In the era of Internet and online marketing, one of the old-fashioned methods of attracting new business continues to be impressively effective: Providing well-thought speeches and presentations.
You build your rapport and reputation as an expert — and, in direct contact with your audience — will often pick up several high-value leads immediately after your presentation.
In some respects, effective speech making multiplies the effectiveness of a single “sales” presentation by the number of people in your audience.
Of course there are some critical qualifications to this story.
You need to present your message in front of a worthy audience, and you need to know how to make that presentation truly effective. And that means you need to practice, practice and practice some more — and understand the basics of effective speech-making and presentation skills.
Here, in writing this post, I’m expressing out loud what I need to do myself, as I’ll be giving a presentation at the Buildings Show (Construct Canada) on Nov. 29.
I’m not ready — yet. And I know full well the risks of inadequate preparation. Some six years ago, I gave a presentation on a topic of which I should have been an expert (the benefits and challenges of strategic alliances in the AEC business) and, despite researching the topic and having amassed enough understanding to write a solid white paper on it for the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS), I fell flat on my face.? I tried to use visuals and survey techniques without testing, testing, testing them some more before launching. And I failed to adequately time and manage the story, so came up short on the schedule. It was a mess.
This time, I vow to do differently. As part of my preparation, I’ll share with you in the next few days some of the techniques and lessons I’m learning about effective speech presentation. The concept here is that by sharing these understandings with you, some of them will sink in with me, as well.
If you want to see the end result, here is the link for more information (and to register for) my presentation.
