You’ve scripted the perfect PowerPoint, assembled some magnificent imagery for your slides, and you’ve out the invites to your online presentation. The only thing you need to do now is show up and press start, right?
WRONG!
Online sales presentations are only effective if you’ve done your best to eliminate all potential issues you could encounter in the virtual conference room. We’ve all been looped into really bad online presentations, and they are more frustrating than informative. If you want to keep your audience from swearing at their computers or tablets for the duration of your presentation, here’s what you need to do:
- Know the equipment. The frustration begins when the presenter doesn’t know how to share a screen, mute callers, go back one slide, etc. Get off to a good start with a dry run.
- Buy a good microphone. If your audience can’t hear you, you’ve lost them. Just imagine your boss or client yelling at their screen, “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you!” Microphones are cheap. Inexpensive wired lapel mics start at around $7 on Amazon and wireless mics start around $15. They are worth every penny.
- Mute the audience members. It never fails. You get into a good rhythm and then someone with an open mic takes a phone call and everyone gets to hear, “Hey Doc. Yeah I can talk. So, were the test results normal?” At the beginning of the presentation, establish you will take questions at the end and then mute everyone.
- Stay on point. Your audience is busy, and their time is valuable. Every time you go off script, pause to take a bite of your sandwich (yes, this has happened), ask someone in the audience an unrelated question or anything else non-presentation related you are wasting time and losing credibility.
Technical issues aside, creating a presentation for a virtual audience is always a tough task, which is why we include this service for our Sales and Marketing clients. Want to give the best online presentations? Give us a chance to review and refresh your content, and follow the tips above.
