Presentation Planning - 5 Easy Ways to Streamline the Process

Practicing for presentations can waste more of your key personnel time then almost any other business activity. The possible exception being useless meetings! To maximize your planning efforts just follow these 5 easy steps. You will find that you can streamline the process and make Presentation Practice much more productive.

- There must be One Person in Charge. This person has responsibility for scheduling, coordinating and, perhaps most importantly, communicating with all of the presentation team members. Preferably this is a staff position working in Business Development who can be assigned the job. Never put a busy executive in charge of the day to day process.

- Select the Presentation Team Early. Be sure to determine who is required to be a presenter. Almost always the client wants to meet and hear from the people working directly on the project, not just the sales group.

- A detailed presentation schedule is mandatory. Everyone must understand what the plan is. At a minimum the schedule needs to show the following: Presentation date and time. Team practices and who needs to be present along with where and when practices will be held. A block of time needs to be allocated for preparing visual aids. They can be power point slides, presentation boards, handouts, leave behinds, or anything else that may need to be created for the presentation. The schedule needs to be distributed to all team members as quickly as possible to allow maximum time for individuals block out times in their personal schedules.

- When practices are scheduled everyone must be prepared to practice. This sounds redundant but I can't tell you how often I have heard people complain over what a waste of time a practice session was. Having a room full of people waiting for someone to finish the power point presentation slides is not where you want to be.

- Communicate everything pertaining to schedule with everyone as quickly as possible. Again, numerous times I have seen practice sessions rescheduled without letting everyone know. The result is always a conference room of senior staff with nothing to do! They didn't know the practice had been rescheduled.

Try these steps and you will be surprise at how much more productive your Presentation Planning will become.

Allen Jossim is a retired executive and freelance writer with much presentation and public speaking experience. Please go to his blog Public Speaking - You Can Do It! Where helpful information is always available.

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