50communicationtactics.com

Archive for December, 2009

Trade show promotions give you an opportunity to display and demonstrate your products and services. Believe it or not everyone is capable of developing and displaying good presentation skills. For a lot of people, making a presentation at the annual trade shows can be a frightening and uncomfortable thing to do, however with some simple tips any such fears and anxieties can be replaced with confidence and even make the whole experience very enjoyable.

Let’s now explore some fundamentals.

Practice.

First of all consider the content and approach of your display and presentation and practice on your co-workers, friends or even your family, ask them to evaluate your performance, remember practice makes perfect. It is also a good idea to visit the exhibition room of the presentation before the event takes place, also you should test out any equipment you are going to use and get very familiar with it. Remember familiarization is always a good thing should things go wrong.

Visuals and Sounds

Use graphics, movies, cartoon drawings, charts and visual aids, you can also use sounds and text to demonstrate further. Computer software programs like Power Point are very impressive and can give a professional edge to your presentation, but be sure you have a thorough understanding of the software as well as the hardware you are using otherwise you could be heading for disaster.

The approach you need to take for your presentation.

Be confident and relaxed but above all be yourself. Use your own natural gesticulations or vocal intonation to your benefit. It is very difficult to transform the manner in which you are accustomed. A presentation is far more effective when one actually puts ones energy full force into them. likewise, never attempt to be anyone else or duplicate another presenter’s technique.

Dealing with nerves and anxiety for your presentation

Being a little nervous is not a bad thing; in fact a small amount of nervousness can be a good thing for your presentation. What some people feel when they take the stage is an urge to do one of two things,

1. Make a dash for the nearest exit or

2. Stand full Force and rush the whole presentation.

If you do get such feelings then simply take a couple of deep breathes, breathing in through your nose and slowly out of your mouth, tell yourself you are winner and let all of your nervous energy channel into your performance and out to your listeners.

It is natural to feel insecure at the beginning but go slowly and don’t strive for perfection, walk a little back and fore or hold onto the display stand, whatever, just take it slowly, bear in mind that your audience will need time to digest what you are saying and to turn it around in their heads, so there really is no need for you to rush.

Talk to your audience like they are your friends.

Your work as a host is to arouse and converse with your listeners so that they are eager to get all the info you have. Have a discussion with your audience. They might not in reality talk back, but let them sense that you are testing; consulting and questioning them, they will then remain alert and conscientious.

And Finally

Everyone has to start somewhere and if you follow your own instincts and take the advice offered to you here then in no time at all, trade show demonstrations and Presentations will become second nature to you.

www.Presentation411.com Want to improve your public speaking skills? Want public speaking skills? Learn Presentation Skills from the Toastmaster International 2001 World Champion of Public Speaking. He started with severe stage fright and over came his fear of public speaking to outspeak 25000 speaking contestants from 14 countires

Product Description
MAXIMIZE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY, ENHANCE YOUR MANAGERIAL SKILLS, AND SHARPEN YOUR EDGE IN BUSINESS! They say time is money. And thanks to Time Management, you can make every moment more valuable, through 24 easily mastered techniques that will instantly increase your workplace efficiency. Through clear, concise directions – all informed by real world examples – you’ll learn how to match the right timesaving method to each situation and avoid ineffec… More >>

Time Management: 24 Techniques to Make Each Minute Count at Work

Ed Lindsey: Person of 2009
“There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication… Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it is somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changin.

Read more on Maui Weekly

Seeing forever into the future
The New Community Coalition (TNCC) has hatched a brand new program aimed at growing a better future for the community, and is calling on individuals to chip in for the cause.

Read more on Telluride Daily Planet

2010: The year of the Mac?
It’s almost a pathetic assertion: This year, the Mac will break out of its ghetto and become a mainstream computer for individuals and businesses alike. That unfulfilled desire is foretold every year and has been since the mid-1980s, when Apple’s then-groundbreaking computer was quickly sidelined by the IBM P and, later, Microsoft Windows.

Read more on InfoWorld via Yahoo! News

Presentation skills are vital to any company that wants to present a good image of their business or present products or services to potential clients or partners. There are numerous providers that offer courses that are designed to help individuals improve their presentation skills. This can be a very positive method of improving presentation skills and because there are a wide variety of different techniques that can be taught by training providers there is a great deal that the participant can learn. This can include plenty of skills and techniques for even the most successful of speakers so that they can also learn from a course.

