This is a guest blog from Paula Jones of 6th level training. We are delighted to join forces with 6th level training to deliver three events for small business owners to help them achieve more with their presentation skills.

I often hear this said about presentations and I’m not entirely sure I believe this statement. At least, not about successful presentations.

As for those who are clearly flailing, then perhaps all preparation has been forgotten in favour of nerves. But only the supremely confident will make the statement above, and even then there must have been some elements of preparation, if only being sure that prior experience combined with good industry and audience knowledge are enough.

How do you prepare?

Do you panic?

Do you rehash your last presentation? What if it didn’t work the last time? Is it simply a case of fingers crossed and hope for the best?

Do you write some PowerPoint slides around your subject and then plan out what you’ll say afterwards?

These methods are a bit like playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. You might hit the spot, but you might not. Your audience will certainly let you know that you haven’t if you fail to prepare properly. It’s also unfair to lead them on a mystery tour if you’re rambling through PowerPoint slides with no clear path.

The key to preparation is to know beforehand what you want to achieve from your presentation.

What do you want your final outcome to be? More signups to courses? Knowledge transfer? Whatever this goal is, write it in big letters, stick it on a wall where you can easily see it and ensure every aspect of your presentation can be justified by that goal. Just as all projects need a business case, so do your presentations.

You also need to be able to gauge your success criteria for your presentation and this also requires preparation. Do you want quantifiable or qualified results? How will you measure your success? Can you relate it all to your desired results easily?

If you prepare carefully for a presentation and think carefully about the results you want to achieve with the audience you have then your presentation should be successful and fun. If you simply wing it; then prepare for your credibility to fly out of the window…

If you have found this blog post useful, you will probably be interested in the following events which we are running with 6th level training:

These are

• a teleseminar on 6th June on delivering the perfect 60 seconds,
• a teleseminar on 5th July how to win business as a guest speaker,
• a full days workshop in Harrogate on 15th september, designed to help business owners win work by improving their ability to present

Related posts:

1. How NOT to be David Brent when presenting!
2. 9 classic mistakes guest speakers make
3. How to deliver an after dinner speech which gets you invited back again

This is a guest blog from Paula Jones of 6th level training. We are delighted to join forces with 6th level training to deliver three events for small business owners to help them achieve more with their presentation skills.

Have you ever had one of those tumbleweed moments in a presentation you’ve given when you’ve told a joke, and nobody laughed? Or have you been in the audience and shuffled uncomfortably, acutely embarrassed for the presenter who is desperately trying to recover the situation?

I learned early on in presentations to be careful with telling jokes. I sat through an extremely difficult session at a conference and watched in agony as the presenter dug deeper and deeper comedic holes for himself. He just wasn’t funny. You remember that episode of “The Office” with David Brent making his motivational speaker debut? Imagine that but ten times worse. Two things kept me rooted to my seat while people walked out. Deep pity for the presenter along with curiosity as to how much worse it could get.

Don’t tell jokes. There is too much risk that they will either be found deeply unfunny or will offend someone. And we don’t want that.

There is good news however.

If you’re funny, then be funny. You know if you are. I’m able to raise plenty of laughs while presenting and training, but I don’t do it through joke telling. Observation, story telling, one liners; they can all hit the spot. Notice the difference between telling jokes and telling stories. Stories can have humour woven all the way through and they help to keep the attention of the audience. There’s no punchline to worry about falling flat. The momentum is maintained throughout the tale. A wryly observed one liner is a punchline in its own right. An audience can be taken along on a journey with us that raises smiles, giggles and guffaws and will, importantly, have them remember you and that great session you did.

I’m sure there will be some who disagree and swear by joke telling. I’m not often one for playing things safe, but I do believe in presentation situations you need to ensure you don’t fall flat on your face, figuratively or literally. Dig those stories and anecdotes out, adapt them, be funny. It’s good for the soul.

