Lesson 45 - Present with Confidence

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Presenting is a vital skill in sales. In this lesson, you’ll learn techniques to deliver compelling, confident presentations that resonate with your audience. The lesson covers 12 tips for perfect presentations, including tips for preparation, organization, and delivery. Your assignment will involve creating and practicing a sales presentation for an active opportunity.  

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to learn 12 tips for Presenting with Confidence. Now, being able to effectively present and persuade others of your ideas is crucial in sales. It will help you to build and establish credibility, to get your ideas heard and to more effectively interact with your prospects. So I'm going to give you 12 tips for any presentation. We're going to break these tips down into four main sections. How do you prepare for a speech? How do you organize a speech? How do you rehearse a speech, and how do you deliver a speech? Let's start with preparing. The first thing that you need to understand is what's in it for your audience. Before you ever step in front of a team, a group, a prospect, students, anybody, you need to ask yourself in one to two sentences, why is it so important that they be here? What are they going to get out of this? And you need to write that down and make sure that it passes the sniff test for you. Then you need to write down three key objectives of what you're planning to get across to them. What are three key takeaways from your presentation that you're hoping they get out of it? And then finally, what are three things or verbs? I like to say verbs that you would like for them to do better once your presentation is over. So I would say, let me actually find the example in my notes here. But if I'm working for Sprout Social, I might say, yeah, here we go. We go. This presentation is about driving engagement with your social media posts. It's important to my audience, because they're responsible for increasing engagement with their organization's social media. The three key takeaways I want them to get from this presentation are understanding the key factors that drive engagement, learning new tactics for creating compelling content and knowing how to measure the success of their posts. The three things I want them to be able to do better once this is over are to confidently apply these strategies to their own social media efforts, increase their engagement rates and effectively track the impact of their work. So that's an example of kind of what's in it for me, what are the key takeaways? What are the key actions that I want them to get from my presentation? Tip number two is to know your audience. You need to know who's going to be in the room with you. What are their demographics? What is their tenure? What is their familiarity with the topic? What what are their roles? What are their challenges, the problems, the things they're looking to achieve? You really need to understand who's going to be in the room. And then number three is to know your setup. So you need to understand, am I in person or am I virtual? If I'm in person, am I going to have a projector? Am I going to have a screen? Am I going to have laptops? Are they going to have their laptops? Do I need to print out Activity Guides? Do I need to supply chargers or pens or paper or notebooks? Am I going to have tables? What format are the tables going to be set up in classroom style, boardroom style. Am I going to have one of those pull down screens, or am I going to have a 4k TV? Is it touch screen? Is it interactive? You need to fully understand your setup before you ever walk into that room, and never make assumptions on what your setup is going to look like. You need to be saying to yourself, if I don't think they have a projector, they don't. If I don't know if they have a whiteboard, they don't. So call ahead. Understand what the setup is. Ask them to take pictures of it and send it to you. If you're not in person, if you're virtual, is it going to be on Zoom Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams? Is it going Are there going to be Breakout Room options? Is it going to be recorded? You need to understand, I you know pretty much anything about your virtual setup. I think that's pretty much everything, yeah. What tool will it be? Yeah. Will there be a chat? Does everyone have the link ahead of time, right? Those are some other things that that you want to know. So that's how you prepare for your presentation, know your audience, know your setup, know what's in it for them, why it's important. Then you're organizing your presentation, and when you organize your presentation, there are three tips that I follow. One, the rule of threes. Break down everything into threes, right? Three takeaways, three objectives, a beginning, a middle and an end. Three, three parts to my presentation. For some reason, our brains work better when you organize things into three things. So instead of giving this long list of bullet points, how can I break this down into three things? If you see. That a slide has more than three things on it, you need to break that up into multiple slides. So ultimately, breaking things into groups and subgroups of three. The second thing you want to do is you want to tell stories. You want to you want to be a storyteller. You want to make it human. That's why I like to include customer proof points, testimonials, etc, because those are real world examples and humans, we're just naturally accustomed to