Presentation Training Skills

Presentations Skills Training Classes

Presentations skills training classes are provided across the country via public open enrollment classes in most major metropolitan areas throughout the US and Canada and can also be delivered on-site via private presentations classes. Our presentation skills training classes can be provided as off-the-shelf seminars, ready to be delivered to a diverse audience or can be customized to provide a tailored presentation approach or in house presentation training classes based on client needs. All presentations classes are limited to a maximum of twelve participants so as to increase the presentation training class or classes effectiveness and provide the individual level of presentation coaching and interaction that is associated with the Presentations Skills Training Center.

For more information on our presentations skills training classes please contact us.

Presentation Course Tips for Consultants: A Metaphor is Worth 1000 Words

A powerful word picture will do the heavy lifting in a conversation the same way a jack lifts your car so you can change the tire. Work hard to find the right word picture for the message you want to communicate.

"How's your project going?"

"Down in flames."

That's pretty vivid, but is it accurate? Is it productive? Probably not. The next one is both funny and positive, but obviously refers to a totally different project. We hope.

"You're going live next week, right? So this project is nearly over?"

"The fat lady is getting her hair done and warming up her vocal cords."

As consultants, we often find ourselves trying to persuade people to see things the way we see them or to enlist others to support our proposal. This can be something small, like increasing the number of daily uploads from one to two, or something huge, like combining three separate instances into one global system. In either case, the argument that "the consultant recommends it" might not be sufficient.

If you want people to get behind your proposal, you need to get them emotionally invested. If you want them to then advocate your proposal to others, you need to give them a message that is easy to remember and repeat.

When we talk to leaders in consulting firms about the value of training their teams in consulting skills, we don't use slide decks full of bullet point and statistics. There is nothing we can tell them about their challenges that they don't already know.

Instead, we start like this...

What if a pro football coach ran his team the way we run our teams in the consulting industry? What if he said to himself, "These guys have a lot of experience? They won a lot of games last year. We'll skip training and I'll just tell them to come in for the first game, suit up, and we'll figure it out as we go along."

How would that first game go? Would they win?

This short word picture, which creates a vivid and humorous image in the leader's mind, replaces a multitude of bullet points. It is memorable enough for them to repeat later to others, so the key message from our meeting is more likely to be circulated among their leadership team.

A good word picture won't replace a good idea, but it will help you communicate your idea to someone else.

The metaphor doesn't have to be perfect, but you should also be prepared for the laughing objections. Our prospects might say, "But football teams have to practice. Their opponents play by specific rules with a specific level of training," to which we say, "Okay, picture the same game on Sunday if both teams blow off training. Is it better? I mean, I would pay a lot of money to see that game, but is it football?"

Or they might say, "Yeah, but on our projects, there isn't another team trying to stop us from scoring," to which we say, "Okay, then make it the marching band. What if they skipped training?" You don't have to convince them that it's exactly the same. Your goal is to make an analogy that they can take away from the meeting and discuss with others.

We were frustrated for a while with one IT Manager at Biggish who treated everyone who had technical skills as if they were interchangeable. He would assign tasks based entirely on availability with no regard for the individual's skills or unique experience. The argument that finally got his attention was, "Mr. Smith, you are missing a great strategic advantage. It's like you are playing checkers with a chess set."

In politics, they call this the 10-Word Answer. If you can create an image, state your position, include all your arguments, and draw an emotional response from your audience (laughter is an emotional response) in ten words, then you have found a powerful communication tool. "It's like you are playing checkers with a chess set" does all of this.

It's an advantage, usually, for your word picture to be funny enough to be repeated, especially if you want everyone to get the message. Be prepared for only part of your message to get out, though. While training the users on a new Purchasing system, we heard one instructor say that the users would be "as happy as squirrels in a nut factory" when the project went live. Later, it was all over Biggish that the instructor called their company a nut factory.

