Building a 30-Minute Speakers Bureau Presentation

As you no doubt know, writing a script for your 30-Minute Senior Connection Speakers Bureau Presentation is vewy vewy subjective. But if you are scared out of your mind and don't know where to start, here are some suggestions that can help you get a leg up on the task.

First off, stop thinking about GIVING the presentation, and start thinking about WRITING the presentation. Don't distract yourself from getting a quality message out because you are, as yet, undecided about your comfort level in giving the talk. That's like the cart before the horse. In reality, your comfort level in giving the talk comes from the quality of the script itself.

Just as in the design of the 30-Second Elevator and 5-Minute Parking Lot Speeches, there are certain mechanicals that need to be put in place.

First, your 30-Minute Presentation should be (wait for it!) about 30 minutes in length. For those of us in the Senior Goods & Services industry, that is not a lot of time to speak passionately about something as near and dear to us as an element of our job.

Second, your presentation is not to be a sales pitch for your company's goods or services. You have been asked to talk as a Guru in your field, and need to put together an educational presentation that will inform your potential clients and make them better, more knowledgeable consumers.

What you will be doing is offering your potential clients an opportunity to establish a relationship with you, for them to test your sincerity, to get a sense of the synergy and decide whether Trust would be well-placed with you (and as an extension, your company).

A by-product is the Sales & Management  truism that once these potential clients have been given a chance to learn about you, statistically, your's will be the first phone number they dial when they finally need your assistance.

So, to add even more stress to your day, you now realize that not only does your presentation content have to be on the mark, but how it is presented will most likely decide whether a new client will be converted and sale (future or immediate) will be made.

But even with this expanded tasklist, the content of a presentation is not all that difficult to generate. Here's what I mean.

Start off with an introduction of yourself and your qualifications to be giving this presentation. This is about you, not about your company. Your company gets all of its shine from how well YOU do at connecting with your audience (your potential clients). These folks want to like you, give them every opportunity!

Pull together the top ten questions that you get from potential or actual clients that you deal with often. Let me guess, most of that list doesn't contain questions about  what your COMPANY does, but what your CLIENT needs, or needs to know. These are the same questions that your audience probably needs answers to. If you generalize the answers to these kind of questions, you probably have a pretty good start  in defining the major elements of the knowledge base of your profession.

It will also overrun your 30 minutes. So using this as a starting point, look at what folks need to know about some element of your profession and start a similar question/answer sheet for each element. Eventually, you will connect with the right set of questions and, ultimately, the right element to be the topic of your quality, germane presentation.

Sort all of the information that you have regarding this one element of your profession into some logical order (either timeline-oriented, or needs-based evolution, most/least needed ranking, etc). Assign a topic name to each of the logical divisions of the information.

Now you have to start whittling down your talk to fit in the 30 minute timeframe by looking at the priorities of the different topics and throwing out the ones of lesser importance (I know they are all IMPORTANT). Look for topics have limited general audience appeal (may be too selective a solution, or maybe too expensive a solution to identify with).

At this point you should be feeling like you are shushing down the ski slope of victory.

Time to sit down and write your script (even if you are not going to be reading word-for-word, but instead plan to speak extemporaneously from notes). This is in fact the only way to do an accurate timing of your presentation. Since the script is in written form, it is repeatable. Which means that edits to the script can be implemented and the results identified immediately - add words or thoughts to a short presentation, cut words or thoughts from a long presentation.

Adding thoughts is as painful as cutting thoughts. But the greater good has to be served - that of your message being absorbed by a motivated attendee group, not ignored by a fatigued group of listeners.

Now is the time to think about your conclusion.  You need to end your presentation as strongly as you started it. Here a lot of presentations fail because there is no Call To Action. Make sure that everyone knows how to get in touch with you, and how you would be personally delighted to hear from them.

Provide phone number, email address, best times to call, community you serve, your company name and address. Make sure you pass out your business card to every attendee - they may not need your services today, but who know what might happen to them tomorrow. Provide a handout of your presentation ( either complete outline or just the highlights, on which attendees can make notes.

See, you are already getting excited about getting started on your Presentation- what seemed so scary a few minutes ago, might actually get done.

Congratulations!