Those who’ve been trained “the old way” in presentation skills now out of pure survival are requiring re-schooling, re-teaching and re-practicing with contemporary tools.

Here are some of the key components required to make it as a presenter in this 21st century.

Persuasive Communication Skills:

Fortunately, communication is still communication. Its delivery systems are the only real changes.

Lessons are taken from the theatre, the humanities, contemporary communication modeling, salesmanship, formats and styles of today’s most watched and highest rated shows and today’s “time starved” audiences.

It’s about how well you connect and not necessarily how much you say. It’s ensuring you get your point received not delivered.

Persuasive Organization Skills:

The Issues:

Audiences have no time to listen to anything other than the immediate answers to the questions they had walking into the meeting presentation. Groups in organizations listen to information differently (as do individuals within those groups); and if you can’t persuade, but only inform (the tell ‘em format) your contemporary audience quickly gets a case of the “I’ve no time for this drivel” syndrome.

The Solutions:

Learn how people listen and evaluate data;
Learn how to structure an argument (not to mean being argumentative) in such a fashion that it becomes “obvious” that the presenter’s P.O.V. (point of view) and recommendations are well evidenced and stand up to scrutiny.

To wit: the advent of the legal profession’s “Winning a Case” approach to organizing presentations has now been introduced for broad publication and use.

Presentation Aids:

For this, we started from scratch and discovered that going back as far as rolled cellophane overheads and slide projectors, the same mistakes were as relevant then as they are today. Albeit the mediums have made dramatic advances, messages are still messages.

Hollywood, Disney and Broadcast became our new teachers. After all, it’s what they do better than any “pundit” of the famous Power Point.

A simple illustration of this is PowerPoint where really the “point” is the power, not PowerPoint.

Your aid is just that – it aids you making the point, but unto itself, it should not make the point – that’s the presenter’s job.

Handling Objections and Tough Questions:

Fortunately, we’ve previously had much of this subject well researched, explored and conquered.

However, today “consensus” is what drives decision and action, unlike the McCarthy era of orders and commands.

But what’s the purpose of answering a question? Isn’t it to answer the question? Yet many of us take this as permission to sell and sell and sell. Don’t.

We also have the issue of manners. Yes manners!

Be aware that you are the audiences “host.” Act as one, even with those cantankerous few, and you will win the day.

The new format – Presentation Meetings™:

Formal, group, stand-up and staged presentations have dramatically given way to informal, sit down, un-staged group meetings.

However, the classic business purpose of both has remained the same. Inform for the purposes of persuasion to a P.O.V. or action.

Again, function remains, form has changed.

On the other hand they are quicker, livelier, less structured and most importantly, more critical in terms of what they must accomplish today.

The Solution:

Manage this chaos by:

Managing the message. Poignancy versus blah! blah! – trying to make the audience submit through the sheer volume of content we can shower on them.
Managing priorities of message. Building one’s case is only as practical as one has the audience’s attention while doing so – therefore seek to reprioritize “critical content” in order to maintain group attention and interest.
Managing inattentiveness. Speaking louder has been a favorite fall back technique. Nothing could be further from practical in today’s meeting room. Instead, manage a) beneficial relevance of content and b) how interesting you are making your delivery.

Learn more about Antoni Louw and Louws Management Corporation in our Contributor's section.