Creating and hosting business meetings and presentations is one of those overlooked business skills that many people don’t really think about but, if the right amount of attention is implemented, these presentations can become so much more efficient and can really benefit your business in ways you never thought was possible.
In this post, we’ll explore nine ways to enhance your business meetings and presentations, ensuring you actually benefit your meetings and presentations in an entertaining, engaging and informative manner.
Keep to the Facts
When you’re in your meeting, it’s important to remember that everybody has work to do and 99% of your meeting’s attendees don’t actually want to be there. Many will be seen playing on their phones or staring out the windows.
However, by only including the information you need to include, you’ll help to give your team all the information they need in an easily digestible format. You’ll also help to keep your audience’s attention since meeting durations will drop dramatically.
Prioritize Your Information
Your meeting’s attendees will pay the most attention to your meeting at the beginning, and they’ll start to lose focus as it processes. This means you need to lead with the most important bit of information first. This means you’ll need to plan the structure of your meeting and prioritize which order you are going to convey the points you want to talk about.
Kenneth Hynes, a speechwriter for Essay Help, continues:
“When writing a speech for your meeting, the best way to plan is by writing down how many points you have and then prioritising them. Number one is the most important, ten being the least. Then write notes about each one that can refresh your memory, rather than just reading off the piece of paper.”
Use Presentations as a Guide
A lot of meeting leaders these days will simply show a PowerPoint presentation and will read what’s on the screen. If you’re doing this, you don’t need to be there as everybody can read the presentation.
Instead, use the presentation as a guide and only include the important information that you want to convey to your audience. At a max, you want to display three sentences of text per slide with your voice filling in the rest of the information.
Create Custom Presentations
Let’s say you work in a factory. You may have the people that operate machines in our factory, and you may have office staff. These are two completely different types of people, so if you’re trying to convey the same information to both groups, you’re going to want different presentations for each. This will help you to effectively convey your information, tailored to what works best for those people.
Pay Attention to Your Body Language
Whether you’re having a meeting or a presentation, your body language says a lot about you. Make sure you use eye contact when you’re speaking to people, mind what your hands are doing and be aware of your facial expressions. If you’re slouching or propping yourself up on a desk looking bored and tired, imagine how your audience feels.
Michael Williams, a business developer for Paper Fellows, states:
“It’s actually surprising how much people pick up on our body language without even realising. When hosting a meeting, stand tall with your back straight and continuously look around the room making eye contact with different people. Make sure they know that you’re aware of them being in the room and actually talking to them.”
Perfect Your Presentations
As you go through your meetings, if you’re using presentation slides that are full of errors, spelling mistakes and other forms of silly mistakes, you’re going to lose your audience’s attention fast, risk miscommunication and you just look unprofessional.
This means you’ll need to proofread and edit your slides, so they are perfect. You can use online tools such as Word Counter to make sure your slides don’t exceed the maximum recommended work count and services like Academized to proofread your slides on your behalf.
Furthermore, you can improve the readability of your slides by checking the grammar and punctuation of your writing and text. You can brush up on your writing knowledge using resources such as State of Writing and Via Writing.
Don’t Risk Poor Quality Slides
If you’re going through your presentation and you’re using poor images, poorly structured sentences and the slides simply look low-quality, you’re going to quickly lose your audience’s attention as they’ll simply think that you haven’t put a lot of effort in.
If you don’t have time to make high-quality presentation slides yourself, head over to online services such as Essay Roo or UKwritings where you can have a professional create superior presentations on your behalf.
Practice Before Your Meeting
You may have an image of somebody standing in front of the mirror at home trying to practice their presentation, but this is exactly what you should be doing. Practice your meeting in your own time before every meeting, and you’ll be so much more confident when the actual meeting arrives.
Confidence Is Key
How you convey yourself to your audience is the most important aspect of any meeting. If you seem nervous, awkward or have no energy and enthusiasm when you speak, your audience is going to notice this instantly, and it will ruin your meeting. From start to finish, you need to ooze confidence and energy in every word that you say.
Mary Walton is a blogger at Simple Grad, educational website about college life (read one of her posts: Essay roo review). Also, she is a tutor at Australian Assignment Help service. Mary wrote her PhD a couple of years ago, and now she helps students at Dissertation Writing Service by proofreading thesis.
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