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March 2010 |
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To Win a Pitch,
Show How Much You Care. |
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Joey Asher
President's
Perspective |
There’s a saying among sales
people that goes, “No one cares how much you know until
they know how much you care.”
But
when you’re one of two or three firms delivering a
presentation for a big piece of business, I don’t think
it’s quite right. I think it should read, “In a beauty
contest, no one cares how much you know. They only want
to know how much you care.”
In
other words, when you’re on a short list competing for
an opportunity, your expertise is irrelevant.
Everything in that final presentation needs to be
focused on one thing: showing that you care about the
client.
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Negative Moods Might Make You a
Better Speaker. |
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It’s
been one of those weeks. You’re feeling low. You’re burned out.
You’re ready to give up and become a professional fisherman. And
you’re certainly not looking forward to giving that presentation
tomorrow to the board of directors.
At
least you can take heart in knowing that you may be about to give
the best presentation of your life.
That’s one surprising implication from a study published in the
Journal of Experimental Psychology.
According to the study, our ability to think and communicate clearly
actually increases when we’re in a negative mood. Apparently,
negative moods make our minds more attuned, more attentive, and
better able to communicate, says Prof. Joseph Forgas, of the
University of New South Wales.
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Is There a Code Against Smiling at Work? Sometimes It Seems that Way
and It’s Too Bad. |
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“There are some people who raise their upper lip so
high, or let the lower lip sag so much, that their teeth
are almost entirely visible. This is entirely contrary
to decorum, which forbids you to allow your teeth to be
uncovered, since nature gave us lips to conceal them.”
Those words are from a 1703 book entitled “The
Rules of Christian Decorum and Civility.” But to look at
the serious faces in corporate boardrooms today, you’d
think it was an excerpt from an employee handbook.
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Never Start Your
Presentation with an Apology! |
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“I’m
not accustomed to speaking. So please bear with me since I'm a
little nervous.”
Ugh!
Instead of starting your presentation with an apology, start with a
simple relevant statement that goes to the heart of your
message. For example, “Today, we’re going to focus on how to make
everyone here extremely rich with very little effort.”
Now
that’s a good beginning.
Apologies, on the other hand, make the audience nervous. Here’s what
goes through the listeners’ minds when they hear an apology at the
beginning of a presentation: “Oh no! This person is a terrible
presenter and I have to sit here and listen to this.”
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Why Do We Get Nervous When We
Speak? Maybe Public Speaking is an Unnatural Act. |
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Public speaking is the number one fear of the average person. It’s
a statistic that’s repeated constantly. But the question remains:
“Why?”
There
are plenty of psychologists that will give you a theory. But here’s
another thought. Could it be that we fear public speaking because
it is an unnatural act for the human species? Put another way, if
you look at the evidence, humans were not designed to stand in front
of large groups and speak. As a result, most of us feel
uncomfortable doing it.
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