Watching Facebook for Business with John Jantsch, and watching Twitter for Business with Hubspot over lunch in the boardroom.

Social Media coaching - first 100 slots sold out but back in January http://ping.fm/8acrX

Getting set for our new role as Managing Director at Loyalist Training and Knowledge Centre.

What you must know to make all your presentations powerful, compelling and persuasive.

Business people often say the presentation of any concept or sales call is as important as the content, in some cases even more important.

So what are the ingredients of a successful presentation? What practical insights are there on how to improve your personal skills? What do you need to know to create presentations that get not only rave reviews, but also succeed in getting recommendations approved and vigorously supported?

In thirty years of teaching presentation effectiveness at one of Canada’s premier business schools, we’ve had a real life lab in what works, and what business owners, executives and sales people really need.

They told us they want a way to significantly reduce the time required to prepare a presentation. They want to know how to respond to challenges and objections from the audience; and, they want to stay in control of the situation and not have their meeting hijacked. And of course everyone wants to know how to control the nerves and fear of standing up to present.

This is a rich subject for discussion. Let’s start by looking at what we see are the biggest mistakes people make.

As a starting point, please realize that nobody wants to talk about your product or service! Your business is the most important thing to you, but your prospect’s or client’s business is the most important thing to them. A good rule of thumb is to talk a lot about them, and very little about you.

Your audience wants one thing only: “How is your product or service going to help me compete in a dynamic, cluttered and puzzling market?” So don’t tell them about how fast your widget processing speed is, tell them how much faster their product will get into customers’ hands and start pumping out cash.

Start your presentation with a promise of value. We feel so strongly about this we insist that all our clients begin their presentations with these exact words, “At the end of this meeting you will have…” Make it as relevant as you can.

A good trick is to find out what the audience’s biggest frustration is with your product or service category, and build a promise around solving it. You might say, “At the end of this meeting, you will have a proven solution to your inventory problem, which will increase stock turns by 14 percent.” Be focused. Be specific.

End your presentation with a clear request for meaningful action, and double your chances of getting a positive response by demonstrating that you have skin in the game too. This simply means that you will ask your audience to do something, and promise to do something meaningful in return.

Here’s how that might go: “Bob, I’m asking you to purchase twelve dozen of our gizmos for delivery by the end of the month, and in return I will provide our advanced training for the whole team a week before the stock is delivered.”

Simple rules that will make a real difference in how well your presentations and sales calls go: talk more about the customer than about your company; start with a promise; end with a clear “ask” and another promise.

Why does this work? Well, when we talk to heads of companies large and small, and ask them what bugs them most about sales calls and supplier presentations, they tell us (and very frankly I might add): people who don’t understand their business; lengthy meetings with no clear outcome or value proposition for them; and no commitment by the supplier to contribute to success.

There’s an old sales guy motto you might recall right about now: the customer is always right. In this situation, it’s worth paying attention to.

Business Owners: You just can't do it all yourself!

We're Duct Tape Marketing Coaches and we make our living by coaching business owners on how to market their businesses. When we work with a business owner, we get to see how they run their business and can help them by offering our observations—often on things that really are not marketing issues although they might affect the marketing.
Case in point: Yesterday, I was having a session with a business owner and giving him some findings of a telephone research project we conducted for him. We had spoken to a number of his clients and one thing that was coming through clearly was that there was a seeming lack of communication between the office and the project sites—this is a company involved in construction.
Clients told me that there were often scheduling problems and that the men on the front lines, at the job site, didn't seem to communicate with the office.
I asked the owner about this and he said that he didn't think the guys were giving him the right information when they called, if they called at all. I asked him how often he visited the sites and he replied that he went to once-a-week meetings.
Curious about this, but trying to be diplomatic, I asked, "What is keeping you so busy here at the office?"
He told me that since the bookkeeper had retired some months back, he had been doing a lot more paperwork and keeping track of the financials. As well, he had taken on a new software program that was intended to "streamline" the operations and he was busy learning it.
The result was, he was not able to get to the job sites as often as he used to and things had begun to get out of control.
I asked him how much he used to pay the bookkeeper per hour and he said it was about $11 per hour. I suddenly noticed a light go on in his eyes!
You see, you can't be doing work you could download for $11 per hour when as a business owner your time is worth so much more—the hourly rate this firm was charging for labor averaged about $55, never mind what the business owners time was worth.
I believe it was Bill Gates who said something like, "Do what you do best and delegate the rest."
If you try to do it all yourself you're not making the best use of your time and your business will suffer.

