A presentation is a great way to deliver your key business messages to customers, staff or investors. We highlight ten ways you can improve your skills to make your presentations more effective.
Presentations are an increasingly important form of communication for anyone running a business. Many people find speaking in front of any kind of group a daunting prospect, but with a little preparation, giving a presentation can be one of the easiest and most efficient ways of getting your message across.
The main thing to get right is the most obvious—you need to be crystal clear in your mind what it is that you want to tell your audience. If you’re not 100 per cent clear about your message, you’ll have an uphill struggle to convince your listeners. You should be able to summarise your presentation in a few clear and simple sentences.
Once you’re clear about the substance of the presentation, you need to get the style of delivery right. Practice makes perfect, so rehearse your presentation as often as you can. If there’s a problem, don’t let a potential customer or investor be the first to point it out to you—family, friends and colleagues can be a great source of feedback here.
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Top Ten Tips – Improve your presentations
Your monthly at-a-glance answers to frequently asked questions. This month we look at employee illness and recent changes to the law.
Q: How should I deal with an employee returning after serious illness?
Your first concern should be the employee’s welfare, and you should make sure you handle the matter with the utmost sensitivity. Under disability discrimination regulations, you must make reasonable adjustments to facilitate the return to work of an employee with a serious illness such as cancer or multiple sclerosis. Talk the illness and its workplace implications through with the employee, and make sure any decisions you take are based on sound medical advice.
Q: What were the main law changes that took effect at the start of October?
October 1 is one of the government’s two “common commencement dates” on which most rule changes affecting small businesses come into force.
This year, the main changes introduced were:
- increases in the national minimum wage rates;
- an extension of the rights enjoyed by pregnant and adopting employees;
- a new prohibition of discrimination on grounds of age;
- the replacement of the old system of fire-safety certification with a new regime built around risk assessments.
Read a comprehensive list of recent legislation changes
Many small and medium-sized businesses are family businesses. But being family owned needn’t necessarily mean being family run — new research suggests there can be big benefits to bringing in an outside manager.
There are many advantages to running a family business. Strong commitment, shared values and a focus on long-term success are chief among them. There can also be short-term benefits, such as increased flexibility and a willingness of family members to work for less than market rates of pay.
But it’s not all positive news. There are downsides too, and an important one concerns the management of family businesses. Often the small circle of family members doesn’t provide a big enough pool of management talent to guarantee the continuing success of the business.
A recent research project studied more than 700 businesses and ranked them on a score of one to five according to how well managed they were. The average score for family-owned businesses was 3.2. However, break that average figure down and there are interesting patterns. For instance, family-owned businesses with an outside manager outperformed the rest, with a score of 3.6. By contrast, family businesses run by the eldest son performed more poorly than the rest, scoring only 2.9.
New research has confirmed once again what we all know to be true—having friendly and reliable customer-facing employees is a sure-fire route to increased sales.
It’s no surprise to hear that customers are more likely to buy from friendly and knowledgeable employees, but it may surprise you to hear just how big a difference the quality of your employees can make on sales performance.
According to new research carried out by customer-value specialist Connection, friendly, knowledgeable staff make customers nearly four times as likely to buy your product than they would otherwise be.
This result highlights the importance of getting your HR policies and practices right—bringing in people of high calibre and investing in training to ensure they make the greatest possible contribution to the success of your business.
The research also points to surprisingly poor results for a number of familiar marketing approaches. Introducing a loyalty card scheme actually reduces customer satisfaction from a benchmark average, while celebrity endorsements are reported to be deeply unpopular, scoring 58 percentage points below the benchmark.
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Recruitment
Recruitment and interviewing
Publicity is a crucial source of leads and sales for small and growing businesses, yet many make little effort in this area. But it’s too valuable an opportunity to let pass by.
There are many tasks involved in building a successful business, and juggling them all can be a challenge. But there’s no excuse for turning your back on potentially valuable sources of new business. Yet that’s what many small and medium-sized businesses seem to be doing when it comes to publicising themselves.
According to a survey conducted by The Buzz Factory, only 60 per cent of UK SMEs send out press releases in an active attempt to attract media coverage and the increased profile it entails. The remaining two-fifths can’t see the point in sending out press releases, or don’t feel that it’s a priority.
But they seem to be missing out, because 86 per cent of PR-active SMEs said that the publicity they had generated had been beneficial to their businesses. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but good PR comes close. Not every press release you send out will generate results, but those that do are like free advertising for your business.
If you think your business has been too publicity-shy, The Buzz Factory is running a competition to find the UK business that has let the most newsworthy story slip by without any media attention. For more details, visit www.publicityshybusiness.co.uk
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Effective PR