Many people say that webinars and conference calls are no substitute for meetings and live presentations. In some respects, we agree – the power of a face to face interaction is unquestionable. Part of the reason, however, that people feel remote meetings and presentations are much less valuable is at least in part because they are executed so badly!
Be honest; How many times have you sat through a deathly dull webinar with 56 overloaded slides and a monotone presenter droning on and on…. Of course it’s only fair if you react by turning off your video/ muting your line and getting on with your emails with the droning going on in the background.
Archimedes have developed a programme to help overcome this.
Remote meeting and presentation skills are similar to those for face to face events but require adaptation. For example, your voice. In a normal meeting or presentation, you have to ensure your voice is audible and engaging but you also have your body language to help get your message across. Most people will be familiar with the research that suggests body language is responsible for about 50% of the message we receive and the words themselves only about 7-10%.
So, for virtual presentations, you have to work twice as hard with your voice to ensure you are clear and engaging. You need to be able to skilfully deploy your vocal pace, pitch and modulation. Typically, this is very different from day to day speaking and can feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Consequently, without proper training, people don’t do it and unfortunately, they end up sounding very dull and losing their audience.
As well as vocal skills, we typically look at:
- What good content and structure looks like and how it differs from F2F events
- How to handle the technology and avoid or mitigate against, the inevitable technical glitches
- How to leverage the functionality of popular platforms (e.g. Zoom, Skype, Go to meeting etc)
- How to keep your audience engaged (and stop them doing their emails!)
- Physical delivery skills for video calls/ webinars
- How to hand Q&As effectively (and what to do if no one asks questions!)
- Avoiding the top 10 pitfalls
We deliver these programmes remotely (of course!) and as well as Zoom we use coaching software to enable each participant to remotely practice their webinar delivery and get detailed, asynchronous feedback.
Patricia is a Certified Virtual Presenter, and once you have perfected your skills with us, we can support you to to gain your certification.
