The Short Self-Promotion Business Speech

Continued from the previous page:
Making Your Speech Informative

Why You Shouldn't Use Your Business Speech as a Sales Pitch

George:
It's an important lesson for folks to learn. As long as you are a resource presenting information it’s a lot easier for people to relate to you and maybe visit the office as apposed to when you come on and use that opportunity to get up there and actually sell something and especially if you do a hard sell.

Patricia:
Yes, actually slipped into some of the presentations of some of my more high profile competition just to see what they were doing. The information level that they provided was very low and the sell factor was very high. So I tried to distinguish myself from them by being more of an educator and less of a salesman.

George:
Did you ever have someone walk in to your office and say I’m coming to you because you didn’t try to sell me something?

Patricia:
Yes I have had that experience. I’ve had people come in and say I heard your presentation and I heard Mr. So and So’s presentation and Ms. So and So’s presentation and I really preferred your presentation and how you do things.

George:
So that would be a bit of advice you’d offer to anybody who’s thinking of doing what you did is to keep it information-based and not sales-based I guess?

Patricia:
That would be correct. And I never discuss fees or things like that at a presentation. As a matter of fact I guess I went too far in that direction because it is something that I’ve been criticized for not mentioning that I actually do this work. So I try to make a point of doing that.

Another thing that is important is to do your research. You have to know your subject. You have to know more about it that anybody in the audience in order to have the credibility of the expert. You have to know who your audience is. Are the 50 year old gentlemen in the Kiwanis Club or is the Ladies Garden Club or are they in the PTA?

Each interest level is different and the stories they’re going to be interested in will be different.

George: 

Did you do much pre-program research on some of the folks. You did a lot of speeches in a relatively short period of time and one of the things I’m always preaching to people is: Find out as much about the group as you can because that helps you connect with them.

Did you have a chance to do that making so many speeches as you did?

Patricia: 

Oh well it’s not so very hard George. Quite often I would simply ask the program chair about how many people would be there, I need to know so I can bring an appropriate number of handouts. Approximately what age range are they in? You can ask these questions quite politely and people seem to be very happy to give you the answer and to me that’s the important thing to know. Is approximately what their age range maybe sometimes I’ll try to get ahead on economic circumstances because everybody needs a will and that includes people of modest circumstances as well as those that have more means. So, those kinds of questions seem to be fairly easy to get from the program chair. Sometimes you can get information from the organization books, the books that have the organizations and the descriptions of them and what their purposes are and that’s very helpful also. 

Next page: Audience Interaction in Your Business Speech