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When You Speak In A Business Environment, You Need Special Skills

Welcome to the world of business: do you know how to give a speech here? All too often speakers spend their time studying how to connect with customers and community members. That’s all well and good; however, that style of speaking is completely different from the style that you need to use when you are giving a presentation within the company. Do you have the right stuff?

The Four Skills That You Need To Know

When you are giving a speech or presentation within your company, you need to take the time to do it in a business manner – there’s a whole bunch of rules that you need to know about. A business audience has an expectation of how you are going to talk to them and what you’re going to say. If you don’t do this right, then they are going to tune you out very quickly.

There are four specific skills that you need to have mastered in order to make your next business presentation go well. Here they are:

1. Make Your Brain Big: business is all about what is happening right now. This means that any time that you are giving a business presentation you need to make sure that your presentation is packed with current events. World events, industry changes, etc. are what your business audience wants to know about.
2. Practice Verbal Dancing: Business speeches rarely go as you had planned them. What this means is that you’ve got to be ready for interruptions, questions, and redirection by senior management at any time during your speech. The key skill that you need to have is the ability to remain calm as your carefully planned speech does a 180-degree turn and heads off into a direction that you had never planned on going.
3. Become a Tailor: In business, there is no such thing as a “canned speech”. You may have a basic set of points that you want to communicate to several different audiences, but you’ll need to change the words that you use and how you deliver the speech to meet the needs of each audience that you give it to.
4. Use The Power Of Words: Ultimately all we have to work with is words. A business audience is like any other audience and it’s the words that you use that will determine if your speech ends up having any impact on them. Picking the right words to use for the right speech can make all of the difference in the world.

What All Of This Means For You

There are many different types of speeches that we may be called on to give, but a business speech to the members of our own company can be one of the toughest speeches to give.

These types of speeches require a special set of skills. We need to take the time to make sure that our speech will meet the business need of our audience. Sorry, there is no generic speech that will work here.

The real power comes from delivering this type of speech correctly. It’s a skill that too few speakers have. If you can develop the skills that are needed to do this well, then you will have made yourself irreplaceable.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills

Question For You: do you think adding stories to your business presentation will help you to connect with your audience or is this the wrong venue for that kind of speech tool?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you’ve ever wished that there was a formula for giving the perfect speech, are you in luck! Chris Matthews is the host of a couple of TV shows including Hardball with Chris Matthews. He gets paid handsomely for the work that he does now, but he got his start as a humble political speechwriter. Based on all of that experience, he’s come up with a way to give the perfect speech…

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Oh No! Not Another Technical Speech!

I don’t know about you, but more and more I’ve been finding myself being asked to deliver speeches that have technical information in them. I’ve got a great deal of self confidence; however, having had to sit through more than my share of boring technical presentations this is the one type of speech that scares me the most. There’s got to be a better way…

You Need To Know Your Purpose

Dr. April Andreas has looked into the problem of why technical speeches are so hard to do well and she’s discovered that one of the reasons is that all too often we have no idea what we are doing.

Every presentation, including technical presentations, is given for a reason. Before the first word comes out of your mouth, you need to decide why you are standing up there talking. Are you trying to teach your audience? Are you trying to explain your results to them so that they can use them? Are you trying to find that one member of your audience who shares an interest in what you’ll be talking about so you can find ways to work with them? Or perhaps your goal is to get people talking about what you’ve presented and maybe scare up your next job offer.

Be Basic

Congratulations – if you’ve prepared for your speech, then you really are the smartest person in the room. However, the problem is that not everyone else is as smart as you are. This means that you need to make sure that you don’t lose them from the get-go. Dr. Andreas suggests that you make sure that everyone in the room, no matter what their background is, can follow the first 1/3 of your speech. This way when you are done everyone will have gotten something out of listening to you.

How About Some Examples?

Depending on what topic you are talking about (room temperature fusion perhaps?), when you are giving a technical talk things can get pretty detailed very quickly. In order to keep as many people on board for as long as possible, take the time to relate what you are talking about to examples that your audience can find in the real world.

In the case of room temperature fusion, one thing to talk about would be the temperature that fusion normally takes place at which is 119,999,727 degrees Celsius. You could compare this to the temperature at the surface of the sun which is about 6,000 Celsius. Clearly fusion is hot stuff.