storytelling. We've been doing it since we were sitting around fires, right? So tell stories as much as you can, especially when you're opening a presentation. Opening a presentation is a great telling a story is a great way to open a presentation. And then the last tip I would give is called tell show do. Tell show do means you're going to tell your audience what you want them to know. Then you're going to show them an example, and then you're going to do something with them, or have them do something to drive that home. Notice I've actually done that in this course. I tell you what I want you to know. I show you an example, normally by reading off an email or a voicemail or a fake customer conversation, and then we do it through the study guide assignments. So tell, show, do so when you are organizing your presentation, tell stories, organize it in the rule of threes. Tell show, do then you get to preparing. Sorry, not preparing rehearsing your presentation. When you're rehearsing your presentation, there are three tips here as well. First, I want you to you need to be able to practice your presentation, practice, practice, practice, right? So when you are going in front of a huge audience, you never want to go in blind and you never want your presentation in front of them to be the first time you've done it. You always want to practice what you're saying, make sure that it's coming across in the right way. Take notes on how you're delivering it. Is it landing. You can have someone watch you practice. That's another great way to have a mentor or somebody come in and give you feedback. My second tip here would be to record yourself practicing. This can be very awkward, but it's super beneficial. Record yourself practicing, play it back to you, and this is going to show you so much about your delivery. You'll learn your filler words, you'll learn your pacing, you'll learn your tone. You'll learn if you're engaging, you're really going to start to see what your delivery is like from the perspective of an audience member. And you can take notes, and then you can iterate. And in a perfect world, you would record yourself again and maybe practice this two or three times for big, important presentations, some of the most important presentations of my career. I think about a revenue kickoff presentation I gave in front of 560 people, and I must have done 13 dry runs for that presentation, which, now that I think about it, is an unlucky number, but you want to practice, practice, practice. And then the third thing you want to do right before you step up on stage is calm your nerves. It is so easy to get nervous before a presentation. It is so natural to be nervous before a presentation, and in fact, I always tell people, if you're not nervous before giving a presentation, I don't trust you to give it. If you tell me, Nick I never get nervous before a presentation, then I bet you are worse on stage than you think. I bet you are not being received as well as you think you are. You, if you care about what you're delivering, and you care about your audience and you respect them, then you're going to want to do a good job. And naturally, when you want to do a good job at something, your body is going to prepare you for that, and that creates nervousness. So if people are telling you, there's ways to get rid of nerves, I've never found one. I've given over 1000 speeches in my career, and I can tell you that they never really go away. You can take beta blockers, but that can sometimes make you scattered in your delivery. So my recommendation would be to do the physiological sigh. I learned this from Andrew Huberman podcast, the Huberman labs podcast, and the physiological sigh is you take a long inhale, then a short, fast inhale, and then a long exhale through your mouth. So a physiological sigh looks like this. You we'll do one more you. The physiological sigh, I already feel calmer. The physiological sigh is a tried and true method that I have found works very effectively to calm your nerves right before you walk on stage. I normally do it about 15 minutes before I deliver a presentation, and it's helped me out immensely. So rehearsing your presentation, practice, practice, practice, record yourself and then use the physiological sigh to calm your nerves. Now, once you're actually delivering your presentation, now it's time to make sure that your delivery is calm, collected, and that you're delivering with confidence. And there are three tips that I have here as well. First, you want to make eye contact. So while, if you're delivering in person, make eye contact with your audience members. The tip that I learned for this is to count the eyes in the room, so or sorry, well, count the eyes in the room will work as well. But also, what are their eye colors? Ask yourself, what are the eye colors of the individuals in the room? Once you know the eye colors, once you start looking around at eye colors, you're naturally forcing yourself to make eye contact with people. Now you might think, Nick, how am I supposed to focus on delivering a speech? If I'm trying to figure out the eye color of everybody in the room, you'd be surprised. Try it out. It actually. I actually found that I was more present whenever I was trying to figure out the eye color of my audience member while I was delivering my presentation. If you're virtual, it's harder, but notice what I'm doing right now, I'm looking directly into the camera lens. So my method of making eye contact for this style of delivery is to look directly at the camera lens. Now, when you're delivering