in turning slides that would otherwise have TMI into ones that audiences can follow; but like other elements of good design, a proper build should never announce itself. Rather, a well animated presentation should simply appear to “happen”, without a clue as to why it seems so easy to follow.

4. Be colorful – Light on dark. Watch much black-and-white television these days? Although black-and-white works as an art form in many ways, humans tend to like color. Even old-guard newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal finally concluded that to avoid losing readers to more modern media, they had to go to color.

While humans can discern a dozen or so shades of gray, they can see millions of different colors. We’ve evolved to use our sense of color to survive – help your audiences survive your presentation by not blinding them with black on white.

3. Less is More. This rule is central to good presentation design, but absolutely essential for graphs or charts. We often see pie charts come across our review desk with over a dozen slices, many so small they need to be annotated with lines and arrows far from the graph itself. Do you really think anyone will remember all 25 competing products in your market and their percentage share? Might be good information for a handout, but in a presentation few people can absorb more than six elements in any graph.

You make your point much more effectively when you limit your displayed data to the stuff the audience is likely to remember. Less information becomes more retention of the stuff you really want them to go home with.

2. One concept per visual. Here’s another really common problem we see in the majority of business presentations, and the solution flows from rule number 3. When more than one concept appear at the same time, your audience not only tries to figure out the concepts, they also try to determine which one deserves most of their attention, how the two or more are related, whether one is the “right” one or the “good” one, and so on and so forth – all having nothing to do with your actual message itself.

This extra time and effort acts as a drag on presentation flow, and explains why a 45-slide presentation, properly broken down into one concept per, takes less time to present than the same information packed into 15.

1. Favor Right-Brain information. We humans have evolved with two different ways to deal with stimuli from the outside world so that we can react to it in the way most likely to keep us alive. Our right brain reacts to input such as colors, graphics, shapes and patterns instantly, without stopping to process the information first. Our left brain kicks in when presented with speech, text or numbers; however with this kind of information we first pause to analyze it before storing or reacting to it. We have filters on the left side on the brain, and not everything gets through.

If you want your ideas to strike fast and be readily absorbed, then every time you can, figure out how to turn your left-brain type data into shapely and colorful right-brain images.