Now then, did you hear the one about the…

If you have found this blog post useful, you will probably be interested in the following events which we are running with 6th level training:

These are

• a teleseminar on 6th June on delivering the perfect 60 seconds,
• a teleseminar on 5th July how to win business as a guest speaker,
• a full days workshop in Harrogate on 15th september, designed to help business owners win work by improving their ability to present

Related posts:

1. “I never prepare for presentations, I just wing it.”
2. 9 classic mistakes guest speakers make
3. How to deliver an after dinner speech which gets you invited back again

This is the fourth blog post in a series taken from my book ‘ Networking tips for busy female professionals’. Each week, we will take a tip from the book and publish it in a blog post.

The rules of a business gathering are different from a social gathering. People expect to meet people and circulate, and wouldn’t be offended if you don’t want to stay by their side all through the event. In fact, the very opposite is true – they may get very frustrated if you cling to them like a limpet all through the event.

If you position yourself so that you can see people entering the room, you will be able to quickly spot friends, contacts, clients – even people you want to avoid! But here is the twist; you will be able to see people without seemingly breaking rapport or focus on the person you are talking too. There is nothing more off-putting than someone looking around the room when they are talking to you.

Action point:

1. Practice standing facing into the room when you are next out networking

If you have enjoyed this tip and would like to get more of the tips before the book is published, then read on

If you would like to pre-register to receive a signed copy of the book, please fill in your details in the form, and we will send you sample chapters when they become available, progress updates with the book, and details of how to get one of the first copies of the book.

Related posts:

1. Working the room tip 15: Look for pairs and open groups of people
2. Working the room tip 14: Arrive on time
3. Working the room tip 16: Make eye contact and smile

One of my tweets… ‘sales efficiency: identify and focus on your target market‘, illicted some negative feedback from @aileen456. Now, I was a tad surprised that a simple efficiency tip could attract some negative feedback.  As @aileen456 stated in her reply to me,

“it really annoys me when people say that. Cause they never follow it with instructions on how to pinpoint them.”

So, here (and dedicated to @aileen456) are my instructions on how to pinpoint your target audience.

Before I start, if you don’t know who your target audience is, then, in my humble opinion, your business is probably a hobby of yours… But, the question is, how do you find your target audience?

For a business to be profitable, it needs to be able to provide a product or service to a target audience who is willing to pay a profitable price for it. Easy to say, less easy to actually do in practice. But, I’m still not quite answering the question of how do you find your target audience… (Sorry @aileen456)

There are two ways of going about finding a target audience. You can either develop a product or service and then find out who it appeals to, or you can choose a target audience, for example, professional advisers, and find out what products or services they require and are prepared to pay for, and you can also provide. (That is quite a crucial point, if they are not prepared to pay the price you need to charge to make your product or service profitable, then you have a major problem and the makings of a failed business.)

Personally, I think that researching your chosen target audience first, and finding out what needs, problems, pains they suffer, is the most efficient method of pin pointing your target audience. Before, you pick your target audience, you need to analyse who you already have credibility with (this saves a lot of time, as before you can establish a decent revenue stream, you need to build up credibility) who you enjoy working with, and who you have reasonable access to. For example, although I loved working with Mumpreneurs and have excellent access to them, it’s taken me nearly 12 months to find a way of providing a product which was affordable for them to buy, and cost effective for me to produce and market. (By the way, watch out for my suite of on-line training products, which will go live over the next few months at www.30daysto.co.uk focusing on the needs to mumpreneurs) This is the reason why you have seen me focusing on professional advisors exclusively for the last 9 months.

Although my team is shortly to expand, for the first 12 months of my business life, it was only me driving the business.  So, I needed to focus on a niche which I had credibility working with, AND who could afford my desired fee level. If you are wondering I’ve spent the last 6 years working within professional services… Now that the team is expanding, I can afford and am able to diversify my target market.

So, hopefully @aileen456 I’ve answered your question on how to actually pin point your target audience.

Related posts:

1. 12 questions which will revitalise your business development
2. How efficiently & effectively are you marketing your practice?
3. Why is it easier to win new work off existing clients?

