The art of content and presence management are critical success factors in both remote and live meetings and presentations.

Following is an introduction to each of the critical elements taught, drilled and coached to improve practical on-the-job application in Louws Management Corporation's Stellar Meeting Presentation Performances^SM workshop.

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PersuasiveClick Here for Presentation Skills related articles.

Communication Skills:

Fortunately, communication is still communication. Its delivery systems are the only real changes.

Louws Managment Corporation addresses how to efficiently and clearly deliver a communication that is both understood and bought by the intended audience.

Lessons are taken from the theatre, the humanities, contemporary communication modeling, salesmanship, formats and styles of today's most watched and highest rated shows and today's “time starved” audiences.

Persuasive Organization Skills:

This component has had dramatic changes made to it.

The premise:

¨ tell ‘em whatcha gonna tell ‘em,
¨ tell ‘em, and
¨ tell ‘em whatcha jus' t'ol ‘em”

and the eternal agenda are no longer workable formulas.

The Issues:

Audiences have no time to listen to anything other than the immediate answers to the questions they had walking into the meeting presentation. Groups in organizations listen to information differently (as do individuals within those groups); and if you can't persuade, but only inform (the tell ‘em format) your contemporary audience quickly gets a case of the “I've no time for this drivel” syndrome.

For any of you reading this, you know today that you must poignantly and efficiently prove your point or go home.

The Solutions:

Learn how people listen and evaluate data;
Learn how to structure an argument (not to mean being argumentative) in such a fashion that it becomes “obvious” that the presenter's P.O.V. and recommendations are well evidenced and stand up to scrutiny.

To wit: the advent of the legal profession's “Winning a Case” approach to organizing presentations has now been introduced for broad publication and use.

Always knew those lawyers were good for something. After all, who's more skilled at taking a group of people and convincing them that someone other than their client did the dastardly deed.

Presentation Aids:

For this, we started from scratch and discovered that going back as far as rolled cellophane overheads and slide projectors, the same mistakes were as relevant then as they are today. Albeit the mediums have made dramatic advances, messages are still messages.

Hollywood, Disney and Broadcast became our new teachers. After all, it's what they do better than any “pundit” of the famous Power Point™.

Reinvented, restructured and repurposed, this training now addresses two major components.

The real purpose and use of aids in selling one's point.
Where and how are they more powerful than the speaker?
When does the speaker really need them?
When does the speaker do a better job than an aid would?
How do you integrate a variety of aids in a seamless and powerful rendition of your points?
How to think outside the traditional confines of Power Point™, boards and video.

A simple illustration of this is Power Point™ where really the “point” is the power, not Power Point™.

Tools for selling digitally, remotely, telephonically, telepathically (only kidding) are explored with specific and tactical tools provided for next day use.

And yes, we do teach how to better use Power Point™, but not only in person, remotely, by CD or even conjointly through the web.

Handling Objections and Tough Questions:

Fortunately, we've previously had much of this subject well researched, explored and conquered.

However, today “consensus” is what drives decision and action, unlike the McCarthy era of orders and commands.

We also have the issue of manners. Yes manners!

Remember when an audience stoically waited for you to finish speaking and then kindly requested permission to ask gentle yet pointed questions?

If you don't, then you're under 40.

Therefore we have liberated “negotiating skills” and “group moderation/facilitation skills” from the confines of their individual and compartmented training programs and liberally sprinkled their tenets, principles, and techniques into the skills necessary to handling difficult people, objections and questions.

The New Format – Stellar Meeting Presentation Performances^SM:

The final adjustments to the training were made based on a collection of over two decades of observations on both the agency(marketing - sales) and client (manufacturing - delivery) sides of the business.

Formal, group, stand-up and staged presentations have dramatically given way to informal, sit down, unstaged group meetings.

However, the classic business purpose of both has remained the same. Inform for the purposes of persuasion to a P.O.V. or action.

Again, function remains, form has changed.

On the other hand they are quicker, livelier, less structured and most importantly, more critical in terms of what they must accomplish today.

Unfortunately, without the necessary skills, those used to a more controlled presentation environment are now faced with constant interruptions, cell calls, blackberry emails, and wireless memo writing in a tense, unstructured, busy and often loud and cramped environment.

Unequipped with the necessary meeting management skills, persuasive abilities and required “presence” enhancement, the uninitiated remain flummoxed and can't wait to get back to their own computer terminals and, “in quiet and seclusion” restate their case through e-mail and the obligatory PDF and Jpeg file attachments.

The Solution:

Manage this chaos by:

1. Managing the message. Poignancy versus blah! blah! – trying to make the audience submit through the sheer volume of content we can shower on them.
2. Managing priorities of message. Building one's case is only as practical as one has the audience's attention while doing so – therefore seek to reprioritize “critical content” in order to maintain group attention and interest.
3. Managing inattentiveness. Speaking louder has been a favorite fall back technique. Nothing could be further from practical in today's meeting room. Instead, manage a) beneficial relevance of content and b) how interesting you are making your delivery.

CONTINUE