Pictures Are Good

When you are trying to convey information during a technical presentation, it can be tempting to show your audience lots of equations. When possible, don’t!

Instead, use pictures to make your point or, if possible, animation. Yes, it might look a bit hokey, but you’ll do a much better job of creating a long lasting mental image if you do it this way.

Stop With The Equation Reading

This one should be simple. If you must show an equation to your audience please don’t make the mistake of reading it out to them. Either they’ll get it or they won’t, but your reading of it out to them won’t help matters.

What Does All Of That Data Mean?

This is the cardinal sin of technical presentations: blasting your audience with too much data. If you have to present a lot of data to make your point, then at least include a box somewhere that summarizes what it all means. At the end of the day this is what your audience will remember.

What’s Your Bottom Line?

Speaking of summarizing, you should do the same thing at the end of your speech: tell you audience why what you just told them was important. During any technical presentation your audience can get lost or caught up in the discussion and forget “the big picture”. Help them out by bringing it all together at the end so that everyone will leave having reached the conclusion that you wanted them to get.

How To Get Ready

Preparing to give a technical presentation is just a little bit different from getting ready to give any other type of speech. One of the most important things that you need to do is to very carefully practice how long your speech is going to take. All too often technical presentations can run long and nobody likes that…

You’ll also have to prepare yourself to deal with questions once you are done. The whole purpose of a technical presentation is to convey information and this always generates questions. Practice your answers before you need to give them and you’ll always come across sounding smarter.

Finally, you need to make sure that you show some excitement about what you are talking about. The technical presentations that I remember the best are the ones where the presenter clearly had a deep love for their topic and it showed. If you can convey this to your audience, they’ll listen to your every word.

What All Of This Means For You

There is no need to fear giving a technical presentation; however, you do need to respect it. It’s all to easy to make this type of presentation boring and uninteresting. Taking the time to do it right is easy to do and the results make it worth your time.

You need to make sure that you make your presentation understandable to your entire audience as you start out. Help people stay with you by taking it easy on the equations and using as many pictures as possible. Where possible, relate what you are talking about to real-world things that your audience will know about.

Just having a great technical presentation is not enough, you also need to prepare to deliver it. This means making sure that you’ll be able to cover your topic in the time provided and that you’ll be ready to answer the questions that always come after one of these types of presentations. If you can do all of this, then you just may start to look forward to delivering your next technical presentation.

Question For You: Do you think that a technical presentation should be “dumbed down” so that you don’t lose your audience or should you deliver complex material and lose some of them?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’ve always spoken English. I never really spent a lot of time thinking about what it took to speak “good English” because it’s my native tongue. However, when I started working with speakers for whom English was not their first language, I quickly came to understand just how hard it is to give a good speech in English if it’s not your first language. That’s “hard”, but not “impossible”…

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"Technical" And "Interesting" Can Both Be Parts Of The Same Presentation

So who among us ever really looks forward to sitting through a technical presentation? Collectively we’ve all sat through so many of these things that we almost defensively shut down before the speaker even has a chance to get started.

So when it’s our turn to talk about things that contain lots of financial details, construction details, manufacturing details, procedure details, etc. it’s quite common for our blood to run cold because we realize that now the shoe is on the other foot – we are going to be the ones who are boring the audience!

Why are these types of presentations so hard to do? In all honesty, the problem really lies with the presenter, not the audience. Specifically what they all seem to be doing wrong is that they’ve made the mistake of thinking that they are just having a talk with coworkers: they show up to share information. Big mistake.

Nobody ever shows up for a presentation hoping to have the presenter share information with them. Instead, they are showing up so that the presenter can tell them what they need to do. They may not agree with what they are being told to do, but that is what they are looking for.

What this means for the presenter is that he/she needs to understand that the goal of the presentation is for action to be taken by the audience based on the information that was in the presentation. It really is that simple!

