Presenting at conferences and seminars offers an incredible opportunity to build pipeline for your business.

Where else do you get the opportunity to engage a room full of potential prospects?

In this situation selling can seem like the obvious thing to do.

To do so, however, would be a big mistake.

Although you’re likely under pressure to realise a return on the investment of your talk, in 99.9999% of cases, selling will deliver the exact opposite result.

No matter who you are or how well known, when you don’t give your audience what they came for, you risk turning them against you.

Just as David Bowie found out a few years ago.

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Picture this – you are sitting in a room. The lights are dimmed so you can see the screen that dominates the front of the room, even more clearly. The projector is humming ominously, hung like a sword of Damocles above your head or splitting the room down the middle.

A huddle of people are hunched over a computer trying to make the machine ‘speak’ to the projector and the USB key yield the information contained within its microscopic diodes.

There’s a hush as the screen flickers and the first of countless slides fills your vision.

Eventually the speaker starts to talk. 3 slides in you’re already confused by the morass of half discernible, bullet pointed, floated in, faded out and clip ‘arted’ information.

By slide 5 you start to lose the will to live and do what you always do when you’re bored, faced with a glimmering screen, in an over warm environment – fall asleep.

So who is really suffering death by PowerPoint?

Not the audience, they’re sleeping peacefully.

It’s the presenter.

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