One of the best and most effective ways to develop your own business or your own profile in the organisation you work for is to grab every opportunity you can to present yourself to an audience.  This might be your colleagues with a project proposal that you are working on, it might be a networking event where you are showcasing your organisation, whatever the reason it is YOU that is being seen by the audience. This is a great selling opportunity.

So YOU are the most important part of that presentation so YOUR preparation is crucial to your success. In the last few weeks I have seen someone miss such a golden opportunity to do this by, what appeared from the audience viewpoint, as a complete lack of preparation, an inability to present effectively and thus give themselves and their organisation a shocking image to the audience (which numbered around 100!!!).

So please think about some of the fundamentals:

Can your slides and all the data on them be read from the back of the room? Do you know the information that you are presenting well enough to answer detailed questions on it?  You need to engage with the audience, so look at them, not the slides!! Remember that audiences will pick up on words that you say  regularly....'ok' is probably the most obvious!!  This presenter said it 54 times in 45 minutes, and yes I was counting!  Finally DO some homework on your audience, find out what they want form the session and make sure the session, its title and content are all related & relevant, you do not want to waste people's time.

You only get one chance to make an impression....I know its a cliche, but it is right.  I watched this presentation for a cringing 45 minutes and would not recommend either the speaker or the company that they represented to anyone....in fact I would actively discourage people away from them.  This is not what you want when you have this sort of opportunity, so prepare, prepare prepare!!

Thanks for listening, Suzanne Unsworth

www.rubusassociates.co.uk