Sales Effectiveness Articles

Confident Presenters: Good or Bad?

Never underestimate mans’ ability to use fuzzy logic.

Just because good presenters are confident, does not imply that confidence makes good presenters. And yet most people, most presentation skills courses and, regrettably, most presentation coaches believe this to be true.

It is in fact a lie. Clearly a complete lack of confidence is a bad thing, but so too is complete confidence.

Darwin on presentations

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”

The confidence you derive from a well thought out, well prepared, well rehearsed presentation is seductive to audiences, but the confidence felt out of inflated self-belief is often perceived as arrogance.

I watched another presentation coach “help” a presenter. This consisted of a series of platitudes and sycophantic ramblings that had as much to do with massaging the coach’s ego as that of the presenter. While the exchange was enjoyed by both, I’m pretty confident it did nothing for the audience that had to sit through that presentation. Which, as far as I could tell, was just as bad as it was before the coaching–but now it would be presented with an air of arrogant self confidence instead of the (quite rightly) caution that it wasn’t really good enough.

Advice is cheap

But good advice is invaluable (as it is rare.)

For what its worth, my advice is that there is a time and place for boosting confidence and that time and place is after the hard work of producing a good presentation has been done.

• Know your audience
• Know your material
• Know how to engage your audience
• Know how to interact with your audience
• Practice the delivery

The confidence you get from this will see you through the event. Its ok to feel anxious, use it to fuel your performance. Anyone who says they don’t feel scared before presentations is either lying or dead.

Confidence is a double-edged sword, too little or too much can kill a performance. To quote Bertrand Russell,

“Those who feel certainty, are stupid.”

To misquote Bertrand Russell,

“Those who feel absolute confidence, are stupid”

What do you think? Ever seen a supremely confident presenter deliver a supremely bad presentation?

Right Message, Right Audience!

Right Pitch, Right Time!

First, let me pose a question. Think back to the last time you purchased something that involved choosing between two suppliers. How about a kitchen or a carpet? Did you confuse the need to buy this item with the choice of who to buy it from? “I haven’t spoken to Bob for a while, what can I buy off him? Oh, I need a new carpet” is, let’s face it, an unusual train of thought. The normal thinking process would be: decide I need something, decide what I need, then select the vendor.

When we are doing an m62 STAT project we often run up against this issue; salespeople prepare presentations and don’t recognize that the first question that needs to be asked is, “What are we selling and to whom?” For example, I am working on a pitch for a client in the IT sector, who is hoping to be selected when a client outsources a critical part of their IT infrastructure. One option is for the audience of this pitch to do nothing (i.e. not to outsource at all), however, a more likely option is to select a partner and outsource it to one of four companies who are capable of doing it. Continue reading →

There is always someone better!

The art of competence

What are you good at? Chess, cooking, squash, sailing, wine appreciation, business, presenting or perhaps selling? One thing is for sure – you are probably not the best at all of them.

How good do you need to be to deliver an effective presentation about any of these subjects? Certainly not world class. Competent is the word that springs to my mind. You don’t need to be the best – just better than the average of the group. I have given presentations on all of the subjects above, but I am clearly not the best at any of them. The secret is to know that you don’t need to be. Continue reading →

Ceridian – Before and After

I recently delivered a seminar for a client of ours, during which I talked the audience through before and after slides and an explanation of why we’d changed them. They asked us to record the slides, so I thought I’d also record a copy to share with you! The presentation slides focus on the modernisation of HR, and how 3 separate areas are key to driving this.

This is how I helped Ceridian move away from using bullet points and start using audience-focused, effective visual slides.

Technical vs Application Selling

So a few of us spent 5 days last week at a huge Broadcast Exhibition in Amsterdam, IBC 2012. We were there primarily to support our Strategic Partner, Ultimatte, but also to announce our partnership to bring high end video production values to the corporate presentation market.

The interesting thing is that wandering around this huge event (14 halls and 1300 stands), there wasn’t much selling going on. Lots and lots of technical people having lots and lots of technical conversations, but the sort of conversations I would expect to overhear at a trade show were largely in the minority.

What I mean by this is that there are lots of questions from the visitors that ask, “How do you do that? How do I do this? I need to do this – what do you have that will help?” and almost exclusively the response is a detailed technical explanation of HOW to solve that problem.

But the inner salesperson in me wants to avoid answering these questions and ask WHY: “Why do you want to do that? Have you thought about what impact it would have if you did this?”

Our new Partners at Ultimatte are engineers through and through, and are really comfortable having the ‘This is how it works’ conversation. As a result, they are very cautious of my approach of stopping passersby and asking, “So do you ever have to record amateur presenters?”, before proceeding to deliver a case for SightDeck if they say yes. Inevitably they want to know how it works and I have to pass it off to someone who actually knows. I’m clearly in the minority here, perhaps everywhere – I really don’t care how things work, I care about what they can do for me!

So I write blogs but I have no idea how to publish them, I drive cars but don’t know how to service them, and now I record presentations on our SightDeck but I… Well actually after 5 days of listening to the experts I do know how this thing works and can definitely say it’s very cool. But still not as cool to me as what we can do with it…

For the first time in 15 years we can actually demonstrate what we do on the web. We can record us presenting our slides. We can take clients and record a version of their presentation for training, for marketing, for sales, even for fun! SightDeck will not only revolutionise how we market, but how we sell, and how we deliver our work to clients. It’s the most significant breakthrough in presentation technology since InFocus launched the first Data Projector.

Technical selling has its place. Most people won’t buy something they don’t understand, but when it comes down to it you don’t often buy a piece of technology just because it’s cool… OK that’s a lie, I just bought a GoPro camera with absolutely no application in mind – I just got excited on the GoPro stand… And come to think of it, I might have spent $200k on a SightDeck because it’s cool, but I did have to make a business case for the loan… which meant a lot of commercial selling as well!

Check out our IBC 2012 presentations using our brand new SightDeck here.