How To Prevent Your Presentations Being A Complete Waste Of Time

Convincing someone to spy against their own country is a big step. The job of an Intelligence Agent is to break that big step into lots and lots of little steps..."

You can imagine - it made for an interesting careers talk! But what's apparently true for espionage is also true for those of us pitching and presenting.

Here's one of the biggest mistakes a presenter can make...  

Trying to convince an audience to take too large (or too complex) a Next Step.

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Some years ago, I remember running a session on New Business Pitching in London, UK near King's Cross Station.

One lady wanted to pitch an upcoming medical conference she was organising.

"What do you want to achieve with your pitch?" I asked.

"I want people to attend the conference" she replied.

"Really? To achieve that, what has to happen first?"

"They need a ticket."

"And how do they obtain a ticket?"

"They need to buy one."

"Where?"

"On our website."

"Aha!"

The overall GOAL may have been conference attendance. But the desired OBJECTIVE for her pitch was to visit a specific website.

That's the first of the lots and lots of little steps!

Inviting audience members to take a simple next step like 'visit this website' is much more likely to yield results than a generic 'come to our conference on such and such a date'.

(Of course this assumes the website is set up right, to maximise conversion rates. But still, you get the idea.)

Be crystal clear on precisely what the next step REALLY is for your audience. Your pitch presentation stands a much better chance of being worthwhile... rather than a complete waste of your and your audience's time.

When's your next presentation?

What's the exact next step you want THEM to take?

Is it little?

Onwards!

Simon

Simon Bucknall
High Impact Speaking Expert
Finalist, 2017 World Championship of Public Speaking

P.S. If you're looking to take the impact of your speaking to a new level, how about this as a next step? View this short video...