FREE! E-Newsletter Presentations Points is a free short monthly bulletin sent out by Claudyne Wilder. Every bulletin discusses two ideas for presenters and one for designers. There's also a monthly challenge for presenters and designers. Subscribe Now April 2003 Your Presentation Success Is Our Passion Present It Right...The First Time! TWO WINNING PRESENTATIONS PUBLIC SEMINARS Goal: Learn how to develop, design and deliver a persuasive, results-oriented presentation. In the last public seminar, three people created real-work presentations the first day, and presented with their slides the second day. This is a real opportunity to take your presentations to the next level of professionalism. Dates: April 8 and 9, 2003, or May 20 and 21, 2003 Location: Boston area Times: 9 to 5 Cost: $650 with a money-back guarantee For an outline click here or e-mail me at claudyne@wilderpresentations.com This month I'd like to discuss two ideas for presenters and one for designers. Try your hand at the monthly challenge at the end. FOR PRESENTERS: STEP 9: RECOMMEND NEXT STEPS HANDLING DISAGREEMENTS BETWEEN AUDIENCE MEMBERS (From the book Presentations Kit: 10 Steps for Selling Your Ideas) You are giving a successful presentation on a difficult subject. All of a sudden two people in the audience start discussing their differences of opinion on your topic. You want to intervene and at least focus their discussion, but are not sure what to do. Here’s one strategy. State the issue and why it needs to be resolved. Do this to clarify the issue and also to give everyone a moment to breathe and to obtain some distance from the conflict. Speak in a forceful voice (or else they may not stop talking) and say something like, “Here are the concerns I hear from both of you.” Ask them to state their views related to the major issue. The temptation is for you, the speaker, to take sides. The better approach, once you have focused the discussion, may be to be quiet and let the audience members state their opinions. You already know what you think. Ask the others in the room, as well as the two people in the conflict, to suggest ways to resolve their differences. Write these suggestions down for all to see so that people don’t just keep repeating the same points over and over. You may end up saying, “I believe I or others in the room need to gather some more information before we can come to a logical solution to this issue.” Then you can go on. Ask both people which suggestions are acceptable to them. Other people in the group may also have to concur on the next steps acceptable to them. Summarize the agreement. As you summarize the agreement, or at the very least the agreement that someone will gather more information, state how this issue affects your presentation agenda. Then go back into your talk. You may not get all the way through this process, but beginning it is one way to take charge of a conflict during your presentation. FOR PRESENTERS: TEACH SKILLS Many of you have been asked to teach a skill even though that is not in your job description. How do you organize your thoughts and teach in a way that is easy for you and benefits your audience? Here’s a structure to use. TEACH SKILLS Give an introduction. State the skill areas to be learned. Explain each area using key points, examples, anecdotes, handouts, questions, and exercises. Summarize major lessons of the day. Suggest the next steps in order for participants to apply what they have learned. HERE’S AN EXAMPLE It’s a short lesson plan for teaching a segment of the Negotiation Skills seminar. Introduction: Creative negotiations are filled with asking questions and brainstorming options. Skill area to be learned: Asking open questions. Points to cover: Open questions give the other party an opportunity to talk. Open questions demand more than a yes/no response. Open questions help you find out the other party’s interests. Example: Finding out what a client really wanted. During an interview to discuss Geri’s team-building program, the potential customer said that, right now, he wanted to train some people who had never been managers and now had five to ten people reporting to them. Geri began by asking, “Tell me more about what you want them to do differently after the training?” She also asked, “What are they doing now?” As a result of these questions, she was able to refer the prospect to a strategic partner. She could have just left without business, but by asking the questions, she began to create a relationship with a potential customer. Handouts: List of open-ended questions to ask. Questions to ask the class: Are you the type of person who asks questions? What type of questions? Do you like people to ask you questions? What type of questions? Closed or open ended? Do you tend to treat people the way you like to be treated? Is that helping or hindering your negations? Exercises to do: Think of a future negotiation and list six questions you can ask during that negotiation. Get in groups of four and come up with a typical negotiation scenario you experience at work. Summarize major lessons: When you ask questions and brainstorm options during a negotiation, you discover the interests of the other party. Sometimes you come up with options no one had yet considered. Next steps: Before making your suggestions during a negotiation, consider asking at least three questions. DESIGNERS: ADDING GRAPHIC INTEREST TO TEXT SLIDES Save yourself time. Put together five to ten slides of interesting arrows, tables, and shapes with space for text by them. Put them in a file. When you are designing a presentation, open that file and find a design that would work for one of your slides. Then, at least one slide will be something besides text. Some wonderful shapes can be found in Crystal Graphics PowerPlugs SuperShapes I & II. They are attention getting, easy to use, and help you get rid of slides that are all text. MONTHLY CHALLENGE: PRESENTERS List the questions you intend to ask during your next presentation. DESIGNERS Start creating your file of interesting varied slides. WHO IS TALKING? FROM NICK MILLER OF CLARITY ADVANTAGE Last week, I suggested: "If we're engaged in discussion with customers and they're focusing on us, it's a failure for us, the sellers. Our customers shouldn't be thinking about us at all. They should be thinking about themselves." Several readers wrote to ask: How do you keep customers' attention on themselves? My quick answer to that is: Watch Barbara Walters interview someone. She is one of the best on the planet at drawing people out to tell their stories. Her 1970 book (you're right, I never throw anything out), How To Talk to Practically Anybody About Practically Anything, suggests we approach every conversation, from cab driver to corporate chief, with the intention to learn something about what they think is really important. In a recent conversation, I heard a prospective client say to a sales rep as the conversation began, "Tell me a little about yourself. Where have you been, what have you done, what led you to go in this direction?" It's a very different request than "Tell me about your company and the services you sell." The first opens the possibility of a personal connection, of relationship. The second one guides us straight to a transaction. Summed up, "relationship first, then the transaction." Enough about me. I'd like to hear about you. © Clarity Advantage Corporation, 2003. All rights reserved. "The Sales Accelerator: Fuel for More Sales, Faster" by Nick Miller contains related articles on selling. 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