How a Business is Learning What Small Businesses Want to Learn

One of our favourite clients is a business training centre at a local college. For the past few months, we’ve been working with their team to find out what small business owners want most from training, and how they want to receive it.

We began by doing a telephone survey. It was illuminating to see how extremely satisfied the training centre’s clients are with the great customer service they get from the staff, and a bit daunting to think that we could help grow such a well-established business even more.

We could have asked a standard question like, “Is (subject) of interest to you?” or “Do you or your employees need training in anything?”, but our work with entrepreneurs has shown us that the answer to this question is usually “No. I don’t have time.”,

AO we ended up asking “What topics would be worth taking time off from your business to learn about?”

Small business owners told us they would indeed take time off work if they could learn: a better way to find new customers; stay ahead of their competition; and spend marketing money more effectively.

This was a great start. But these topics cover a lot of territory and the training centre wisely wanted to do further research to hone the new offerings. To do that, they decided to offer a series of free seminars to businesses in three separate regions, teaming up with partners in each area.

The seminars will be samplings of the broader courses they are considering offering at the centre. They will gauge interest in the topics via the number who enroll for the seminars, andcirculate a questionnaire to gather even more information. They will also ask for permission to continue sending information to participants.

The results should provide guidance on what courses to offer and what kind of businesses will be interested in each. Further, the seminars will kindle interest in training in those companies that participate.

Sampling is a standard strategy in package goods marketing. This project by a training centre shows how the same technique can be used to develop or improve a product and build new business.

Speak Up! Get out there and find an audience for what you do.

One of the greatest fears that people have is public speaking — people would rather deal with snakes, spiders even death rather than have to get up and speak to an audience.

It’s too bad because one of the best business building tactics is to demonstrate your knowledge to a receptive audience. It pays to be able to speak well in public and of course it helps if you have a little charm as well.

Public speaking is particularly effective if your business has a service or consulting component (actually if you are not selling services along with products you may be missing a high-margin bet). People like to be educated rather than sold, so if you are an expert in say, interior decorating or adventure tours, you could hold a seminar entitled “The Ten Interior Decorating Improvements that Increase Your Home’s Value Most” or “Planning an Adventure You’ll Remember for the Rest of Your Life.” Retail shop owners can offer in-store demos or hands on workshops like the ones you see at Home Depot and the other “big box” stores.

Naturally you won’t have time to provide all the secrets you have learned about your subject in these sessions; after all, this is your business and you don’t want to make yourself redundant. But if you carefully plan an interesting agenda that informs, educates, and whets the appetite of the attendees you’ll likely get some inquiries on using your services — not everyone wants to do-it-themselves!

And what’s more, you will have identified yourself to people who are obviously interested in what you provide, or why would they even come? If you want to make sure they’re the right people, identify who should attend. You could say something like, “This seminar is for you if you are thinking of selling your home in the next six months.” or “If you have never been on an adventure vacation, this is the seminar for you.”

But whatever you do, be sure to plan your program and do a few practice run throughs. You’ll need to see how much time it will take – count on it taking longer than planned. Make sure there’s a two-way communication with the audience; ask for questions from time to time.
Have some handouts like a sheet of “tips and tricks” insider techniques that you use to do what you do. Or give samples of your product.

If you’re going to do this more than one time, ask for feedback, hand out a survey form at the end to ask how you did or what could be added.

And if you’re really serious about building business, hold a draw for a small prize of some kind and in doing so, get everyone’s name and contact info. Put a check box on the entry form asking if they’d like more information from you. If they say “yes” you have permission to market to them in the future.

Public speaking can open a lot of doors. Try it and see.