Presentation Skills training, Leadership and teambuilding, on-line training, sales training. Discover how to make the most of every presentation opportunity, be it 3 people or 300 people. Our presentation skils courses are highly aclaimed. Give me a day and I will change your presentations for ever. We offer a guarantee, if you are not satisfied, we will not charge any fees. Contact Young Markets to make your communications more effective, email graham@youngmarkets.co.uk ... ...

Why Corporate Presentations fail

How many corporate presentations have you sat through?How many of them have really excited you?Why are so many business presentations boring?It all starts with the person who created the presentation, typically someone in marketing or business development. They accumulated a lot of knowledge about their markets and about their products services and solutions. They know what benefits their solution provides and they know what problems their target audience are looking to solve. They also know they need to provide a consistent brand image. This is all really good knowledge for creating a presentation about their company and how it can meet the needs of their market.They set about creating a spectacular PowerPoint presentation, often utilising the skills of graphic designers to create aesthetically pleasing slides. This result is then approved by senior management and after several iterations is rolled out across the company as out new corporate presentation, which must be used in all sales situations.After weeks and months of effort this corporate presentation, which the authors are so proud of, then fails to wow the audience. Why?There are two main causes behind the failure of most corporate presentations. Firstly, the person who designed it is not always the person who presents it, and secondly they have to be designed as a one-size-fits-all presentation. Designed for what the author thinks will be a typical audience.What affect do these two factors have in the design of the presentation?In designing a presentation for someone else to give there is a tendency for the author to spell out every single aspect of the presentation. After all the person delivering it may need to be educated in what to say, and may need to be reminded of the particular benefits that they should bring out. At the back of the author's mind is the thought "can I trust the presenter to say the right thing". This doubt in the mind of the author leads to lots of text on the slides. Slides full of bullet points, to ensure that the presenter says the "right" things about the company and stays "on message". In cases where slides purely contain images the author can not be sure that the presenter will say the right thing.Having slides with lots of text is not good presentation practise, as the more inexperienced presenter tends to read the slides then say what the slides say. Good for ensuring they say the right thing, but really boring for their audience, who can read the slide far quicker then the presenter can say it, and who effectively gets ahead of the presenter and then stops listening, because he/she already knows what the presenter is about to say.The second problem is the one size fits all nature of corporate presentations. Because the author does not know exactly who the audience will be, and what particular aspects of their products, services and solutions will be of interest, then tend to include everything. Very few audiences will actually be interested in everything a company has to offer and different people will be interested in different levels of information about the company and its products and services. For example, while the CEO of a prospective client may be interested in your financial success, geographical coverage, and number of employees very few technicians will be interested in this information. What they want to know is the technical details about your products. The end result is a presentation where up to half the content is irrelevant to your audience, which makes the whole presentation particularly boring.How can you avoid these two fundamental problems, and still ensure that your staff bring out the right points for their audience?To reduce the amount of text on your slides I recommend that you put all the information that the speaker needs to know in the speaker notes, not on the slides. Go through your corporate presentation and ask your self, what elements of each slide are there for the speaker and which elements are there for the audience. Then put all the speaker stuff in the notes section. There is little benefit to be gained by the audience reading the same thing as the presenters says.Don't write a full script in the notes, because some people will try reading the script when they give the presentation which invariably comes across as dull and boring. Include an opening phrase for each slide and a set of bullet points on the areas to be covered. Finally, teach people how to use the twin screen facilities of PowerPoint so that the presenter can see the notes, while the audience only sees the slides.The second problem can be addressed by creating a slide library, rather than a corporate presentation. Create a variety of different slides for each aspect of your presentation according to the potential needs of different audiences. You will still want to keep the overall structure of the presentation consistent, but have different slides for different audiences which can be plugged in according to the needs of each particular audience.Of course, designing a good usable presentation is only half of it, the other half is educating your staff in how to deliver a presentation with enthusiasm, passion and purpose.

Who needs presentation training

Why would anyone want or need to go on a course about how to stand and talk. After all, we can all stand up and talk already, can't we?We don't need training on how to talk. And as for what to say, how can a trainer who has little or no experience of your company and your job know what to say better than you do?Anyway, training courses are an expensive luxury, which we can't afford in the current economic climate. Anyone who needs to learn how to give a business presentation can just watch how other people in the company do it.We don't need presentation training! But there again if you just keep doing what you have always done, nothing will change, your success rate will at best remain the same and in these difficult times when competition for business is ever harder you are more likely to lose ground to your competitors. Let's approach this from a different angle. How many presentations have you sat through? Probably hundreds ? How many of them do you remember?Probably less then 10% ? And that includes all the ones that were memorable for all the wrong reasons. The ones that went wrong. The really boring ones. The ones where the presenter made a fool of him or her self. How many really good, inspiring presentations do you remember?Less than a handful?That is not a very good percentage success rate, is it? How effective are the presentations in your company?Do you want your next presentation to be instantly forgotten, or remembered for all the wrong reasons?No? Then maybe you could benefit by going on a presentation skills training course. And so could many of your colleagues. Brush up your skills, eradicate the bad habits and make your talks more effective. What are you likely to learn on a Young Markets presentation skills course?We start by understanding what you would like to improve, which particular aspects of your presentations you would like to be different in the future and what types and styles of presentation you are likely to give.Then we discuss the 5 most important aspects of giving a presentation, for which we have an acronym OSRAM, which stands for Objective, Speaker, Room, Audience, Message.Most of the morning is then spent investigating the traits of a good speaker, including:How to overcome any nervous anxiety and use it to your advantageHow to remember the key elements and structure of your presentationWhy it ain't what you say that is important, but how you say it.In the afternoon, we turn our attention to your message, including:The structure for the ideal presentationHow to influence everyone in the room and motivate them into taking actionHow to make your presentation memorable, for all the right reasonsYou will discover how to handle questions and awkward audience members, as well as what your visual aids should and shouldn't contain and a myriad of other hints and tips.We'll highlight a few bad habits people can pick up that are presentation killers. Things like relying on your slides to remind you of what to talk about, having too many bullet points and filtering out the emotion in an effort to hide the nerves.During the day, everyone delivers two short presentations and is given a video of their performance.By the end of our 1 day course you will be more confident and much better prepared to deliver influential presentations that will be remembered and acted upon by your future audiences.After all there is more to giving an effective business presentation that just standing up and talking. See details of our upcoming courses here

Specialist Services

How to structure and deliver an effective business presentation. Every course participant is given a copy of my book "The A to Z of Effective Business Presentations". or you can buy a copy on Amazon the ISBN is 978-1849231138

Trade Bodies / Associations

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Presentation skills training & coaching

Demonstration skills training and coaching

Learn how to move past bullet points on the screen to give effective business presentations which motivate and influence your audiences.

Or if your in technology pre-sales discover how to demonstrate the solutions your technology enables, rather than giving canned demos of your products.

Trading Since

1999