This is the third blog post in a series taken from my book ‘ Networking tips for busy female professionals’. Each week, we will take a tip from the book and publish it in a blog post.

What’s worse? A palm-shattering, bone crunching handshake? Or, a being offered a hand which feels more like a limp fish?

Originally handshakes were used to prove that we came in peace and did not have a weapon. Nowadays, we use handshakes all the time – but particularly when meeting and greeting someone.

Handshakes are a sign of trust and help build strong relationships. As a busy professional, it is important that you make a memorable positive impression when you are out networking. Your handshake is just one of the ways you can build a positive first impression. It’s interesting to note that a study by the Incomm Center for Trade Show Research has found that if you shake hands with people, they are two times more likely to remember you than if you didn’t shake hands.

In a study on ‘Handshaking, gender, personality, and first impressions.’ By Chaplin et al, (2000) discovered that a firm handshake is an effective form of self promotion for a female. Research has found that women are more likely to give a ‘limp’ handshake, or only ‘grasp with the fingers’ rather than a man.

Psychologists have found that if you take the initiative and move forward to meet and greet a person, their impression of you will be more favourable than if you waited for them to make the initiative.

Action points:

1. Get feedback on your handshake from friends and family
2. Practice at initiating and offering a confident handshake when you meet and greet people

If you have enjoyed this tip and would like to get more of the tips before the book is published, then read on

If you would like to pre-register to receive a signed copy of the book, please fill in your details in the form, and we will send you sample chapters when they become available, progress updates with the book, and details of how to get one of the first copies of the book.

Related posts:

1. Why your handshake could be damaging your reputation
2. How to make the RIGHT first impression when working the room
3. Working the room tip 16: Make eye contact and smile

I’ve just reviewed a website for a new training consultancy business which a friend is setting up. It’s amazing how many common mistakes new professional advisers make with their first business website.

1. Style over substance

Flash websites look great, but are generally lousy for search engine optimisation (SEO). Search engines are a great way for your business to be found by people looking for your services. If you need convincing about the power of good SEO, we are receiving an enquiry a week about using our services courtesy of our work on SEO.

It doesn’t matter how great your site looks if you either can’t be found on the web, or your web copy doesn’t showcase your credentials or reason why people should contact you.

2. No contact details on the home page

Clients do not buy a professional advisor’s services directly from a website. A website is a means to check out a professional’s credibility, and then make a decision to contact the organisation. Therefore, make it simple for people to contact you – even if it is only a spontaneous thought. This means including a landline phone number, as many people don’t like calling a mobile phone, and an e-mail address for those who prefer to make contact via e-mail.

3. Muddling up ‘I’ and ‘We’

There is no problem in being ‘I’ in your website, or being ‘We’ or ‘Us’, just don’t confuse the two. So, if you decide to be ‘we’, make sure you have an ‘our team’ page with more than just you featured on the page.

4. No testimonials or case studies

Credibility is the difference between why someone will pick up the phone to talk to you, and why they will click through to another website. Any website visitor who has ideally clicked through to your website will want to be reassured that you can actually do what you promise to do.

Ideally on every page you should have clearly displayed client testimonials and case studies of the work that you have completed for clients.

5. Selling features rather than benefits

Take a look at any soft skills training provider and they will all offer a selection of the following services… commercial skills development, management skills development, leadership skills development, personal coaching and team coaching. So, how is a potential client meant to choose who to call? Therefore, you need to communicate how you add value to your clients, and what sets you apart from the rest of your competitors. (In case you are wondering, we work with professional advisors to help them achieve better business results for less effort)

6. No mailing list sign-up box

A visitor to your website is the start of a relationship with a potential new client. You need to make sure that if they like what you are saying you have permission to stay in contact. Offer something of value to your website visitor in return for them signing up. On a personal level, I have found that over 90% of seemingly ‘random’ enquiries about using my services have come from someone on my mailing list. These are people who I have contacted from time to time with either our fortnightly efficiency tip or the monthly newsletter. More importantly, these are the people who are most likely to sign up to one of our teleseminars or on-line training products.

