Helping This Generation Make Good Business Presentations - Just be Yourself

Following on from my various articles on selling, and my thoughts on why this generation might be struggling with face-to-face selling, these are a few of my thoughts on helping our current generation make great business presentations.

As part of a new business team back in the day at Record Tools, I was sent on many selling courses and one such course was on the art of making good business presentations. Reflecting on this course and others like it, I gained absolutely nothing from the advice that was given to me during the three days I spent in the Newcastle Hotel where the event was being held, apart from a memorable hangover. For those of you old enough to remember, during this course, I had to make a presentation from an overhead projector which was videoed and played back for discussion. We were told to use a pen to highlight various points on the acetates and leave the pen pointing to key points while we presented them. The whole course was focused on the content of our presentations and how we should professionally project our voices. I came away from this course believing that my Sheffield accent should be modified to enable me to project a more professional voice to my audience. So much so that I paid for private elocution lessons from an acting coach to try and eradicate my accent, to become what .........? A posh Sean Bean? Thankfully she didn't even try.

So what have I learned over the years and what is my advice to young business people?

Be Yourself

Firstly and most importantly be happy to be yourself. Every talent show winner, every reality TV show winner and every endearing person you come across wins us over by being themselves. We love authentic people, and far from trying to perfect your accent as I did, embrace every part of you that makes you unique to the world. Once you have embraced yourself and everything you are, you become liberated into being able to present from the heart and not from a script. I have heard countless presentations during my time at Sheffield Hallam from young nervous students and the best presentations always come from the students you least expect, because they are happy being themselves. I have seen first-hand how some students are so overcome with nerves they can hardly speak, and I just want to take them to one side and tell them it really does not matter one slightest bit if they are not slick, just be yourself and the rest will take care of itself. I believe that this generation has such high expectations of themselves based on false realities of others that they forget that being themselves is incredibly endearing to an audience. Embrace everything about you and you will be halfway there to becoming a great presenter.

Mistakes Can Be Endearing?

In every aspect of our lives, we make verbal mistakes that we are happy to correct in a normal conversation. Selling and presenting is just a conversation, nothing more and nothing less. My advice is for a young nervous student to feel comfortable with mistakes during a presentation and to use a physical or verbal mistakes to project confidence and authenticity. Perfection is not necessary and indeed a fool's gold when it comes to making pitches for business. We buy from people, and rarely from companies, and to invest in a person, you need to see them as vulnerable, humorous, kind, compassionate etc. Perfection is counterproductive to projecting authenticity. I am not recommending making deliberate mistakes, but I am saying that the odd mistake here and there can be incredibly endearing if you handle it correctly.

Know Your Stuff And Be Passionate

Knowing your stuff does not mean reciting a PowerPoint verbatim. Knowing what you are talking about is vital when creating confidence in yourself and the product that you are selling. Nobody recovers from a total lack of understanding during a pitch. However, projecting knowledge does not have to be so slick is sounds like you are reading a script. It is ok to fumble around questions and even pause when presenting to an audience to give yourself a chance to think about a subject. Passion, enthusiasm and knowledge will win an audience over whenever it comes to selling. If you are not passionate or enthusiastic your audience will see straight through you and it will be game over. If you fundamentally know your stuff and enjoy talking about it, you can never be caught out.

Be yourself, know your stuff, be passionate and don't strive for perfection!