Presentation Skills are Key

Formal presentations are a common occurrence in a consultant's life and being able to present effectively is a basic move in your Consulting Stance skill set.

If you are afraid to stand up and speak in front of people, and studies have shown that people fear this more than death or the IRS, there are things you can do to improve your confidence and eliminate the worst of the fear. Everyone feels a little anxiety before they make a presentation, but if you can get rid of the visible sweat on your upper lip and that nervous twitch in your left shoulder, your audience will be able to concentrate on the information you are providing.

The keys to effective presentation skills are practice and feedback.

Volunteer to conduct as many presentations as you can. If you are working on a small team, be the one who offers to speak when the project manager comes in and asks for an update on your status. Later, ask both the project manager and someone else in the room for feedback. Ask them separately and privately, so that you can be sure you are getting honest information.

Join Toastmasters, if there is a chapter available to you. This is a great place to learn to speak in public and to get practice in a supportive environment where productive feedback is readily available.

With important presentations, practice what you are going to say in advance. Extemporaneous speaking is never as well-organized or smoothly executed as a planned speech. If they're available, enlist supportive colleagues to listen and give you feedback; otherwise, enlist your family, friends or other people you trust to provide honest and helpful feedback.

Know Your Audience

Biggish engaged us to develop a comprehensive global strategy for one segment of the IT infrastructure. We spent weeks investigating requirements, researching alternatives, devising a strategy and developing a detailed approach for how to reach our objectives over the next ten years. The program was ambitious and included many different facets.

In the course of this larger effort, we identified a weakness in one aspect of the IT operation and determined that a complete overhaul of project governance in IT was needed, regardless of whether our overall strategy was adopted. Rather than fold our recommendations for project governance into our findings and recommendations at the end of our project, we decided to produce a separate recommendation that could be adopted immediately.

Once we had a solution, we began to prepare our presentation. We divided our audience into two general groups: managers who knew there was a problem and those who did not. We added the managers that we had not talked with during our research to the group that did not know there was a problem.

When we presented our findings, we spent very little time defining the problem with the audience who already knew it existed, and instead jumped directly into the details of our solution. This audience would have been impatient with a presentation that included too much information they already knew. They would have felt we were wasting their time, which is never a good idea.

With the second group, we started by discussing our investigation and the issues we discovered before leading them to the conclusion that a problem existed, and only then presented our solution to the problem. For this audience, time spent discussing the solution would have felt like a waste of time if it happened before they recognized the problem. Why fix something that isn't broken?

When You Practice, Check the Time

Ideally, your material should take no more than 20 minutes to present. While employees in Corporate America have developed a high tolerance for meetings, they are typically only willing to give up an hour out of their calendar for any one meeting. With getting-settled and packing-up-to-leave time taken off the beginning and end of the hour, your actual meeting time is usually about 40 minutes. If you allow time for interruptions and questions, you are left with approximately 20 minutes of actual presentation time.

As a general rule of thumb, a typical slide in a presentation takes a minimum of three minutes to present. Plan accordingly.

With proper planning and practice, you look poised and professional during your presentation. Without it, you may have to rush through the second half of your material or allow the meeting to run over the scheduled time. Neither enhances your professional image.

Organizing Your Presentation

One of the most common presentation situations for a consultant is when you are asked to present your team's recommendation for resolving a particular issue. Once again, how you organize the presentation depends as much on your audience as it does on the material you are presenting.