7. Too much text

Many visitors to your website will be idly browsing. Therefore, you need to make sure the text is succinct and to the point, and your major selling points are easily picked out. This means key messages need to be ‘above the fold’, i.e. in the first screen full, and you must have some clear space on your website, to allow the eye to see client testimonials and other credibility building pieces of content.

8. No professionally taken photo

Every professional advisor needs a high quality, professional looking head and shoulders shot, as people want to work with people, and are keen to see the person behind the company. A photo of you in your garden or at a friend’s wedding is normally not suitable.

9. No call to action

You need to give your website visitors something to do after visiting your site. I’m guessing that is probably something along the lines of ‘get in touch with us’.

Related posts:

1. What does credibility really mean for a professional adviser?
2. The Four Pillars of a Successful Website
3. How clients buy professional services

I was asked a question this morning by @phrankleen:

“do u know of any tweeting product that helps u get targeted followers? In terms of marketing.”

“and that can send automated tweet whilst am away from d p.c”

There are many ways to get targeted followers, and whilst there are some 3^rd party applications which may help, you have to be prepared to spend the time to build up the relationships within your followers.

My first tip is to make sure that you have your house in order first. So what do I mean by this? I mean making sure you have a photo of you (not a logo) and a filled out bio, with a link to where people can find out more about you.  Make sure you have been using twitter a couple of times a day, and are posting an equal mixture of stuff about you, RTs, stuff about your business, and conversations with other people. In your bio, make sure you have keywords in of the followers you wish to attract. For example, I work with accountants, consultants and lawyers, and want to attract these types of followers. Therefore, within my bio I have the words accountants, lawyers etc. You get the picture.

If any of these are missing, people are unlikely to follow you back and may believe that you are spam. Why? Well, many people will look at your twitter stream and your profile before making a decision on whether to follow you. I can’t be the only person who looks to see whether a new follower is interesting enough to follow back.

My second tip is to use tweetdeck. Find a list of people who you would like to build up relationships with. For example, if you want to build up relationships with uk accountants on twitter, then take a look at @bookmarklee ‘s pretty comprehensive list of uk accountants. Then on tweetdeck, set up one of these columns as the list you want to keep an eye on. Your objective is to build up a relationship with the people on the list. So, follow them and remember to introduce yourself to everyone individually. Take the time to RT their tweets, comment on what they are saying, but most importantly of all start and maintain conversations.

There are several directory applications, e.g. wefollow, twellow, which will give you ready made lists of peeps organised by profession or location.

The next challenge is how to keep your followers. Visibility, interaction and interesting content is the key to keeping followers. A 3^rd party application which will let you schedule your tweets in advance, is a great tool to allow you to maintain your visibility while you are away from your PC. For example, I use the paid for solution, tweetspinner, to allow me to do this. Other people use socialoomph, or you may like to try hootsuite or futuretweets. An application such as twitterfeed will allow you to automatically post up new blog posts of bloggers who write content of interest to your followers. Aim to schedule your tweets when the majority of your followers are on twitter. Between 16:00 & 17:00 is normally a good time to pick up UK people.

You also may like to use a keyword follow to pick up the right type of followers. I personally have not found this to work well for me, as I found it too hard to isolate the right type of keyword. But, you may find it useful to set up a keyword search column on tweetdeck to highlight the people you need to start a relationship with.

What’s your tips for building up a targeted follower list?

If you have found this post useful, you may like to take a look at our social media training programme – the social media apprentice. This 20 week programme literally holds your hand and gets you winning business on social media by the end of the programme.

Related posts:

1. How to use tweetdeck (or hootsuite) to help you win business on twitter
2. So, what are twitter lists?
3. Twitter – an absorbing waste of time, or a powerful business marketing tool?

Today’s blog is a guest blog from my book editor, Sonja Jefferson.

I’m often asked to evaluate a business website before we get down to rewriting the content.

