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Listen to your presentation, note
rhythm and cadence,
"uh's", "y'knows", and check your mastery of
subject.
If videotaping, note your mannerisms and body language, and coordinate your gestures with your vocal inflection.
5. Practice with colleague, friend or spouse
After completing
solo practice session, you are ready to practice in front of another person. Choose this person carefully, as you do not want a hypercritic who will find excessive faults with your presenting style. Neither, however, do you want
type of person who finds no faults whatsoever, and praises you to
skies. You need honest and constructive criticism aimed at "tweaking" your presentation.
6. Convene a "Murder Board" practice session
The "Murder Board, a term I bring to my training workshops from my military background," is a rigorous practice session. It is
speakers equivalent of
flight simulator used for training pilots how to deal with in-flight emergencies, or
moot court readying lawyers for courtroom combat. Select no more than four people to be your simulated audience, and share with them all
intelligence you have gained on your prospective audience. These four people will then role play your audience.
Their comments, questions and criticism help you correct your style of delivery, find
gaps in your knowledge, and anticipate questions and objections.
7. Arrive early to meet and greet
Personal contact and interpersonal skills are important for
success of any presentation, but they are absolutely vital when you attempt to persuade people to buy
product you are selling. We tend to accept information from people we like, but reject it from people we don't like.
When you arrive early, you can get to know members of
audience and let them relate to you as a human being. If it appears appropriate, mention names during your presentation of people you have had
occasion to meet prior to
presentation. Nothing is so sweet to
human ear as
sound of one's name being mentioned positively by a speaker.
8. Use visuals to support, not to impress
Visual aids, including
ubiquitous PowerPoint, can make or break a presentation. The advantage of using them is that most people are visual and can more readily absorb information that is graphically presented.The danger is that visuals can bore an audience, setting them off into daydreaming, not listening.
Be careful in word choice in your visuals—and, of course, in your delivery—to avoid Geekspeak, unless you are speaking to an audience as familiar with this unique form of jargon as you are. Bottom line ion visuals: Don’t have
wonders of PowerPoint remembered, but
substance of your presentation forgotten.
9. Employ rhetorical devices
Repetition of key concepts,
careful use of
strategic pause, and parallel construction are just a few of
devices you can use to add spice and cadence to your presentation.
Two examples of such techniques will illustrate this important tactic. Winston Churchill, instead of saying "We in Britain owe a great debt to
pilots of
Royal Air Force," expressed this thought with
memorable words "Never in
field of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few."
President John F. Kennedy used a classic device of parallelism when he said, "We must never negotiate out of fear, but we must never fear to negotiate."
Use your imagination to see how you can arrange words to create such cadence and rhythm.
10. Conduct immediate post-presentation analysis
Your instinct after completing a challenging presentation is to breath a sigh of relief and relax. Big mistake.
Within minutes, sit down with a note pad or tape recorder and record
questions asked,
reaction of
audience to your presentation, your impression of your own performance, etc.
Don't wait until
next day. Short term memory is precisely that, and you will remember only generalities. The immediate analysis will provide specifics.
Transfer this specific information to your data base, and you have an excellent head start to use in
Murder Board leading to your next presentation..
Use these tips, and
next time you leave your keyboard, you’ll find you are now as eloquent in front of a group of potential customers as you are behind your computer.