Many courses will have a component that aims to advise the participants about the theories behind presentation skills and will be the building blocks upon which a person can transform the way in which they relate to other people. There is also a real distinction between the types of presentation skills that can be taught to participants. These skills are generally related to four main sub sections; personal impact; presentation skills; winning practices and media training.

The skills taught in presentation skills training can help people improve their personal impact. This can be extremely effective for people that are extremely knowledgeable on their area of expertise but for some reason struggle to get their knowledge across to their audience in a dynamic way. Presentation skills help improve the ability of a person to have an impact on their audience. Presentation skills can refer to a number of different practical skills as well as speechmaking skills. This can be the ability to set up a good powerpoint presentation or other visual devices.

It can also deal with the clarity of the message and work to improve the intonation and clarity of the individual’s voice. The range of training includes training on how to create a winning pitch. This will work from the concept of the pitch and the organisation of the pitch all the way to vocal techniques that can help improve the presenter’s ability to seal a deal.

There are also training options available for people that want to improve their media skills. This can include the ability to create video footage and other inspiring techniques that make presentations much more exciting.

Presentation skills training is designed to help people improve the clarity of the message that they get across and the impact with which this method is delivered. This can lead to many companies winning more pitches and as a result increasing the profits of the company.

The ability to influence and persuade people to buy in to the ideas that you have is vital. This is what differentiates successful businesses with less successful businesses. Training can help improve the ability to achieve this. It can also be an effective tool in resolving conflict within your company and also encourage harmony within your organisation. This can be extremely beneficial to your company.

Presentation skills are also useful if your company needs to handle media interest and would like to do so with confidence and with competence. This can means that overall a company that can present a good image and demonstrate great presentation skills is more likely to gain and retain clients that want a lasting business relationship.

Introduction 

Better communication skills start with the right choice of communications media.  Good intentions are sometimes lost in misunderstanding that could have been avoided with honest, face to face discussion.  Yet face to face is not always practical.  How do you make the right choice? 

A Real Example

This is a story I’m going to tell on myself.  It’s true, and because it’s a bit personal I’m leaving out some of the details.  You’ll still see the point. 

Recently I emailed a good friend and business associate to ask a small favor.  In the email I also asked how he was doing, and asked about family as well.  It was a sincere inquiry, since we are friends, but it was casual. 

In his response, my friend immediately addressed my request for a favor, positively of course.  He then answered the family question by mentioning problems he was having with one of his sons.  Very little detail, but it didn’t sound good. 

In an effort to provide a little hope, I quickly responded to him and told him a brief story about my brother, who had similar problems when he was at the age of my friends’ son, but had outgrown the problem and was now a successful CEO. 

In my efforts to keep the email brief, I apparently didn’t word it very well.  He immediately emailed me back with a note expressing concern and wishing the best for my brother. 

Think about it — here my friend had shared a personal problem he was addressing, and my email back to him must have sounded like “you think you have problems, let me tell you about mine”.  Now that was not my intent of course, but I hadn’t taken the time to carefully read my own email. 

The good news is that we were emailing in near real time — almost chatting, really.  So as soon as I realized the mistake I had made I was able to set it straight.  And it’s a good thing I did, because just as I suspected I had come off as insensitive and self centered to my friend. 

The Perils of Email 

As the above story illustrates, written communication is often misunderstood.  Nowhere is this more evident than with email, a media which often masquerades as letter writing, but without the care, proof reading and editing that a personal letter or business letter normally receives. 

I had a boss for whom I’d only been working a short while.  On a weekend when we were having some operational problems, this boss sent me an email in which he vented openly about the breakdowns we were having.  He was not subtle in describing his frustration, and he was not subtle in his threat that heads were going to roll the next week. 

Now the only recipient on this email was me, and at the time I was the guy who was busting my you know what to get everything fixed and back on track.  I was getting results and frankly others were not.  But I got the menacing email.  You can imagine how I felt. 

I got so mad when I got his email that I quickly wrote a strong and not very subtle response.  Thanks to what was probably divine intervention, I didn’t hit the send button. 

My boss actually trusted me implicitly — enough to vent to me by email.  He needed to blow off some steam before he addressed real issues with other people more professionally.  He trusted me, and I thought he was threatening to fire me! 

