1) Send them an insight – a podcast link, an article about their industry.

2) Give them someone new to listen to – a conference call with your Managing Director, or an audience with your Client Services Manager.  Someone fresh or new always stokes the embers.

3) Buy them a book. Seriously.  A book is such a wonderful, personal thing to buy someone.  It will cost you next to nothing to make them feel great.  Start with the business section on Amazon and see if you can find something in their interest area.

4) Ask them to feature in your newsletter.  Interview them.  Send it to your marketing or PR person.

5) Organise a conference call or webex with one of your current customers, and have your prospective customers all log in to listen to their experiences. 

6)  Put on a lunch, or after dinner drinks, or a site tour at your premises.  Invite them along.  Everyone is busy these days, but equally it’s nice to get out of the office for an hour or so to clear the mind!  Get them reinvigorated again!

7)  Rather than just send a proposal and hope they read it, conduct a read-through.  Again this can be done on a conference call or a webex.  As each relevant department from your company is mentioned in your proposal, maybe that could be read out by an actual representative from that department?

This is an excerpt from our acclaimed e-book called Heat:  Why Customers Buy from You – And Why They Don’t. To download your free copy click here.

In our sales training we will help you to keep the heat in the sale for all of your clients with our natural philosophies and strategies.  Give us a call on 020 7613 7830 to find out more.

 Here’s a short checklist to help:

1. Is the time right…

… in your industry or market sector?

Can you see a hot new area where you could work on something innovative and accomplish something particular? You will achieve a higher profile as a leader if you make a distinctive success on a niche project. Big Fish/Small Pond gets you ready for bigger ponds in future.

… in your company?

Is your company in need of new leaders? Sharp pruning often means that new shoots can develop, so company downsizing and growth can present opportunities. Does your organisation need your kind of leadership – are they open to innovative approaches or needing the security of a safe pair of hands?

… in your career?

What risk do you see when assessing whether to seize the leadership opportunity:

A) It’s High Risk, but you have to take it in order to move onwards;

B) It’s Medium Risk, looks attractive – but maybe you could wait to see if there’s a better time;

C) It’s Low Risk, a natural progression for you.

2.  Be Prepared!

Ensure that when the opportunity to lead is indeed something you want, you are ready to act.  Consider the following points:

- Examine your past.

Consider what relevant experience is evidence of your leadership capabilities. Think too about the mental baggage that you have accumulated – past failures, dashed hopes, others’ expectations and so on. See what you can drop right now and work on how you can use the rest in a useful way, to spur you on.

- Assess the present.

Use a SWOT analysis to help check your assumptions. Different people will be very bullish about the Opportunity and ignore the Threat, or vice versa. Either way, being unrealistic will harm your chances of success.  Re-check your assumptions to assess the “now”!

- Look into your crystal ball.

What do you want to see in there? When you are a successful leader, what will you be doing, where, how, with whom, saying and hearing what? If you create that vision, then you can specify objectives, set out your route-map, see any gaps. What are you doing to prepare yourself?

3. Go for it!

Your instincts have been put to the test by your thinking. Leadership is in your nature but it still needs nurture.

- Get training and/or coaching to help transition into your new role. You will have new peers, bosses and reports to deal with and you need good skills and effective leadership behaviours.

- Communicate well to all your stakeholders. This improves your chances of success by creating positive perceptions of you and your team. Let people know what you are working on, for which client and do share lessons learnt and success stories.

- Keep thinking ahead. Stay proactive with your leadership of yourself and others. And before making any more big decisions, tap into those instincts – they’re essential!

At Natural Training we coach leaders of the future, like you.   Give us a call at Natural Training if you would like some leadership development and coaching and we’ll be pleased to help.

Everyone’s got their view on what Leadership is. That’s why there are shelves of books, hundreds of training programmes and dozens of gurus all vying for the time and money of business executives.

Fortunately, I’ve come up with a quick and cheap view of my own: there are Leaders and there are leaders. Upper- and lower-case leadership is important but I believe you can’t be a true Leader unless you have spent time as a leader first.

Let me explain.

The Big L Leadership is earned, awarded or conferred. It arrives because others want you to have it (though you probably wanted it too). And ultimately it is about them, the others; it’s not about you but your followers. This Leadership involves rank or status, recognition and reward, power and authority over other people. There will be expectations; decisions to be made that will affect many; and judgement by the results delivered.

Nobody said this is easy, so what a Leader needs to possess is both character and capabilities. I believe that these are developed when one is a lower-case leader, without formal followers, status or outside expectations. This is a long-term process that often begins at school – and for many it continues throughout life.

