Public Speaking and Presentation Skills - Tips and Techniques That Really Work

I could write another book just on rookie mistakes you should avoid.

That being said, making mistakes is not the end of the world, but you don't want them to be the end of your career as a speaker, or the end of your ability to promote your business or cause. Making rookie mistakes - like the one we'll talk about today - can ruin your chances of getting referrals or being asked back.

Starting at the beginning, here's something you should never, ever do: don't get up in front of the room and say anything like "I'm new at this" or "I hope you'll forgive me for not being better at this" or "I really didn't have time to prepare for this" or "I don't usually do this kind of thing".

You get the idea. Keep all that to yourself. Being at the front of the room is not a confessional, and the audience is not going to offer you forgiveness for your lack of experience and/or preparation.

Remember this phrase: the audience is there on a need-to-know basis, and they don't need to know if you're inexperienced or unprepared! Just get up and do your seminar talk the best you know how.

See you tomorrow!
David

Certainly one of the most powerful presentation techniques you can use is telling stories and metaphors.

It's very subtle, yet extremely effective because the listener puts themselves into the story.

You can use stories to lead people right into the emotional state you want them to be in. Fear, pain, pleasure, greed - you name it, and you can elicit that state using stories.

Stories are deeply ingrained in us as human beings. The campfire story probably harks back to the dawn of man (as it were) when the hunters would come back with the kill and tell the tales of their adventures of the hunt to a wide-eyed (and no longer hungry!) group.

Got kids? What do they always say?-"tell me a story, tell me a story!". The popularity of Hollywood movies is because of our innate, in-born love and need to hear stories.

Why not consider having several riveting stories in your tool-belt of presentation techniques?

Here's something you really need to know if your seminars are designed to create sales of any kind:

You must, you must, you must (did I mention you must?) drive people's emotions. You must create an emotional reaction in your audience. You must make them feel strong emotion.

People don't buy based on intellectually made decisions. People make a buying decision emotionally, then back up their emotional decision with their intellect. They create reasons why their emotional decision to buy was a good idea, after they've already bought because of emotion.

Your seminar, if you intend to sell your product, your service - yourself! - simply must touch on people's emotions. That is the true key to sales seminars.

If you're promoting your business with seminars, as opposed to holding a seminar solely to educate, you need to be clear that those are two different animals, but they're very related.

First, even if you're only educating your group - let's say you're bringing them up to speed on new laws that affect them, or teaching them about some area of expertise you have and so forth - really you are selling at least to the extent you have to sell them on the idea you know what you're talking about. If you have a well-known respected reputation, you may not have to sell yourself in the same was as you would if you're not well-known.

On the other hand, it's quite common to see various business people like financial planners, real estate brokers, insurance agents, chiropractors (and so forth) hold seminars to promote their business, and put together an educational seminar to do so. So far so good - but the missing piece is this:

Holding your educational seminar hoping to generate new business is a lot of wasted time and effort if

1. You're not 100% clear that the true purpose of your seminar is NOT really educating people, but getting them into enough of a comfort zone with you to want to do business with you, and

2. You don't tell people exactly what you want them to do. Usually called "closing the sale" in sales terminology, you need to close the sale at the end of your seminar, even if that just means getting someone to book an appointment.

More on closing the sale later.

If the seminar room and your audience is larger than 40 people
or so, you'll likely be using a microphone.

When you take questions from the audience, you may have a second mic so that when you take questions, the rest of the group can hear the question. Never just hand someone the mic to ask questions, have an assistant hold the mic for the person asking the question.

Instruct your assistant ahead of time to move away after the person poses their question. Otherwise, this person may be on the mic forever - or at least a lot longer than you wanted. And, if you just hand the mic over to someone in the audience to ask questions, you may never get it back.

Alternately, you can set up a mic on a stand, and have people line up to ask one question at a time, and you can announce that the limit is one question per person. This is especially useful if you're filming the event, because that way you can point one camera at the mic stand and capture all questions easily.

Don't hand the microphone over to your audience, you may never see it again!

Seminars and public speaking is without a doubt the best way to promote your business. It's also the fastest way to bring in new customers and clients. It's also the most fun way too.

Sure, maybe you're not sure about the whole getting up in front of people thing - after all, in school it was nerve wracking (to say the least) to have to get up in front of people and start speaking... all those faces looking at you... all those eyes on you....

Look: that was then. That was when you were in your formative years when your peers, and what they thought of you, meant more than anything else.

Yes, you probably have a kind-of hangover from that now, but my students over and over have easily conquered what they thought was insurmountable stage fright and fear of public speaking, and so can you.

So, either start doing seminars and public speaking to promote your business, your mission, your product, your service, yourself................ or you might as well get out one-hundred dollar bills and start ripping them up right now.