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Number 1.Sending out the right signals

Have you ever walked into a presentation to see a sea of uninspired faces gazing back at you? The Practice Manager is looking repeatedly at her watch, one GP has already rushed in and out of the door twice, and everyone else is staring longingly at the sandwiches – knowing that they will have to sit through your presentation before they are given a few precious minutes to eat?

Faced with the adversities of diverse audiences and strict time limits, you may feel uncertain or anxious before you start your presentation. So it is important that you send out the right signals when you begin, in order to create a friendly environment that allows you to build rapport with your audience.

Remember: You are your best audio and visual aid. Your audience picks up signals from how you present yourself, your voice and your body language. You need to project yourself in a positive way in order to influence them. Although some people are naturally good communicators, everyone can learn communication skills and use them to their advantage.

Number 2.Command with your voice.

Most people rarely use the voice to its full potential as a means of communication. When they start to make more use of the voice, they are surprised at how empowering this feels in helping them to influence and engage with their audience.

The starting point for anyone working on their voice is to create a relaxed physical state, since any tension in the body inhibits vocal power. Before starting your presentation, take a couple of deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth. As you breathe out, think of releasing tensions with the breath. This simple breathing technique will also encourage you to slow down – which is very helpful at the start of a presentation, when your nerves can easily make you go too fast.

Your voice should command your audience as soon as you say the first words. To provide your voice with support, it is important that your posture is strong. Always check that you are standing with both feet firmly on the ground – or if you are sitting, that the small of your back is firmly supported by the back of the chair.

Number 3. Pace yourself

A complaint I often hear from medical sales representatives is that they are always fighting against the clock. They struggle with the strict time limits imposed on them, especially when lunch has to be included in the time slot. So there may be a tendency to speed up in order to get all the information across. But this is counter-productive. Too much information given too fast can overwhelm your audience, resulting in a complete ‘switch-off’. Restrict the amount of information the audience has to take in: limit your presentation to no more than three key messages.

Keep the pace of your delivery steady by inserting pauses into your presentation. Pauses act as a brake pedal to stop you ‘free-wheeling’. Try to pause for three seconds after your first sentence to help you control your pace at the start. You will be less likely to speed up as you continue speaking.

Number 4. Enhance your messages

Another challenge is holding everyone’s attention and interest for all of the time. It is important that you speak with passion, even if you have delivered the presentation many times before.

When you speak, emphasize your most powerful words to help you sound more convincing and have greater influence over your audience. Emphasize the first word of your sentence to grab their attention, and emphasize the last word to help you avoid trailing off and losing energy. If you feel that someone has ‘switched off’, try emphasizing your next word while looking at them. This will help to regain their attention and make them feel more included. Our moods are expressed through our tone of voice. You may be giving a presentation late on a Friday afternoon, when you are tired – and your voice will sound flat, dull and lifeless.

You need to put more energy into your voice, so that it sounds enthusiastic and is more likely to inspire the listener. One way to help influence your tone of voice is to adopt a role. For example, a highly successful approach is to take on the role of a storyteller and imagine that your message is an exciting story. This will help to ‘lift’ your voice and create greater energy and variety in your tone. Finally, always remember to smile: when you smile, your voice smiles! This is always a good way to build rapport with your audience.

Number 5. Look good, feel good

Body language is important to consider when you want to send out the right signals. We all subconsciously read the body language of others – their posture, facial expressions, gestures and eye contact – and react accordingly. If you slouch, avoid eye contact and speak with an impassive or stern face, your audience may conclude that you are unmotivated or impatient, and be unlikely to receive your presentation with any enthusiasm.

You want to aim for a relaxed but professional image. To achieve this, make sure that your posture is strong without being tense. Share your eye contact around the audience to help you connect with them. A useful rule is to give three seconds to each person at any one time. This will allow you to engage with individuals and keep them all involved in the presentation.

Try to use gestures while you are speaking: this helps to create a stronger presence, and enhances your voice. When you use a strong gesture with a powerful word, you cannot help putting greater emphasis into your voice.

Number 6. Polish the practicalities

You also need to think about practicalities in order to ensure a polished, professional performance. Five key points to consider are:

1. clearly state your schedule at the start. It will help you to control your audience if they know how long the presentation and the following lunch break will be. You must then stick to your times in order to keep their attention.

2. Be conversational with your audience – ask them a few questions at the start to ‘open them up’ and find out more about them. This will help to create a more personal, relaxed environment, and you will be able to pitch your presentation more effectively to those present.

3. Make it clear at the start what you hope your audience will gain from the presentation. Ask yourself why should my audience listen to me? What are the key benefits to them?

4. Ensure that you are properly set up before you start – don’t waste precious presentation time setting up equipment while your audience are waiting

5. Try to walk around the presentation space before your audience arrives.

This will help you to feel more familiar with the space, and to look as though you have ownership of it.

