Why buy this book?

In business today, very little time is available to prepare for a presentation.

It’s real. The call to present with one hour’s notice. Being told to use other people’s slides, sometimes more than one person. Your workload being so heavy it’s impossible to prepare for a presentation on top of it.

Add to this the human factor; we procrastinate with the time we do have. We begin to panic when we have time to think about our presentation and we go into self-protection mode. This self-focus causes us to think only of our own agenda, forgetting we have an audience we need to communicate to, persuade and influence.

Finally, and I believe worst of all, when we overcome all these hurdles and we start preparing, we have only an outdated presentation approach to help us. We don’t know any other way but to open a laptop and start writing slides. We are not equipped with a methodology and framework to help simplify our message and have impact. A methodology and framework to take our expertise, tailor it, shape it and edit it. A framework to talk about what we do in an impactful and meaningful way to our audience, to talk about what the audience cares about at the right time, in the right way.

And it doesn’t end there. There is one final layer to all this. The world has changed. We now live in a digital age. Not only do we have to present, we have to present globally, virtually and with cultural intelligence. We have to present to people in different countries and times zones, thousands of miles away, who we cannot necessarily see and persuade them to engage with us.

These are the real challenges we all face every day and they create real problems for individuals and businesses such as:

1. Presenters who are overwhelmed with information
2. Audiences who need to be re-educated multiple times
3. Bottom line impacts such as wasted time and money/longer sales cycles/misunderstandings and damaged reputations

The approach of using slides alone to prepare a presentation is simply not good enough anymore. It doesn’t work. I want to offer you a new and different presentation approach.

This approach is based on the professional presentation secrets I learned while I worked as a television presenter for MTV and the BBC. In these roles I presented to over 3 million people at any one time and my sole purpose was to keep them engaged. I want to share with you the approach I took to do this.

The approach is called Audience Focused Presenting.