When we are presented with the opportunity to give a speech to a business audience, a lot of different things start to run through our heads. Unfortunately, not all of these thoughts are ones that will help us to create a good speech. I’ve got 3 questions that you need to ask yourself when you start to prepare your next presentation…
3 Questions To Ask Before You Start To Create Your Next Speech
Despite the importance of public speaking, it’s very easy to create and deliver a speech that ends up having no impact on your audience. All too often this happens because we create a speech that we’d like to hear, not one that our audience would like to hear.
If we want to make sure that this doesn’t happen, we need to take action before we start to create our next presentation. Presentation tips won’t solve this problem. Just sitting down and hoping that we’ll get it right won’t do the trick. Instead, we need to ask the right questions before we start.
One question we need to ask ourselves is what the topic or subject is that we’ll be reporting on to our business audience. As simple as this question sounds, it’s actually critical to our ability to create a deliver an effective presentation. If you don’t completely understand what your subject is, then your presentation is going to go off course. You’ll end up talking about things that have no meaning to your audience and that won’t help anyone.
Next, you need to determine why your topic is important to your audience. The people who will be in your audience are busy people who have other things that they could be doing or other places that they could be. You need to make sure that you understand why they are sitting there waiting for you to give your speech or they won’t use their listening skills to get anything out of your speech. What is it that they hope to learn from your presentation? If you know this, then you are that much closer to being able to give your audience what they want.
Finally, there is no way that you can cover everything in your speech. That means that you need to spend some time and think about what your audience’s questions will be. Once you know this, then you’ll be able to work answers to their most pressing questions into your speech and you’ll be providing them with the answers they want without them having to ask the question.
What All Of This Means For You
Presentations to a business audience are a tricky thing to get right. Our audience has high expectations for what we are going to tell them, otherwise they would be somewhere else. Not to put any pressure on you, but you had better get this speech right and show your audience what the benefits of public speaking are.
In order to create and deliver an effective business presentation, you need to answer three questions before you start. The first is what is the subject of your presentation going to be? The next is why is your topic important to your audience. Finally, you need to anticipate what questions your audience will have and make sure that you work those answers into your speech.
It is possible to deliver an effective business presentation. However, you need to take the time to collect information about your audience before you sit down to create your presentation. Do this, and your next business presentation will be the best one that your audience has ever heard.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: Do you think that there is a maximum length that any business presentation should run?
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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!
What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
A big picture is what makes Prezis immediately stand out from all other presentation tools, and let your audience know they’re in for a different type of presentation. Because of its zoom functions, Prezi allows you to put images at the heart of your presentation – even incorporating all of your information into one picture.