4 Tips for a Successful Presentation

Business meetings and presentations can be boring. But they don’t have to be. Learn 4 ways to make your presentation more effective and more interesting. It’s not all about English; a good presentation needs preparation, confidence, and a smile. Watch the video to see how to get the most out of your next presentation. Then test your understanding with the quiz: https://www.engvid.com/4-tips-for-a-s... Check out my writing channel, ‪@WritetotheTop‬ ! More of my videos about business English: How to speak professionally and politely    • Polite & Professional English: How to soft...   Negotiation vocabulary    • Professional & Business English: Negotiati...   In this lesson: 0:00 4 Tips for Better Presentations 0:43 1. Know your material 4:35 2. Consider your audience 8:22 3. K.I.S.S. 11:53 4. Are you alive? 16:20 Know yourself! TRANSCRIPT: Hi, everybody. Welcome to www.engvid.com. I'm Adam. In today's video, I want to share with you some tips for giving a presentation. Now, I'm going to focus a little bit more with a mind to business, and I'm going to think more about non-native English speakers. However, all of these tips can generally apply to any situation, in business or out of business, and this applies to both non-native speakers and native speakers, because a lot of the tips you're going to see here are just fundamental to a good presentation. Non-native English speakers will have to work at it a little bit more to make sure that they present something clear and enjoyable to the audience. So, the first thing I'm going to mention is that you should know your material inside out. What does inside out mean? It means completely. There's nothing in your presentation or your slides or anything that you're going to do that you don't know about, that you're not familiar with or comfortable with. So, the reason you want to make sure you know everything, you're ready for anything is to avoid surprises. Don't look through your notes or slides and realize, "Oh wait, I made a mistake there. It's too late to fix it in the meeting, in the presentation." Make sure everything is taken care of before, and you want to avoid gaffes, making a gaffe. A gaffe essentially is a mistake, but a little bit different from a mistake, a gaffe is an embarrassing mistake. So, if you say something and it's - everybody understands that this is wrong information, or if you say one thing and then two minutes later you say the opposite thing, that could be very embarrassing. If you've prepared everything, if you know every single word and every single slide and every single statistic from beginning to end, you will avoid these kinds of gaffes. Also, make sure that you practice your delivery - oh, this is a good word, actually - a presentation is delivered. Make sure you practice your delivery a few times. One reason is to get the nerves out, so you're not too nervous. Another one is to make sure that it sounds as good as it looks on paper, because how a presentation appears on paper and how it sounds spoken out might not necessarily be the same. So, make sure you practice saying it. Also, the more you say it, the less you will actually stand in front of your audience and read your notes. The key is not to read a presentation, the key is to deliver one, face to face, eye to eye, which I'll talk about more in a moment. If possible, get feedback. Now, if you're giving a presentation in a company and you have co-workers, obviously you have feedback. If you're self-employed and you're making a sales pitch to a company, find somebody who will come and listen to you give your presentation. Make sure it's somebody you trust. And make sure that the person who is listening to you and giving you feedback is not too nice to you. You don't want a friend to come and say, "Oh yeah, that was great, you're going to do great." You want somebody to come and tell you, "Okay, this was not so good, this was not so good, you should try doing this and that." You want real feedback, not nice feedback. It doesn't help you to get nice feedback. If you're... Especially for non-native English speakers, identify trouble words or terms. Sometimes you're going to have to use maybe technical language or like a complicated word that's specific to your topic. Make sure you know how to say it properly. Okay? I've helped some people make... Prepare for presentations, and there's always one or two words that they just can't pronounce properly. So, I work with them a few times, get them to say it properly, and then everything smoothens out. Now, the reason you do all of this, and the reason you get feedback, the reason you practice is because you want to build your confidence. The most effective sales technique is to show up confident. It doesn't matter what you say, it doesn't matter what they see, it doesn't matter what they think of the product. They're looking at you, the person. Be confident, and they will trust your product, they will trust your ideas more because they believe you. […]