Company presentation stress

Posted on April 24, 2005

I think everybody faces a great amount of stress when having to make a company presentation in front of 20-30 people you never saw before. Even the most experienced salesman could find difficult to address people from the podium. During my presentations I’ve overcame my fear by thinking at the scope of the presentation: make the people buy. Once I’ve considered them as prospects, the presentation appeared to be a simple matter into talking some guys to take action.
The following 10 steps are to be taken in order to have a good presentation:

1. Try to find all the details regarding your appearance: how much time do you have for the presentation, who will have a presentation before and after you.

2. Find out all you can about the public. Are they professionals? Are they from the competition? Are they potential buyers?

3. Prepare the presentation documents long before the actual event. This will leave you time to correct and adjust the content following your colleagues feedback.

4. Read several times with loud voice (could be in front of the mirror) the presentation. Make sure you know the slide order and content. If you feel insecure about talking freely in front of the people, make a short document and write what ideas you would like to discuss for each slide. You can even go ahead an write the entire story, nobody will be upset if you read the thing if its interesting enough.

5. OK, so now you are a few hours away from the big presentation and you already feel the fear settling in. Take all the materials you are going to need - including the presentation :) - and head towards the presentation location. Be sure to be there before the announced time, in order to be able to accommodate with the place and the people.

6. Try to visualize the full room. Find the best place for you that would offer a good view over the people and the presentation.

7. Once the people are in, salute them and ask a simple question about the subject of the presentation and notice who is interested in the room.

8. Now that you have a few interested people in the room, start the presentation and look only for these guys. Simply ignore all the others, you will feel like at one normal sales meeting where you discuss face to face to a potential client and convince him to buy.

9. Focus all efforts into making the “interested” people “buy”. You are not anymore at a presentation, you are at a simple sale session.

10. If you are in trouble at some point, just get further away, probably nobody will notice. The people you are talking to usually know less that you know, therefore even if something is wrong they won’t notice. Just don’t stop.

An probably the most important thing, nobody expects you to be Mister Perfect, they just expect to be talked into “buying the product“

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