Presentation skills Archive

Ultimately facilitation is about guiding participants vs. leading them, engaging vs. directing and stimulating learning vs. lecturing.

Customising your sales presentation to the unique needs of the customer is essential to retain interest and engagement.

The core purpose of an investor pitch is to stimulate interest and to get a second (detail) meeting.

There is a big difference between spoke language and written language. Aim to have it sound natural as it is spoken. The speech should be memorable and easy to follow. Most importantly, when writing a presentation script for some else it needs to reflect the speaker’s style, not yours.

The Power of TED Talks are that they are engaging, have a clear message we can relate to and hardly ever have any "Death by PowerPoint" to put us to sleep. TED Talks make learning fun and entertaining.

Business storytelling helps our audience recall more than a list of statistics or facts, but we still need to be sure our audience leaves with our key points. A simple story that is relatable and memorable is far more powerful than something foreign to your audience.

Do you feel like people sometimes don’t listen to you at work? We’re all guilty of not listening at one point or another in our lives. We tune others out while we’re busy, concentrating on a task or when we are reading. Though we try hard to multi-task between tasks we are not always able to listen to someone who’s trying to talk to …

Not all Q&A sessions are created equal. We could use technology (Twitter or some other live question feed) to get quality questions, but these solutions can be time consuming, complex to manage or expensive (due to the technology required).

Image selection in slide design is about more than just typing the word or concept into Google, it is about clarifying your message and making each slide count. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but using the wrong picture can be distracting and create confusion.

Effective slides are designed to augment your message - not be your message (notes) or a distraction (clutter). When designing slides avoid to "death by Powerpoint" think billboard (a simple focus slide which augments your message and can be understood in 3 seconds).