Exhibitions - pain or pleasure?

Expos and Industry Shows are expensive to arrange, and often costly to exhibit at.

We visited one yesterday which had over 100 speakers talking throughout the day – and came to 3 realisations:

1. As most of you will know, “we all do the best we can with the resources we have available”. And the speakers were doing their best.
2. From those we were able to hear and see, they varied from interesting but ‘could do better’ – to pretty awful. Which is such a shame – given their chance to create interest in themselves, their companies, and their services and products.
3. But there is good news. With just a few changes of thinking any one of them could have stood apart from their competition – and made a more useful and powerful impact.

Here is what would have made the biggest difference:

• Have a good introduction – with an expressed purpose, so that the audience know what to expect. And avoid starting with your name and what you do.
• Keep industry jargon, shorthand and three letter abbreviations to a minimum – or preferably replace them all.
• Know what’s on your slides – so you can spend 95% of your time looking at and engaging with your audience and not the screen.

Very small changes we think you’ll agree. But what a difference they would have made.

For an aide-memoire of some other small changes you can make to your own talks – that make a BIG difference – download our 13 Secrets of Powerful Presenting.

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