Number 7. Finally, enjoy your presentation. A presenter who looks as if they are going to enjoy the meeting will send out the right signals. And if you enjoy it, your audience is more likely to do the same!

Good luck next time and don’t forget to train and sharpen your skills, remember all professionals have coaches, amateurs have none.

If you’re a presenter who wants to deliver your material by webinar, the secret is to forget you’re doing a webinar, and structure it just like any other program. There’s nothing magical about the webinar format. It’s just another medium for delivering your presentation. You prepare the content just the way you would any other presentation, and you deliver it in (broadly) the same way.

Let’s look at some of these options.

Keynote presentation

If you give keynote presentations, design your webinar as a keynote-style presentation, with the aim of changing their attitudes or shifting their beliefs. It will probably run for 45-60 minutes, with you doing most of the talking, and perhaps a brief Q&A session towards the end.

Be careful with trying to adapt a keynote presentation to the webinar format. Webinar audiences expect high content. Some keynote presentations are very light on content, which can be acceptable in a conference room. But on a webinar, your audience can’t see you, can’t see each other, won’t speak up as readily, and won’t do interactive exercises unless there’s a very clear point to them. In general, you can’t rely on the energy and “showiness” of a face-to-face presentation.

Training session

If you’re a trainer, your job is much easier. The webinar format is ideally suited for transferring skills and knowledge through education and instruction, provided the teaching doesn’t depend on the participants actually being in the same room.

If you offer your webinar as a training session, you’ll be teaching them skills. It might be about an hour long, with a handout they download in advance, and exercises they complete during the session. You’ll still do most of the talking, but you might have more than one opportunity for them to ask you questions, and you’ll allow more time for questions.

Broadly speaking, you take the material you typically deliver in a face-to-face training session and adapt it for delivering by webinar. You can still use slides, handouts, workbooks, asking questions, asking for a show of hands, and even initiate group discussion.

Training course

The next logical step is to present a multi-stage training course. If you can do one webinar well, it’s only a small step to present material as a series of webinars. Rather than a one-off event, you present the training in smaller chunks, perhaps with “homework” between each session.

Even if you’re not doing training this way in your face-to-face presentations, consider how you could do that using webinars. Webinars lend themselves well to this sequence, because they have such a low overhead. Some of your material might be better delivered as a course, but it might have been too difficult to run a face-to-face event each time.

Interview experts

Webinars allow you to bring in other experts for your audience. Although you can do this in face-to-face presentations as well, that is rare – perhaps because presenters think they themselves need to be the only expert in the room, and their credibility would be diminished if somebody else was also delivering material! For some reason, interviewing experts by webinar doesn’t have the same stigma. In fact, if some people attend your webinars regularly, they will appreciate hearing from your guest presenters as well.

If your guest is already a skilled presenter, they can simply treat the webinar just like any other training webinar. However, you might also have the situation where your guest is an expert, but not a skilled presenter. In that case, you don’t want to force them to make a presentation. Instead, run it as a one-to-one interview, with the audience silently “eavesdropping” on your conversation.

Panel Interview

The next logical step is to interview a panel of experts. If you have experience in this area already, again a webinar is an effective medium for conducting your interviews.

Even with a panel of experts, you can add visuals to enhance the experience for the audience. Of course, the larger the panel the more difficult it is to manage this, so plan it carefully. For example, you might decide only you show visuals – a particular Web page or document, for example – and then call on the panel to comment on it.

Facilitation

If you’re a facilitator rather than a trainer, you can still use a webinar to host your presentation. The key difference here is it’s your job to create the right environment for discussion among the participants, rather than being the expert with the presentation. So you set the scene, and then open the webinar for the audience to do most of the talking (with your guidance, of course).

Coaching and mentoring

So far we’ve talked about webinars as being for group presentations. But there’s no reason you can’t use them for one-on-one presentations as well – in particular, coaching, mentoring or consulting. If you run a webinar as a coaching session, you’ll be asking lots of questions and giving the client more time to answer them. So you might ask a question, and then give the client time to answer it.

If you’re conducting mentoring sessions by webinar, you’ll combine the training and coaching modes – that is, a mix of teaching and asking, with some time for you to speak and some time for them to interact with you and with each other.

Presenting remotely

Finally, one other use of webinar technology is for you to make a presentation remotely (in other words, when you’re not physically present). The audience might be gathered in a room, but you make your presentation from elsewhere.

You might have seen this already in the form of videoconferencing, where a speaker is “beamed in” to a conference or meeting. That is still an option, of course, but it has some drawbacks: It can be expensive, it might require special equipment at both ends, it needs a fast Internet connection, and the audio and visuals don’t always synchronise correctly.

Doing it by webinar is far easier, and often more effective. It doesn’t require as much Internet bandwidth, it doesn’t need any special equipment at your end, and you can show a slide presentation as well.