Business Presentation Skills - Excellence Made Easy

This short lesson will show you how to get maximum value from this business presentation skills course, and why that matters.

Establish your practice presentation and start applying your learning to get the best from the course.

   This lesson introduces you to three key business presentation principles that you should follow for all your presentations, whether business or personal. You will find we keep referring to these as we move through the course, and you will unfortunately remember sitting (or possibly sleeping) through many presentations where one or more of these business presentation principles have not been followed successfully.

You might be fooled into thinking that every business presenter knows the purpose of their presentation. But do they really know their purpose, or is it just a vague notion? Find out how to test and hone the purpose of your presentation. The clearer your purpose, the easier everything else becomes.

Successful presenters have laser like focus on their presentation content. Learn the critical questions to ask yourself once you have established your presentation purpose, and before you do anything else.

How much presentation planning do we really do? For many people the answer is 'not very much' The most common tool used in planning is widely known as cut and paste. It goes like this: Have I done a similar presentation to this before? If not, do I know someone who has? For the sake of clarity, No - cut and paste is NOT really planning. Here are four easy to use presentation planning tools that can help you plan your presentation. Using planning tools will ultimately save you time as it greatly increases the chances of getting your message across clearly first time.

Nervous presenters give the game away. Complete this short activity to think about how business presenters inadvertantly let their audience know they are nervous.

Compare your list of Nervous Tells with the most common ones.

Here are some key tips to help you manage your presentation nerves.

They say practice makes perfect, so why do so many of us cut it down to the minimum, or do none at all? Here are some practice tips and an example of one of my own practice sessions.

Answer these questions without referring back to any of the course materials.

Avoiding mixed messages is essential if you want your ideas and key messages heard. This lesson helps you understand the common causes of mixed messages and how they impact your presentation and audience.

A short activity to start thinking about posture and movement. What do you believe works for good presenters and what gets in the way of delivering their message.

How we stand when giving a presentation makes a significant difference to how our audience perceives us, and our message. There are no hard and fast rules, but here are some straightforward guidelines and principles to follow.

When speaking in public we often forget what to do with our hands. Here are some straightforward tips to help.

Maintaining eye contact with your audience during your presentation is important. This lesson provides you with some useful strategies to adopt and some traps to avoid.

Compare your list from lecture 9 to this summary of the key messages. How did you do?

Your voice is the most important tool at your disposal as a presenter and public speaker. Your voice is driven by muscles, and like any other muscles they benefit from targeted preparation and maintenance. Here are some exercises to warm up and strengthen your voice.

How to use your voice to add colour to your presentations and connect with your audience. This is potentially one of the most under utilised presentation tools for business presenters.

Researchers believe they have discovered the elements that make the 'perfect voice'. This simple exercise will enable you to benchmark yourself against two of those key elements.

Here are some practice ideas to help you better understand your voice and how to use it in your presentations.

Get the most from your course. It is great that you have invested the time and money to further develop your skills. However, the story doesn't end there. The real value you get is from putting your learning into action by changing your habits and trying out new ideas and approaches.

No more boring presentations. Engage with your audience using these straight forward success strategies based on the work of Chip and Dan Heath. Incorporating these techniques into your content as you develop your presentation will significantly improve your audience engagement.

It is impossible to over emphasize how important simplicity is in effective presentation. Getting to the core of your message and communicating it clearly separates highly successful presenters from the rest. Strive to keep things as simple as possible.

Raise your audience levels of interest and curiosity without tricks and gimmicks.

Explore this critical strategy to make things 'real' for your audience. The more you can link your content to the audiences everyday experiences the more engaged they will become.

How do you you encourage your audience to believe what you say matters? By establishing your credibility.

Find out why emotion matters.

We all love stories. Find out why they are such an important element of engaging your audience.

This formula is at the heart of great presentation, so it's definitely worth reminding yourself of the key elements before applying them to your presentation.

Here is a great opportunity to see SUCCES in action. Watch this video of the Toastmasters 2015 World Champion of Public Speaking. Before you watch it, download the SUCCES analysis document, and as you watch, make a note of examples of the differing elements being used. There are plenty to find.

So many presenters waste the opportunities good visuals provide. Learn how to get the best from your visuals.

Visualizing your data is a super important if you want to get your messages remembered and understood. Steve Jobs once said, 'it is not about the numbers, it's about what the numbers mean.' So many business presenters fill their presentations with data and pasted spread sheet pages and it simply doesn't work.

This lecture is a short video clip from a lecture called The Food Revolution and you'll find it on my YouTube channel. It's a fantastic example of how to bring data alive in a memorable way. The speaker is a doctor talking to a conference of other doctors. They will have all seen the stats he is discussing. However, he tells a story that brings the information to life and makes it very real. He could have shown a spread sheet table. Everyone would have nodded sagely and forgotten it instantly.

I really like the way his images reflect the words he is using - 'spreading like a cancer' for example. He also gets high emotional involvement with the final images, especially the child.

A flip chart or whiteboard can be a very effective visual aid. Here are tips to use them well.

Make the best use of peak moments of interest with these presentation opening and closing strategies.

It's time to think about the sequence of your presentation. and what will work best fopr your presentation.

How to handle questions and more awkward audience members.

The final opportunity to test yourself and guage your learning.

A refresher on the most common pitfalls that presenters make.

A downloadable presentation checklist to help you keep your presentations on track.

It's time to put all your learning together and become an engaging presenter. Before you do that, one final piece of advice.

An opportunity to put all your learning into practice and make a 5 minute presentation demonstrating your learning. Then upload your presentation to the closed Facebook group for students of this course and get feedback to help you develop your skills further. You'll find details of the Facebook group in the downloadable resource linked to this lecture.

Whilst I have been presenting, speaking, training and facilitating for many years, the growth of online learning through video based activity is a newer field for me. As a 30 year learning and development professional I am keen to be a part of this learning revolution. Through my dealings with Udemy I was offered the chance to work with fellow instructor Alexa Fischer. Alexa is a successful actress and media trainer who specializes in on camera presence.

The method was this - I was working on my latest course Recruitment Interviewing Made Easy and Alexa asked me to record a short video and let her see it. We then spent a hour on Skype where she was able to give me some great personal feedback and advice. Because of my presentation experience, much of the advice is on the more technical side of being on camera. This video shows a small part of my video and then contains Alexa' feedback.

After receiving the feedback from Alexa I was asked to re-shoot the video putting ideas from the feedback into practice. Alexa then provided me with further feedback.

There is still work to do, but hopefully you can see quite a difference in the videos.

This is part of a live webinar entitled Giving Business Presentations in a Virtual World

How to obtain your course completion certificate

Links to other courses and other information.

Thank you. Now it's time to put your learning and ideas into action.