Business Presentations - Conviction

If you want people to believe you, you have to belief yourself first.  You need to talk like you mean it. 

Leave out all those phrases like “I think….” and “Perhaps …”. Be more definite.

Instead of saying, “I think, if we worked together we could probably achieve our goal” say, “Together, we can achieve our goal. In fact, we can exceed it!”

I remember, when I was working for a large well-known software company, we had a very important product launch of a completely new suite of software.  As part of this launch we were staging a massive presentation for hundreds of existing customers and potential prospects.

It was so important that we hired a voice coach to preview all our presentations to ensure we were up to scratch.  I gave my presentation and was given a very positive assessment, except for one part where I had to talk about the multi-lingual capabilities of the software.  The coach asked me if I believed what I was saying.  I had to admit that it was the one aspect of the product suite that had not yet been implemented and that I had my doubts about how well it would perform.  She said that the doubt came across in my voice and that I either need to convince myself that it would work or leave that part out of the presentation.  So I went back and talked it through with the developers, learnt more about how they were going to achieve the support for multi-lingual operation and became convinced that it would work.  The presentation went off with out a hitch.

When it comes down to it, if you do not believe it yourself, you will never get others to believe it.

Was this helpful?

If this was helpful, why not buy the book "The A to Z of Effective Business Presentations"? It is full of lots more hints tips and trade secret and you could be reading it in just minutes from now.

Or subscribe to our regular newsletter all about giving effective presentations.