Marketing: Reaching Your Target

Every company works hard to get its products into the hands of customers. Are you doing everything you can to compete? In this course, you’ll find a winning formula to turn a product idea into real sales. Follow along through the fundamentals of the marketing mix and see how companies successfully bring products to market.

Delivering an effective presentation is a crucial skill for any professional. Whether you want to pitch an idea to your boss, inform customers about your products and services, or persuade coworkers to join your baseball team, you’ll need presentation skills.

However, preparing for and delivering a successful presentation can be daunting. You might be worried about your public speaking abilities, or not know the best way to get your key points across. Luckily, there are steps you can take to increase your chances of success.

Francis Fung is a career mindset coach at Sloane Japan and a professor at Temple University Japan Campus. With a wide range of career experience, he’s a pro at tailoring a message to a specific audience. His GLOBIS Unlimited course, Delivering Successful Presentations, explores how to prepare for a presentation that will capture your audience’s attention, deliver your message, and make everyone feel good about the outcome.

Below is a transcribed excerpt of his course with tips for effective presentations beyond the usual eye contact and body language.

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Transcript:

Write your presentation to your audience.

Francis Fung: So before making a presentation, you need to consider the following points.

  • Firstly, the purpose. Why are you even having that presentation?
  • Secondly, what do you want out of it?
  • And then, most importantly, the audience.

Before having the presentation, you need to research the audience. Now, what I mean by that is, you know who’s on the invite list, and you know who’s going to come. Or you may have had your reasons for inviting certain people. But you need to find out who is there, their role, and their responsibility.

Marketing: Reaching Your Target

Every company works hard to get its products into the hands of customers. Are you doing everything you can to compete? In this course, you’ll find a winning formula to turn a product idea into real sales. Follow along through the fundamentals of the marketing mix and see how companies successfully bring products to market.

What do you want them to be there for? To be educated? Or do you want them to make a decision? Do you need them to be there so they can relay information back to the decision-makers?

Make it your job to find out who’s attending and why.

Do introductions in the meeting.

Fung: If you can’t find information about the audience in advance, then there’s no other way except to introduce at the meeting.

You can take a few minutes to just get to know one another. “Hey, there are some faces we’ve never seen! Why don’t we introduce from our side first?” And you can, do self-introductions, which then makes the other side feel a bit easier about opening up and introducing who they are.

It also makes it easier for you to ask, “How about yourself? Who’s on the call?” and find out how you can help them.

Stay focused on the decision-makers.

Fung: Everyone feels, “I’m there to make a presentation. I’m there to tell people what I want them to know. I’m here to present. I’m here to sell a point. I’m here to pitch.”

But what a lot of people forget is that the audience is the decision-maker. If they don’t understand what you’re selling, presenting, or talking about, they can‘t make the decision.

And you’re there for a purpose: to present to them. They should be the most important thing. If you don’t keep them in mind, you’re just gonna be talking.

People will not be listening. They won’t be focused. They’ll be disinterested. You’ll basically be wasting everyone’s time if you don’t focus on what the audience needs.

So when presenting to different audiences, you have to bear in mind that what you’re saying is not a one-size-fits-all. You have to tailor your message, or your language, or sometimes your explanations to suit whoever it is that you’re talking to at the time. Their knowledge might vary.

Remember to ask questions in advance.

For a lot of us, presentations are, “This is the chance for me to present, for me to tell you everything that we need to tell you. And you can ask questions at the end.”

But usually, this runs a risk of you spending all your time presenting, and you didn’t even cover what they really wanted to know in your presentation. We may have presented for a few hours, but we didn’t really cover the exact points that the other side needed. It may be simple questions about budget. Or procurement needs to know certain things about when you’re gonna do this, or why you’re doing this, but we’re just talking about creative, for example.

So gathering questions in advance, I feel, always helps. If there are no questions, great! But at least you’ve given the other side the opportunity to tell you what they want to know.

This makes it more beneficial and valuable for everyone attending.

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