a virtual presentation, it can be really difficult because your notes are off to the side. You've seen me probably a million times in this course, look off to the side and then look back. It's very, very common. There are plenty of people that will tell you to get a teleprompter and put your notes on the teleprompter. I actually feel like that's super unnatural. I think it's way more natural just have your notes, look at them and then look back at your audience, right? So virtually, there's ways to make eye contact as well, but make eye contact, it shows confidence, and more importantly, you'll be able to see what your audience is doing. Are they engaging? Are they nodding their heads? Are they tuning out? Are they glazed over? Are they are they pondering what you're saying? Are they absorbing what you're saying? Making eye contact will not only make you sound more confident, seem more confident, but it will also allow you to see how they're receiving your message. Second tip is to master the art of the pause. So pauses are very, very important. And in fact, a TED Talk study found that TED Talk speakers who paused before delivering their speech, so they walked out to the microphone. They stopped, they looked at their audience, then they delivered their speech. Were more likely to be perceived as knowledgeable and confident on the topic than TED Talk speakers who started talking right away as they were walking out onto the stage. There are two places where pauses can be uniquely powerful one, you should always pause after making a very important point. So if I'm telling you something that I really, really want you to remember, I'm most likely going to pause after and let it sink in. Second is you should be pausing after asking if there are any questions, and you should pause for an awkward amount of time. So many speakers will say, any questions? Okay, no, y'all are so quiet today. Okay? And that's a horrible way to ask for feedback. Right? Questions take time. People need to figure out in their head, do I have any questions? Well, what is he talking about? Do I fully understand everything that he just said. It's going to take them a minute to figure that out. Let yourself be awkward. Resign yourself to the awkwardness of life, right? You need to come in and say, Hey, um, you know, I realized that what I just said was, could have been a lot. Are there any questions that you have about this material? I Okay, okay, if there aren't any questions, then let's go ahead and move forward. Now notice that was a little awkward. That's okay. It's by design, right? You want it to be a little awkward and notice what else I did. I took a drink of my glass of water. That's something I usually do whenever I'm pausing for questions. The next thing is, you should be crushing your Q and A. Okay, before you ever deliver your presentation, you should be writing down all of the questions that you expect to get. What are the questions that you think your audience is going to ask you? Make sure that you have prepared responses for those questions. What are the objections to your presentation, the friction points, the places where someone might say, but what about this? Make sure that you've prepared responses for that, and if you don't know the answer to a question, just say so confidently and succinctly, I don't know the answer to that question, I can go get that answer for you, and I'll get back to you. If someone is derailing your conversation. You should point that out as well. Hey, I think that that may be a little off topic, off topic for the purposes of this discussion, but your question is important to me, and I do want to talk about this further. Would it be okay for me to connect with you after, after the session today? Right? Let them know I'm not snubbing you, I'm not trying to avoid you. And then the last thing I would say there is, don't avoid and don't evade, if you anytime you're purposefully evading a question, because you know that the answer is awkward or hard to give everybody notices. Everyone notices. They're all talking about it. They're slacking about it. You need to make sure that you are delivering any question answer that you can in the most honest and transparent way possible. Cool. So preparing for your speech. Let me see if I can remember them all now without looking at my without looking at my notes, this will be a test for myself. Preparing for your speech. Tell them what's in it for them, know your audience, know your setup, organizing your speech, the rule of threes, tell, show, do, storytelling, rehearsing your speech. Practice, practice, practice, record yourself and iterate and calm your nerves right before you walk on to stage with the physiological side and then delivering your speech. Master the art of the pause, cross your Q and A and make eye contact. If you can do these 12 things, I promise you, you will be head and shoulders above so many people that I have seen deliver so many speeches. So now it's your turn for your assignment. I want you to prepare for an upcoming presentation. Your study guide is going to walk you through these 12 tips, and you're going to draft an outline, prepare, rehearse. You're going to write down what's in it for them, your audience, your setup. You're going to prepare for any upcoming questions. You will organize your speech into the rule of threes. You'll do everything that we've discussed in the course. Your study guide will walk you through it. Always check your preparation with your mentor manager or new hire buddy, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.