Maintain Interest – Don’t Distract Your Audience
Nesh Thompson | July 8th, 2009 - 2:58 pmI really enjoyed Skip’s article on presentations last week and how skills that stage actors use can potentially help sales people present in a better way. One of the greatest assets a skilled actor and indeed a skilled sales person has to have is the ability to hold interest. Interest is a key ingredient in any two way traffic of information whether you are watching a programme on TV or talking to a friend. The challenge of maintaining interest is tough enough in a presentation environment, yet one of the greatest obstacles to a good presentation is the presenter themselves. Here are some reasons why…
1. Who Exactly Is In Charge? – I’m not a huge fan of PowerPoint but it does seem to be one of the presenter’s aids of choice in large presentation settings. The problem isn’t with PowerPoint itself but the focus of presentations. You see, there appears to be an unconscious feeling by some presenters that the most important thing in the presentation is the information that resides within that presentation aid. In a way, the main focal point of the presentation becomes that piece of collateral and the presenter becomes the presentation aid. Shifting the importance value by directing attention away from the presenter is actually quite damaging because the interest, trust and engagement that you would hope to be built between presenter and audience is actually deflected to the sales aid and not to you.
2. Why Are You Fighting Your Own Presentation? – Another cardinal sin with presentations directly following on from the last point is when presenters and their presentations constantly vie for the audience’s attention. While talking to your audience, why are there masses of text or odd little animations or video’s in the background? Why make it hard for your audience to pay attention to you?
3. What Are Your Hands Doing? – Pens and paper are sometimes a really bad idea to hold on to in a presentation especially to those with a nervous disposition (and even those that don’t) Subconsciously we like to occupy our hands in nervous activity, so while pacing around, a presenter may be in the middle of an important point succinctly delivering the information whilst unknowingly fiddling with a pencil between his fingers. Paper is worse (I know, I did a presentation once holding a piece of paper with notes – it was a disaster), in that it exaggerates nervous shaking so that the audience can see quite plainly that you are nervous. If you have to use notes, make sure they are in a portfolio that doesn’t easily accentuate minor shakes. If nerves are evident you can bet that the audience is preoccupied with thinking about that rather than the information you want to deliver.
4. Engage Everyone – This may appear contradictory to what I’ve said in point two but using different methods of delivering information is actually a good idea. Why? Because we all learn in different ways. Some of us like listening, while other like watching or doing or participating. Mix this up and the audience will retain the information you are giving more easily. I used to hate going to lectures when studying because a presentation of aural information over an hour long was not my ideal way of understanding information and my interest was not engaged for very long and I soon forgot what was said. If you watch some stand-up comedians they employ different ways of engaging their audience, perhaps interacting with audience members or asking for volunteers to act out stories. One of the purposes of which is to break up the monotony of delivering information in one format. Planning different ways of delivering information into a presentation means there is less likelihood of there being conflict between different media as in point two.
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