Here are some guidelines when it comes to email: 

The more important the communication, the less you should rely on email.

Never use email for feedback, even positive feedback, except to reinforce something you’ve already communicated in person.

By all means take advantage of email as a distribution mechanism for other written documents, for scheduling meetings and agendas, etc.

You’re going to violate these guidelines; we all do.  When you do, hopefully you’ll be more aware of the risks, and hopefully you’ll treat the email you’re writing more like an important letter.  Take your time writing it, read it carefully before you send it, let someone else critique it if necessary.  You’ll save yourself a lot of grief by adopting these best practices. 

What About Meetings? 

Ahhh, meetings — the bane of existence in corporate America.   

There’s a popular IBM commercial running these days featuring several business people in a conference room with sprinklers from the ceiling raining down on them.  They seem oblivious, and someone pokes their head in the room to ask what’s going on.  The answer from the meeting leader is “we’ve got this room until 3:30″.  And the inquisitor leaves, apparently satisfied with the response.  Oh by the way, the meeting in progress is about disaster recovery. 

There are too many companies where that commercial is not far off the mark.  Those of us who’ve spent a lot of time in corporate settings have developed a healthy distaste for meetings, and embraced some meeting avoidance and meeting reduction strategies. 

These include things like holding standup meetings, where there are no chairs, no coffee, and no opportunity to get comfortable.  Get together, share the necessary information, and get out.   

Another is 15 minute scheduling, which changes the culture in ways that make 30 minute meetings seem demanding and 60 minute meetings monumental. 

Of course, there is the old standby, the PAL (purpose, agenda, limit).  I’ve heard many people mock the PAL, but it should be a requirement wherever meetings are held.   

Use all of these tools, and any others you may have in your bag of tricks.  Never attend someone else’s meeting if they don’t provide a PAL.  Respect others time, and get others to respect yours. 

Leadership Communication Meetings 

After all I’ve had to say about meetings, this may seem out of place.  But leaders must have occasional communications meetings with the organizations they lead.   People who don’t hear from you, their leader, or only hear from you by email and press releases, won’t align as strongly with you as you need. 

Effective leadership communications have the following characteristics: 

They don’t become routine.  Usually they’re not regularly scheduled, but event driven.

They are focused and always provide limited, specific information.

They are followed up by talking points, management guides, surveys to determine whether the message was well received, or some other means. 

Leaders seeking better communication skills should strive to accomplish all of these. 

Phone vs. Face to Face 

Conference calls are a necessity in a geographically dispersed work force, and there are unique considerations to executing these successfully.  I won’t address them all here. 

It’s amazing, however, to see how often people choose to meet by conference call, even when they are located in the same building, even on the same floor.  If the meeting isn’t important, don’t go.  If the meeting is important, then nothing will make it more effective than face to face interaction. 

Face to face lets you see people’s reactions, the wrinkled noses, the nods of understanding and acceptance, the bewilderment or the confusion.  You can adjust on the fly, and you can engage people in real dialogue.  Body language is powerful.   

If budgets, time and practical considerations don’t allow face to face meetings, then do all you can to overcome the limitations of conference calls.  But if conference calls are being held when in person meetings are possible, that’s an unhealthy sign. 

One more point about leadership communication.  Regardless of how global the audience may be, the leader addressing their organization should be in front of at least some of their audience when they speak.  This helps the leader by giving him or her a chance to see body language and test their effectiveness.  It also goes a long way toward helping the leader seem more accessible. 

Leaders, use traveling roadshows to get in front of your teams if they’re spread out.  Video conferencing has come a long way as an affordable and effective technology, and may help bridge the gap as well.

Nobody is happy coping with the idea of having to present in front of an audience, even more; the people most used to speak in public show clear signs of anxiety and stress in their body language, but they are doing it, and in most cases they are doing it very well. If there are mistakes in the way they are presenting they will be forgiven by the audience.

Presenting in public is an uncomfortable situation; it clearly takes us out of our comfort zone. and there are bad and good news: the bad news is that this is never going to change, we are never going to feel comfortable in such situations, and however there is some good news: we can improve our presentation skills and do a better job in passing our message by following three golden rules 

Preparation

We tend to think that a good presentation has to have an elegant story being told by someone with an awesome voice and a very attractive and engaging body language, this is not always true. The best presentation is the one that achieves the goal of transmitting the message. Therefore defining the message is crucial and it has to be kept as top priority when designing the presentation, we have to remind that whoever communicates, changes; defining this change that we want to perform and structuring our presentation is key for success. 