Professional speaker Anne Warfield has come up with three ways to make your next technical presentation even more riveting (and I’ve added a suggestion of my own). Let’s take a look and see what you need to do in order to keep your audience on the edge of their seats next time you talk technical:

1. What’s The Next Step?: When you are creating your technical presentation, you need to start at the end. Once you are done with your presentation, what action do you want your audience to take or what conclusion do you want them to have reached? If you don’t have a clear understanding of this, then you’ll end up filling your presentation with a discussion about HOW you reached your results and that is what everyone will end up talking about.
2. What Question Do You Need To Answer?: If you’ve been able figure out what action you want your audience to take once you are done, then the next step is to understand what questions or objections might be preventing them from taking that next step either right now or after you are done. This is the question (or questions) that your presentation needs to provide answers to.
3. Make It Real: The technical topic that you are talking about may or may not be familiar to all  of your audience. If you can “map” it to something that they are all familiar with, then all of a sudden the audience’s comprehension of what you are talking about will go up dramatically.
4. Match Your Audience: The amount of technical detail in your speech and your use of technical terms and acronyms needs to be matched to your audience. If you assume to little, then they will quickly become bored by your too basic discussion. If you assume too much, then they will become lost in a sea of terms that they don’t recognize. Get it right and you’ll be connected to your audience from the get go.

Your next technical presentation does not have to be dry and boring. Use these tips BEFORE you give the presentation in order to ensure that your presentation will be riveting and talked about long after you are done.

Would you consider your last technical presentation a success or a failure? Had you taken the time to determine what you wanted your audience to do afterwards? Did people fall asleep or end up peppering you with nitty-gritty questions? Do you feel that you talked to your audience on the right level? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Too Many Questions From One Person Can Ruin A Speech

As though speaking in public was not difficult enough! Just about every technical presentation ends up with the obligatory “Question & Answers” opportunity for the audience at the end of the speech. There are actually three ways your presentation can go at this point in time: (1) nobody asks any questions – sorta embarrassing, but you can live with this as you quickly wrap up and sit down, (2) people ask good questions and you provide good answers – the perfect scenario, (3) some jerk starts asking a whole bunch of questions and just won’t give up. Let’s spend some time discussing what to do about this last scenario.

The eternal questioner (EC) is one of the strange creatures that lives in the land of public speaking. A close relative to the heckler, the EC is in love with themselves – especially the sound of their own voice. Experience has shown that the EC is most likely to be found attending your more informal speaking events: team meetings, brainstorming sessions, etc. He/she will generally avoid the big presentations to Senior Management because there is a good chance someone would shoot him/her down at those meetings.

Why does the EC do this? There are many reasons, but the best ones that I can come up with are as follows. The first is that the EC has a story that they want to tell. It really doesn’t matter what your presentation is about, they are going to use your Q&A time to tell their story. The other reason is that they have a whole series of ideas that are just jumping around in their head and they want to spill them out for everyone to see. It really doesn’t matter what their motivation is, you’re left with a problem on your hands.

How can you deal with an EC? When you encounter an EC the worst thing that you can do is nothing. Your audience is quickly seeing your presentation go from great to bad and if you don’t step in, then you’ll have to live with their final analysis forever. Here are four steps that you can take to deal with an EC:

1. Lose the Anger: You need to realize that the EC is not doing this because you are you. Instead, you’ve got to realize that the EC does this to everyone – it’s not personal. What this means is that the worst thing that you can do is to get angry. Don’t – realize that it’s just a distraction and lose the anger.
2. Play To Your Audience: When the EC reaches a stopping point (or takes a breath!), you need to say something that will show your audience that that you are willing to treat everyone with respect. A phrase such as “Good point, let’s talk about it afterwords.” would work. Note that this probably won’t shut the EC up, but it will win you points with the rest of the audience.
3. Realize That Everybody’s Got ‘Em: Once again, it’s not personal. Some of the greatest communicators of our time such as Jack Welsh, Suzie, Orman, Steve Jobs, etc. have had to deal with ECs. You are not alone!
4. Make Sure That You Have A Wingman: In order to head events like this off at the pass, it’s always a good idea to coordinate with whomever is running the meeting and have them agree to help you out if you encounter an EC. Let them play the “heavy” once the EC starts to hit his/her stride. Have the organizer step in and tell the EC to sit down and give other audience members a chance to ask their questions. This way you still have the respect and admiration of the audience.

Have you ever been in a meeting where an EC started asking questions? How long did they go on for? Did anyone try to step in and get them to stop? Where they successful? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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