If you want to show the value you provide and you have a somewhat captive audience, you may choose to organize your presentation as a chronological narrative that summarizes your activities, such as:

The Issue, as you originally understood it

Your Investigation, including the number of people interviewed and a sample or summary of your findings

Alternatives Considered, including a summary of the pros and cons identified

Preliminary Solution, including reasons for selection

Testing conducted to validate the solution

Your Recommendation

Proposed Approach

With this organization, you include the details of your findings in each section of the presentation and you have the opportunity to gauge your audience's level of acceptance at each step along the way. For example, you wouldn't move on to describe how you tested your solution until you were sure your audience understood how you selected it from the alternatives. Presenting the same information to upper management, who are notoriously impatient with narrative presentations, might require a totally different and much shorter agenda, particularly if they are the ones who originally told you the problem existed. In that case, you might organize your presentation this way:

Summary of Issue

Your Recommendation

Proposed Approach

Supporting Evidence

Details of investigation and research

Alternatives considered, including pros and cons of each

Selection criteria for solution

Testing and validation activities

It's important to have all the same supporting documentation available to you because you want to be prepared to answer any questions that may arise.

In either case, it is important to begin the presentation with an overview of how you intend to present the information. People are more tolerant if they understand your agenda, whether you are leading them through the suspenseful narrative or presenting a conclusion and waiting for them to ask questions to find out how you reached it.

Questions and Objections

When you are presenting material that you prepared, every question or objection may seem like an attack. (You are standing alone in front of a conference room full of people who are firing questions at you...of course it feels like an attack!) If you get defensive or show any resentment at the questions, your audience will see weakness and ego. They will think you are weak because your argument doesn't seem to stand up to reasonable discussion, which is what their questions seem like from their side. They may think you are arrogant because you are unwilling to have your conclusions challenged.

Instead, listen carefully to each question, objection or suggestion and respond as though the attacker is being helpful.

"What's wrong with [rejected alternative]? Wouldn't that be cheaper?"

"Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, [rejected alternative] would be cheaper and we seriously considered it. However, we discovered that it would only solve half the problem and that it would really only buy us some time before we had to go with [selected alternative] anyway. At that point, you might feel that we had wasted time and money with the first solution."

When someone challenges your base assumptions, as opposed to your conclusions, concede most of their point, if you possibly can, before restating your perspective.

"I think you are overstating the issue. Things work fine most of the time. Why should we change anything?"

"That's a good point. We focused our attention on the times when a problem occurred and looked for a way to prevent those problems, You're absolutely right that these problems are rare, but they can be very expensive. For instance,"

Managing Participation

If you are doing a presentation, particularly if you are using a slide deck, stand up. This establishes your authority in the meeting and encourages people to pay attention to you.

This works even if you are in a small team room. If you want to limit discussion and keep attention focused on you, get out of your chair and stand by the whiteboard with a pen in your hand. Even if you don't write anything, and you probably will, this gives you a reason to be standing. When you are standing, you are in charge.

If you want to encourage participation and open discussion, the reverse applies. Sit down. The people in the room may not know why they feel free to talk now, but they will.

When you are ready to end the conversation, stand up. The person who is talking when you stand up will finish his thought, but when he stops talking, you'll see all eyes back on you.

Open With a Joke

The conventional wisdom for speeches and presentations is that you should begin with a joke or humorous observation to establish a bond with the audience. For some speakers, this is an effective tool that helps them relax. For others, it feels (and looks) fake. You already know which category you fall into. If it helps you, do it. If not, don't force it.

If you do a lot of presentations or training classes, you'll soon develop a collection of anecdotes and stories that illustrate the points you make often.

One consultant who often taught classes in her particular application specialty had a fairly noticeable southern accent. As part of her training, she got into the habit of telling stories from her childhood that poked fun at her Texas roots and entertained the class while they waited, for instance, for a query to run on their systems. Over time, the stories evolved from pure fact to a more humorous interpretation of fact to, eventually, outright fiction.

This was not a problem and would never have mattered, except that she was assigned to teach these training classes at the company where her mother worked as a senior executive. Imagine Mom's surprise, sitting in a board meeting, when she learned that her daughter was ten before she discovered that her Uncle Bob didn't invent "bob-wire" (barbed wire). The bigger surprise, of course, was the discovery that her daughter had an Uncle Bob.

When you tell stories, always consider your audience.

Source: Christine Lambden and Casey Conner link

Related: Presentation Course