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Are poor presentations costing you business?

The ability to deliver a presentation to potential investors or clients is an essential skill for any budding entrepreneur, sales professional or consultant.

Whether it’s a ’15-second elevator pitch’ or a more extensive presentation, winning over and persuading audiences is vital in today’s competitive capital raising and sales environment.

Learning the art of making powerful and persuasive presentations in any business situation and you will win more work.

My premise is every start-up entrepreneur, seasoned business operator or consultant can win more business by being a better presenter.

Here are the Seven Deadly Sins of Business Presentations and How to Avoid Them.

1. Not Having a Clear Goal.

It is essential to know what the objective or end outcome of your presentation is. Is it to raise funds, educate and inform, build relationships, to sell or build credibility?

2. No Structure.

This is an absolute must for any presenter – at the very least have a beginning, middle and end. You may be the best presenter in the world with outstanding delivery skills but poor structure will lead to a poor presentation.

3. Not Connecting with Your Audience.

Building empathy and rapport with your audience is critical. Connect with them on three levels – head, heart and hip-pocket.

4. A Poor Beginning.

First impressions always matter. If you have to raise $8 million in 8 minutes, make every word count. I learnt this tip from attending Patricia Fripp’s speaking school recently and I think its brilliant. For business presentations she says avoid using ‘Thanks, its great to be here’ as your opener. She rightly points out you’ve just wasted 10 seconds. At a million dollars a minute that equates to nearly $167,000!

5. Too Much Content.

The cardinal sin of all business and technical presenters. In my media career, I estimate I have attended more than 300 conferences, events and seminars. That’s 1500 hours worth of presentations I’ve had to sit through and the most common mistake I’ve seen is presenters rush and overload the audience with too much content. Remember, presentations rely on the spoken word and the visual – use the written word and a handout to provide more detail.

6. The Presenter’s ‘I’s’ Are Too Close Together.

We all like to talk about ourselves. As a radio manager, I spent hours listening to and providing feedback to broadcasters. Those that really connected with their audience talked with them rather than at them. I observed they used the word ‘you’ a lot more than the word ‘I’. This led to the saying that with some presenters their ‘I’s’ were too close together! Here’s another great tip I learnt from Fripp. Record your presentation and have it transcribed. Every time you see the word ‘I’, cross it out and replace it with ‘you’. She calls this working on your ‘I-You Ratio’.

7. Poor Closer.
Again it is beginning and the end that is the most important part of any presentation. With your closer – what is the key message or action you want the audience to take away with them as they walk out the door? In business presentations the closer is often the ‘call to action’. When I heard Bill Clinton speak at a Fundraising event for sick children, his closer was ‘I want you to help’. Simple, direct and effective.

Here’s another tip I learnt from Fripp. If you want to take questions, take them before your closer, because ending on question time is a poor and weak way to end a presentation. Worse still, you are unlikely to be able to control the last question. Take questions for a set period before the end, wrap that section up and then end with a strong closer. I’ve already tried this on several audiences and it works a treat!

Despite similarly sounding names, there are huge differences between project and product development. These two concepts are often confused with one another that sometimes even experienced people in the field find it difficult to tell the difference. So, if you plan on hiring a developer for product or project development, it is imperative for you to conceptualize the difference between the two.

This is mainly because the process of selecting the right IT Company during development is of great importance. Therefore, if you make a mistake and hire the wrong company, it will directly result in the wastage of your efforts, time and money. That’s why in today’s article, you will learn more about the main differences between project and product development.

Project Development

The process of project development is usually carried out by a professional project manager who works closely with a product manager to create a successful product. However, please note that project managers are not a part of development process, but they are involved in the pre-development process. In simpler words, a project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique service or process that is developed by an organization for its own operational requirements.

Therefore, the process has nothing to do with product development, despite the fact it provides valuable information on what type of product has to be created. Additionally, a project is developed only for handling specific applications of an organization where look and feel of a product doesn’t matter, just the idea does. It is when a company wants to optimize its processes, but doesn’t want to waste money on purchase a ready-made tool that may or may not meet the exact requirements.

Product Development

Product development, also known as the ‘Stage-Gate’ process is when a product manager collaborates with other teams in order to ‘develop’ new innovations. Developing a product means creating something that a company intends to sell and generate revenues afterwards. It is strictly related to business and focuses on a wide range of consumer needs, wants and requirements. In fact, it has a whole life-cycle consisting of multiple stages.

The process begins right from the very conceptualization of the idea to developing all the architecture, drawings, designs of the products and then converting them into real, workable and sellable products. However, developing a product requires strong support and the assistance of professional product designers and industrial designers. Regardless, the entire process is carried out to develop a product with the intention of selling it in the marketplace to represent the image of a company.

Project Development vs. Product Development

• In project development, less maintenance is required, but product development requires high maintenance, strong support, and good financial resources.
• The development of a project requires long term testing, whereas project development involves limited tested.
• In project development, features and requirements are important, but the feel and look don’t carry much significance. However, product development is all about the look, feel and user-experience of a product.

• Product development is for selling and revenue generation where as project development is for a company’s own operational requirements.
• Product development is an ongoing investment that involves adding new features, but project development is only a onetime investment.

So, now that you are familiar with the factors mentioned above, determining the difference between project and product development won’t be a problem.

Affiliate products offer people the opportunity to make a commission by referring someone to buy a company’s product. This can be done online from the comfort of your own home.

Where to Find Affiliate Products

There are many affiliate programs on the Internet such as Click Bank and Amazon.com where people can find affiliate products to promote and make a commission. You can join either site for free to promote any of the products they have available.

Who Promotes Affiliate Products

Affiliate products can be promoted by people who enjoy blogging about a particular topic.

For example, someone who likes to blog about golf travel can find an e-book on how to improve your golf swing. People who golf are always looking for ways to improve their swing.

If they are on that site looking into golf travel and come across an e-book that could help them improve their golf swing, they can potentially buy the e-book and that affiliate makes a commission on the sale.

How Much do Affiliate Products Pay?

Commissions can be as low as 10% of the product price or as high as 75%. It all depends on how much the company wants to give back to their affiliates.

If you are looking to promote affiliate products to make a commission online, you’ll want to focus on the products that pay a higher commission especially if you want to do paid marketing.

Most companies out there allow people to become affiliates of their products for free. However, people are at a disadvantage when they don’t own the product. If they don’t own the product, they don’t know the benefits of that product. Not knowing about the product will make it difficult for them to sell it.

How to Promote and Make Money With Affiliate Products

The best way to promote affiliate products is to set up a blog. However, it will take you some time to set up a blog or you can pay someone to set it up for you. You will need a domain name, web hosting and security. You might even need to hire a graphic designer to make your blog look appealing.

To start getting traffic to your website, you will need to consistently blog on a daily basis and promote your blog posts through syndication. When making blog posts you will want to focus on particular subject and do keyword research to see what people are searching for so that your blog posts will show up on search engines.

It will take about 6 to 8 weeks before your blog posts are showing up on the search engines so don’t expect a lot of traffic right off the bat. Just understand that you need to keep blogging and eventually you’ll start getting traffic and having people buy the affiliate products that you promote.

How to Make Money Right Away With Affiliate Products

If you are looking to start making money right away, then you might want to do some paid advertising such as Google pay per click (PPC) or Facebook PPC. However you will want to learn how PPC works or else it will suck you dry.

Another thing that you can do if you don’t have money to promote your products is to submit your blog posts to several article directories such as EzineArticles or Go Articles and link it back to your blog.

There are many people who search article directories for what you have to write about. People will find your articles before they find your blog on the search engines.