How You Can Become A Fearless Presenter

For some people, fear is an emotion that can create an obstacle in the growth of your business. Important tasks like making follow-up prospecting calls, setting up appointments or presenting to a prospect may go undone all because of fear. You’ve convinced yourself that you may not possess enough experience or credibility to take on the task without making a mess of things.

Previous articles written on my blog that relate to managing fear were for those individuals who are fearful and terrified to talk to people. These articles were not “skill” building discussions, but intended to get the reader to focus on changing the way they “feel” about speaking to people.

Once you’ve identified the root cause of your fear, this article takes that new found knowledge one step further. Now that your knowledge is more advanced, we can discuss how you can become a fearless presenter and focus on how to present to your prospects. Now that you have managed your fears and doubts, you can refine your ability to communicate to others and master it.

To become good at presenting you need to focus on three things:

• Presenting is not magic. It’s made up of several successful things combined together, such as body language, delivery, distractions, timing and repetition, voice volume and facial expressions. This is far from an all-encompassing list, however, but the basics.

• Identify which things in the list you need to get good at. Pinpoint the ones you are good at and the ones you are not good at.

• Once you have identified your weaknesses, practice correcting those skills continually until they become second nature. You should find yourself doing them without even thinking about it.

There is a huge difference between talking to be heard and presenting so the prospect or audience understands what you’re presenting. Therefore, you have to be “interested” in your prospect, not “interesting.”

A presenter who is truly interested in his prospect ONLY presents things that are valuable to the prospect. You may think that since your company’s compensation plan pays out 75% is valuable to the prospect. How did you come to this conclusion? Because it’s valuable to you!

If you are doing a one-on-one presentation, a better approach to find out what interest the prospect is to ask questions like, “Mr. or Ms. Prospect, in making a decision about a business, what’s most important to you?” For the most part, whoever is asking the questions controls the conversation.

Another way to ascertain what interests the prospect is a technique called “testing a topic.” You begin by asking a question. Let’s say, you want to know if the compensation plan interests the prospect, then ask them. “Mr. or Ms. Prospect, does making a profit on selling any of the products interest you?” If they say no, then don’t start talking about your compensation plan, no matter how much you think it’s important and valuable.

If you are presenting to a wide audience, it’s important to find out what’s relevant to the majority of the people in the room. For example, if 98% of your audience is blue collar workers looking to supplement their income and the others are doctors or engineers, then don’t gear your presentation toward the doctors and engineers. To address this situation, you could begin by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, what I am about to discuss may not include everyone, but for those of you that do have an interest, I’d like to share some information on how you can supplement your income without quitting your job.”

Lastly, one key point in presenting is the length of the presentation. It will vary according to your prospect. You do not have to always give a 1 hour presentation. You should provide enough information to your prospect so that he or she can make an intelligent decision whether to join your business or not. Enough information is the right amount your prospect wants to hear. Test the topic and if your prospect is not interested in hearing about it, don’t talk about it.

The whole point to this discussion is to show you how to present effectively and educate your prospect about how to evaluate a business to get what they want. Presenting by being interested in your prospect instead of being interesting, first and foremost, will not only be a lot easier; it’s a surefire way to increase your duplication and retention rate!