Anyone can keep working on their own capabilities and character, in order to manage themselves better in their life and develop the attributes that Leadership will demand. We are all capable of working on our self-discipline, persistence and awareness of our choices. We can each decide for ourselves to do the right thing and be comfortable being different. We can develop our courage, we can learn from feedback and adapt our everyday behaviour and we can even (with practice) acknowledge our weaknesses.

Small l leadership is about personal responsibility and decisions that may affect only you, but it is about developing the best You that You can be. And unlike Leadership, leadership is available to all of us.

 © Hilary Fraser

Here are some tips to help you bring more of yourself to your presentations. Check how you are being, as well as what you are doing.

A – Alive and Aware of your Audience
U – Unpretentious and Unaffected in your manner
T – True to your self and your audience
H – Happy to be here with them
E – Evidence to back up your points and Examples to illustrate
N – Natural in your delivery. Note: this takes rehearsal.
T – Theme for engaging the audience and Transparently clear messages
I – Interesting and Impactful, otherwise why show up?
C – Coherent, Concise, Clear

  © Hilary Fraser

Imagine you’re giving a presentation to 10 people in a boardroom.

You pause for a moment, look at the audience and there’s a sea of blank faces looking back at you.

Worse still, there are two people yawning, a few people planning their next holiday, and one who’s just nipped out to the bathroom.

If you feel you need to add some life to blank faces, you’re not alone.

One of the top reasons people want our help with presentation skills training is because they feel that they need more audience engagement.

Here’s a recent comment from a pre-workshop questionairre: “I feel that my weekly team update presentation wastes everyones time. People rarely have anything to say, and look as though they would rather be anywhere else but listening to me”.

So how do you overcome the sea of blank faces?  It is about three key things:

1.  Increase relevancy

2.  Audience engagement

3.  Resist padding

1.  Increase relevancy

Failure to be empathetic with audience needs is a sure way to achieve total boredom.

The way to overcome this is to imagine yourself in the audience, and then maximise the the relevancy of your content.

Try this simple exercise, suggested by John Forde as an antidote for copywriters who need focus:

It’s called the Margin Mantra. Print out your presentation, and in the margin, or somewhere on every page, write the theme of your presentation, perhaps as a question that needs to be answered, such as “How do we increase revenue in July?”

The Margin Mantra serves as a constant reminder that if you’re straying from the subject, your audience will probably be similarly straying from your presentation.

Seth Godin agrees, suggesting writers stay relevant by “killing your children”. This means that even those sentences and slides most dear to you have to go if they don’t fit in.

Another technique to help stay focused is to be the Google for your audience. 

Google is highly effective at delivering information based on relevancy, and you should do this too.

Imagine that your audience has put in a search term on the information that interests them, and deliver just on that.

Save the rest for a later search.

Your audience will be much more attentive, and you will avoid those blank faces!

3.  Audience Engagement

In order to engage your audiences, it is useful to understand the difference between direct and indirect audience involvement.

Direct involvement is when you want to elicit a response from the audience, such as asking them a question.

This aspect of audience involvement can work well, but it also puts you in the position of potentially losing control with difficult audience members wanting to dominate the presentation.

This happened in a presentation I gave to The Met Police a few years ago. I asked the audience a direct question, which the person from marketing took as a 15 minute invitation to recall in infinite detail his vast career experience.

To avoid similar situations, yet still bring colour to blank faces, indirect audience involvement is the preferred option in many cases.

You can do this by asking rhetorical questions (“So what happens if we do this?”…and answer it anyway), language such as “you may be thinking…”, and by asking the audience to imagine a particular scenario, which puts them right in the moment.

3.  Resist padding!

Some presenters, when given an hour slot, go on to deliver a presentation that fills in exactly that time, padding it out with all sorts of extra stuff.

Padding = blank faces.

I think if you are given a time allocation that is much more than you want or need, then you should challenge the agenda organiser, and tell them that you would rather speak for just the time it takes to deliver your message.

Much better than filling in an allocated time just for the sake of it.

If you can get your message across in 5 or 10 minutes, and it is relevant and punchy, then the audience will appreciate you far more than the next presenter who pads out her presentation for an hour.

Tip: If you must fill out the allocated time, invite questions and ask the audience at the end what part of the presentation they would like to hear more about – then concentrate on those bits.

I’m sure you have your own techniques for avoiding blank faces in your presentations – give me a call at Natural Training and let me know, or simply respond to this blog!