I sat in on a webinar recently and was once again reminded that people who know their subject aren’t necessarily the best presenters. It wasn’t – I hasten to add – a typical Learning and Development session; it was a session for entrepreneurs to learn about a facet of developing their business.

The speaker knew their subject well but didn’t deliver it in the best way to sell his message or his organisation. A few of the noticeable points:

• Too much content. Trying to stick 3 discrete topics into a 30 minute session was too much.
• No slides summarising their work. They resorted to copying and pasting in links to the chat from a live demo.
• Chat failure. They asked the audience to use the chat and ended up with dozens and dozens of messages they couldn’t read through, only picking up the last comments in the chat, skewing their approach.
• Lack of control. Someone in the chat disagreed with the premise of the session and spammed the chat with messages promoting their own products and services.
• Poor time management. With 30 minutes you need to be crisp in your delivery. This session over-ran, had no time for questions, and ended suddenly.

These are a new set of skills that many people have assumed they have because they can speak on Zoom/Teams etc. They need time and space to practice and work through.

How good are you at selling your approaches? Let me know in the comments.