Make Every Click Tell
A few times in the last year I've been asked I look so comfortable speaking when presenting, running demos, or giving a talk on stage. I'm sharing this as specific guidance for others looking to improve how they present.
I'm lucky enough to have led hundreds of sales calls over the last few years. After all these reps, I've got a method that works for me.
There's main two schools of thoughts for giving a talk:
- Plan out the 'high level' themes, anchor points, and then go with your gut
- Plan out every word, pause, smile, guesture, joke, and wink
For anything sales related, I'm a fan of the latter. It works. But this does take a lot more effort.
"You can never waste time preparing" - a mentor
Here's my process
Before every talk, I follow most of these steps:
- Write want your audience to take away.
- Most of the time it's teaching; explaining how something works. This is how I see both sales and consulting calls. If you explain what you do clearly and with empathy, your audience will want to do business with you.
- Plan out the overall story you want to tell.
- These are usually bullets that cover each of the slides, sections of a presentation, modules from a demo, etc.
- Note what you want the audience to get out each part.
- Write out the script, verbatim.
- And write like you speak.
- Iterate, iterate, iterate.
- Speak the script out loud.
- Fix anything that feels even slightly clumsy.
- Say it out load again - and fix, again.
- Repeat until reading the script is as natural as speaking.
- Include the words or phrases you say while you're speaking (e.g. 'like', 'you know', etc..). Flow is worth more than grammar.
Here's some things to avoid
- Most important: avoid jargon, technical or domain-specific words. You can talk about complex topics without using complex words. Like writing, keeping things simple will help your audience follow your points.
- Most common: slow down. Speak slower than you think you need to. This has an extra benefit of giving your more time to think - and - avoid jargon
- Less important but quite common: minimize the 'ummm'. Speaking more slowly will also help with this, but umms aren't actually that bad. They can make you come across more natural. This actually helps in a sales call.
Note: This doesn't make sense for things like presenting in internal meetings or collaborative discussions. But those also would benefit from more preparation