As an independent outsider it’s easier to give a fresh perspective, without being mired down in the detail.

I try my hardest to think like a customer and review the site from their point of view.

Here are the four crucial elements that customers have come to expect from a company website, and some ideas on how to fulfil them.

1. VALUE

Does your website provide information that is of real value to me, the customer?

Once upon a time, in the beginning of all things web, company websites were merely over-designed, hype-filled brochures, pumped up with their own importance and bursting with impressive phrases such as ‘world class’, ‘cutting edge’ and ‘…..’ (feel free to add more meaningless gobbledygook here).

This approach was supposed to wow customers into action: the flashiest, ballsiest website would win the war for new business. Very 1980s, don’t you think?

It worked for a time when we were web-green and gullible, but today customers rightly expect more.

We want value. We want to know how the sites we visit will help us solve our problems and achieve our goals.

• Focus on customer problems. Tell your customers, in language they understand, exactly how you help clients in their position.
• Segment your customers. For each group, describe their business problems and say how you will solve them. Show the benefits you will bring.
• Make yourself useful. Serve your customers with valuable content – educational articles, papers, resources, ebooks, video clips, audio files, cartoons – whatever content will best help them to solve their business problems.
• Prove the value. Show that current customers have had success – provide case studies and testimonials that show the real benefit of what you do.

2. TRUST

Is this a bona fide company, providing actual benefits to customers like me?

Trust and credibility are big, big issues on the web. There are millions of company sites up there and not all of them are reputable. Web users are a suspicious bunch. How can you win the confidence of your visitors? Here are a few ideas:

• Provide information on your people – your management team and key customer contacts. Show photos of real people so they know who they’ll be dealing with. Enable your customers to make contact with your team directly.
• Use social media and provide links from your website. One of the major benefits of getting your company into social networking is the ability to show that your company is made up of real people with opinions, passion and expertise in their marketplace. Social media enables you to connect with your customers. Whether it is via a company blog, Linkedin, Twitter, another platform or a combination of the lot, social media makes good business sense.
• Keep your website up to date - provide fresh content, regularly updated. Don’t let your website go stale – if you last updated your company news in 2006, visitors may think you’ve gone out of business!
• Provide testimonials from customers and case studies that tell the story of their success thanks to your services or products
• Be approachable and genuine. People like to do business with people. Genuinely communicate through your site and you’ll form a connection.

3. USABILITY

Can I find my way around the site and get to the information I want?

People visit websites for their utility. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen states: ‘The web is a tool. If it’s convenient, people will use it; if not, they won’t.’ Today, users are far less tolerant of difficult sites. Usability is more important than ever.

It’s all very good providing information that gets customers to trust and value your services, but you’ve got to make sure people can find it. Make your website easy to use, so your customers can get to the information they want, fast.

• Pay close attention to navigation - plan and organise your content carefully. If you’re redesigning your site, build a wireframe first.
• Test your navigation with real customers. Give them a task and see how easy it is for them to achieve this. Tweak the navigation accordingly.
• Follow web conventions such as recognisable page names. Web layout has become standardised.
• Write for the web: poor writing makes web sites fail.
• Design your home page carefully. This is where web usability usually succeeds or fails.
• Make contact easy. Make your contact details very, very obvious.
• Don’t make me think. If I have to think about it I’ll click away – to the competition.
• Usability for all. Make sure your site is accessible to everyone, including the disabled – follow WC3 guidelines.

4. PRESENTATION

Is this company professional? Do I like how they look?

You’ll notice that presentation is fourth in the list. Colour schemes, branding and imagery are important of course, but must not be prioritised at the expense of usability and content.

• Hire a professional web designer to make the site visually appealing to your customers: bad design can frighten customers away, good design adds interest and will help to draw them in. NB: hire someone who specialises in web design.
• Don’t over complicate things – make it interesting but also simple, consistent and free of clutter.
• Pay attention to typography as well as graphics – make sure your content is easy to read.
• Avoid bloated design and splash pages - these will detract from your content.