Rehearsal

We’ll never find our limits until we’ll actually try to reach them, once our presentation is ready, we defined that wonderful message and we know how to make it be understood by our audience, we must actually present it. The objective is to find what is not working well, where we find problems, check our voice tone and body language and correct what needs to be corrected. 

Performing the rehearsal alone would be enough, but recording it or doing it in front of somebody else will be of a great help. 

External aids

Now we know which message we want to pass, how to make it be understood and we have practiced until the limit, we feel we are ready, but there is still one step that needs to be done to make sure our presentation will be perfect and this is setting up some external aids, small things that will increase our level of self confidence. 

We could have a couple of people around, find them before we get started with the actual presentation and establish eye contact with them. 

We could prepare some notes that we’ll keep in our hands, this is highly recommendable for a couple of reasons; the preparation of the notes itself will help us in memorizing the key topics and it will increase our self confidence just by the fact of having something in our hands. If we fear that our audience could think that we are not enough prepared because of we have to hold notes, don’t worry, in fact the effect is the opposite and the audience tend to think that this is great because of you have spent some time to get ready for them. The size of the notes is important because of we won’t like to have big papers with us; it will be advisable to make it in hard paper and in a size that we can easily manage. 

We could make sure that we have a couple of comments or jokes ready to use as an escape valve when necessary. 

Following these three steps will dramatically improve our presentation skills; everybody is perfectly able to make a good presentation with a bit of preparation, rehearsal and usage of external aids.

Introduction

Better communication skills; not a term usually associated with technology types.  Perhaps you’ve heard the story about the man who asked the engineer what time it was, and the engineer told him how to build a watch?

Exaggeration?

Perhaps, but there is many a true story about firms meeting with clients, and the client asks the IT guy if the system will work.  The IT guy’s response goes something like this: “It certainly should.   We did all our design reviews, held code walk thrus, tested it in system test, user acceptance test, load test….yeah, we’re feeling pretty good at this point.”

The right answer, of course, is “yes, we guarantee it”. 

To be fair, it’s not easy for tech pros these days.  Many of their business counterparts are relatively tech savvy.  They don’t know if the VP of Marketing that they are talking to has detailed knowledge of web technology, or if they don’t know their browser from their Bowzer (that’s for you Sha Na Na fans).

Tips for Tech Pros

Technology professionals who don’t want to be treated like mushrooms, who want direct involvement with clients and the chance to participate in decision making, need to develop better communication skills.  It’s not too hard if they focus on four key behaviors:

Adapt to your audience.  Figure out where they start from on the technical knowledge scale.  You don’t want to lose them, and you don’t want to talk down to them.  If you’re not sure, ask.   They’ll usually give you a straight answer.

Listen for intent.  If the client wants a high availability customer database solution, and the customer billing info is on a separate database, then they probably need high availability for that other database as well. 

Be tolerant and value differences.  It’s ok if the lawyer can’t turn on his laptop.   You probably don’t want to be his opposing counsel in front of a judge.

Don’t try to impress.  The tech knowledgeable members of the audience won’t be, and the tech averse already are.

Managers and Leaders

You stand to gain credibility with clients and partners when you can bring your tech pros along to answer questions and gain a stronger understanding of the business.  Of course you can suffer if they commit crimes of miscommunication.  Here’s what you need to do:

Decide which members of your staff just don’t have business communication in their DNA.  Be honest with those people, and define their roles accordingly.  You don’t have to keep them in the dark like mushrooms, just make sure you know who’s around before you let them into the daylight.

Highlight the strong communicators in your technology teams.  Give them access to clients and other business leaders.  Make it clear that they are demonstrating role model behavior.

Invite business experts (internal, external, client) to share their knowledge and feedback with your technical teams.  You’ll get a better sense of who “get’s it”, and your staff will appreciate your efforts on their behalf.

Take every opportunity to reinforce for technology professionals the reasons why they are asked to do what they do.  Help them keep perspective.  Encourage questions, and provide individual feedback about more than their technical skills.