Always A Presentation

One the work front, it's been a great run and no matter what level of the organization I seem to be involved in, I am always giving some sort of presentation!  I started in sales where I had to make a presentation of my company's products and services to customers either in our place of business or theirs.  This presentation used archaic tools by today's standards.  We had printed sales kits with removable pages to keep it up to date.  The presentation was mostly pictures where we sales types filled in the details conversationally.

As technology evolved, we went to computers and laptops for presentations.  But these were such that we had to log in and then scroll through screen after screen.  Sometimes the Internet speeds at a customers location caused the presentation to drag on and be a bit dull.  Likely, you've had to endure one of these.  Now, we use the iPad and it rocks compared to the olden days!

PowerPoint Presentation

As I was promoted in the organization to sales leadership, I regularly use a PowerPoint presentation in training new recruits.  I'd also use it for some sort of presentation in regular sales meetings.  What I like about this is that it lends itself to a consistent track where people can follow along and make notes on printed pages and everyone gets the same message.  It's not a wing it kind of sales training still so prevalent in many organizations.

This wasn't the only place for using PowerPoint though.  As our company went public I was included in the road show to make a presentation from a sales and marketing perspective.  My talking points were incorporated into an overall presentation with slides.  This was a lot of fun and the slides were awesome since we had them professionally done.

Our company wanted me to be involved in speaking at various industry trade association meetings, too.  So, I often found myself using PowerPoint to make a 45 minute to 1 hour presentation.  I find it interesting that in the biography of Steve Jobs he forbid PowerPoint from being used in creative meetings.  He just shut them down in favor of a discussion free-for-all.  However, he did employ a powerful presentation style when introducing new products that is often used as a template today.

Just About Everything Is A Presentation

We are almost always selling.  Plenty has been said about that elsewhere and I don't plan to address that again here in this post.  However, to sell usually involves a presentation of some sort.  And you never get a second chance to make a first impression.  So it better be good!

Remember the last presentation you saw where some of the equipment went haywire?  I do.  The bulb in the projector burned out on the second slide as I was getting on a roll......and they did NOT have a back-up bulb.  There are a bunch of presentation fiasco's that I've seen or been a part of.  My computer not synching with the projector for some reason was one.  How about the time when mid-presentation the screen just of it's own accord decided to roll back up into the ceiling and the curtain background was very dark to where you could see nothing.  It's funny now looking back, but it was a presentation from hell!

 

Killer Presentation Skills

Prepare well and make sure you have a backup plan B in case something goes wrong.  That's my best presentation advice!