I hope this evaluation technique is useful. Is there anything else you’d add?

Sonja Jefferson is a freelance marketing consultant and book ‘incubator’, based in Bristol, UK. Sonja helps busy small business owners to communicate what they do and grow their companies with powerful sales and marketing material.   Sonja specialises in helping busy consultants make their book a reality.

Related posts:

1. Nine mistakes new professional advisers commonly make with their first website
2. My Idiots Guide to increasing your search engine ranking
3. B2B Social Media: Be There, Be Relevant, Be Proven

Related posts:

1. What the best way for your firm to find clients?
2. Why is it easier to win new work off existing clients?
3. Nine mistakes new professional advisers commonly make with their first website

Over the last ten years I seem to have spent a considerable amount of time helping professionals improve their ability to present – whether at an industry conference, guest speaker at a networking group or an internal firm presentation. Over the last month or so, I’ve had the privilege of being asked to speak myself at several events, as well as listen to other speakers. It never fails to amaze me how many people miss a trick (or several tricks) when presenting:

1. Building their presentation around their slides

When you are speaking at a seminar or industry conference, your aim is to build your credibility as an expert. In an ideal world you will maybe generate some leads or enquiry from people in the audience – however, the key reason for being a speaker at a seminar is to increase your profile and credibility amongst your target market.

To help make the greatest impact you need to be memorable after the event – this means that your audience needs to engage with you as a speaker. If you build your presentation around your slides, you will fail to maximise your engagement with the audience.

2. Not staying around for informal networking before and afterwards

As an ‘expert’ your prime motivation for being should be to demonstrate you have relevant credibility with your audience. However, you have a great opportunity to network before and after the presentation with interested members of your audience. If you arrive late or have to run away at the end, you will miss out on a good opportunity to build up potentially lucrative relationships at the event.

3. No prepared introduction

Your credibility as a speaker will be heightened if you get the event organiser to introduce you beforehand. Don’t leave this introduction to chance – remember to send a pre-prepared short punchy introduction about you, which gives your credentials plus any other business interest which you would like to highlight to the audience.

4. Handing out slides/handout before or during session

You want your audience to listen to you, not be involved in reading slides or handout. As soon as you give your audience a handout to read or jot notes down on, you risk losing their interest and attention. After all if you have all the material in written form, you can catch up on e-mail on your blackberry… I recommend having some printed material, which you give out at the end.

5. Not leaving time for questions

Questions are a great way to increase your credibility as an expert with your audience. If you fail to leave enough time for questions you will lose a great opportunity to answer the questions which really matter to your audience.

6. Too many slides & leaving slides on during presentation

At the risk of repeating myself, you are speaking to be memorable and impactful with your audience. If you let the slides take over, or leave the slides on when you are speaking – then you will start to lose the connection and engagement with your audience. A cardinal sin is to speak to the slides or cram slides with information. Ideally slides should only contain a graphic or minimal text to emphasise a point you are trying to make.

Make sure you blank your slides after showing the graphic, otherwise your audience will be deciding whether to focus on the slides or you. You want them to be focusing on YOU!

7. Not thinking about your audience

Your presentation needs to be written with your audience in mind. The only way you will get the audience to move from being aware of what you do, to talking to you about potential work, is to talk in their language, and showing them how you have helped solve their potential areas of pain. An easy trap to fall into is to put in job jargon and acronyms.

8. No call to action

You want something to happen as a result of your session. So make sure that the audience has your contact details, but also a reason to give you a call. For example, a call to action could look like this “if you would like to know more about how your organisation can …. give me a call on this number”

9. Going on too long…

Your audience can only concentrate fully for a maximum of 20 minutes. So make if you have a slot over 20 minutes that you throw in some variety or different activities to keep your audience’s interest up.

Related posts:

1. “I never prepare for presentations, I just wing it.”
2. How to deliver an after dinner speech which gets you invited back again
3. Are you winning enough pitches?