GREAT site for your Presentations

My goodness this is fantastic. Merlin Mann has a blog that I follow called 43 Folders.

Here is a recent post about how he puts presentations together. Pick any single piece of this advice and you would have a good presentation. Put them all together, and you have a really, really, really fun approach to the daunting presentation.

This is the finisher's blog approach - do your research, search out people who have gone before you and who do a better job than you...and then study what they do.

How I made my presentations a little better

Presentations

A week or so ago I gave a presentation that I had not had enough time to practice. I got through it OK, but I didn't engage my small and critical audience the way I had pictured in my mind. My mother used to make me practice school presentations two or three times in front of a mirror...that really helped me notice my ticks and annoying expressions. I didn't make time to do that on my last presentation, and it felt weak.

Sticking with one of Brain Bucket's tenets of marketing...let's think about that.

Guy Kawasaki has a recent post that helped me start the thinking part:

URL: Speaking as a Performing Art

Now I just need to figure out the innovative approach to my sales presentations...oh, and then I have to practice enough in front of the mirror so that I can execute it better next time.

Any ideas?

Network Marketing...How Is Your Elevator Speech?

I had the pleasure of attending a well run, established referral group meeting yesterday.

Great lunch guys..thanks.

This is a group of people that are as varied as you can imagine, and this is a group that does not allow direct overlap of business descriptions in its membership.

I was struck by the friendliness and genuine desire to help others in order to help yourself attitude that is a huge part of this group's motto.

I was also struck by how the membership described what they did, and it got me thinking about the dreaded elevator speech.

We work with small and medium sized companies to help them put together marketing plans, website plans, sales plans, printed collateral, interactive plans.

I promise you that if I ever get to work with you, the first thing I will ask you to do is to describe your company and what you do.

Commonly, people start with their name, their company, and they tell me exactly what they do.

Occasionally, there is a silly lead in teaser...and then a repeat of the above.

What many people don't get is that the elevator pitch is NEVER about what you do...

It should always be about your customers, the kinds of things they deal with, their struggles, their challenges...

Too many people think of the 30 seconds or less description of what you do as a "pitch" or a "speech" or a "presentation"...

In reality it will only be memorable by being engaging.

Engage the person who is asking you "so, what do you do?"

Get them to ask you another question.

Get them to ask you to tell them more, "Oh, how do you do that?"

It has become such second nature to describe what you do from your own point of view...

When really what you should be doing is engaging people by describing what your customers say you do.

Got any questions?