The 7 Deadly Styles of Presenting … or how to really be mediocre presenter
“You can call me anything you want because I’m fairly thick skinned but never, ever call me mediocre…”, those words echo inside my head from 20 years ago when my sales director gave me my first real lesson in presenting. At the time I was working for a chap called Anthony Robbins in New York and we sold 90% of our business through presentations to groups of people.
During that time the school of hard knocks was a frequent classroom I visited and feedback was my breakfast, lunch and dinner at times! An old mentor of mine always use to say, “Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes bad judgement”. One thing I’m really certain of is I’ve had lots of experience – yep, I’ve probably messed up more times than China has won Olympic medals. Presentations are one of the few areas you get immediate feedback about how you did – the feedback comes from your own intuition (what you felt like after the presentation), the reaction of the people in your presentation and the feedback you get in the cold light of day – you won the business or not, got the job or not or the feedback scores at the end of the conference.
In seeing and in being part of literally thousands of presentations over the years I’ve noticed some specific genres that really stand out and at best, make the presentation mediocre and at worst, the presenter ‘nose dives’.
Presentations are in many ways one of the last unfair advantages in the market place because business propositions today within industries are fairly similar, price is rarely a differentiator for high quality products or services and anything other than ‘world class’ performance would not earn you the right to tender in a global setting. Ther ...