Today’s Guest Post comes from Lisa Sasevich, a coach who specializes in developing speaking skills for promotion. Her remarks are directed to marketing presentations but they apply to a wide variety of situations.
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Save the Show! What to Do When the Unthinkable Happens During Your Presentation
numbers you can bank onIt’s inevitable. At some point during your speaking career, no matter how carefully you prepare, something will go wrong.
The equipment may fail; the well-known speaker sharing the stage with you may not show up; someone may step in with a tweak to the event that hurts your sales.
You may not be able to prevent the unthinkable from happening, but there are ways to salvage the event, perhaps even turn the mishap into a plus. Here are seven secrets to save the show:
1. First, Be Prepared Use your checklists and prepare for the mishaps that commonly occur. For instance, bring your laptop in case there are problems with the A/V equipment; bring an extra copy of your introduction in case the host has lost yours; if you’re shipping product, carry a few with you in case your shipment doesn’t arrive. Those kinds of problems are more predictable and, with preparation, you can prevent them from ruining your event. (Become my Fan on Facebook and you can download my Invisible Close Speaking Gig Pre-event/Packing Checklist for free! You’ll find it under the Fan Bonus tab.)
2. Breathe If something does go wrong, remember to breathe. Take a few deep breaths to calm yourself before you do anything else. Much better to respond than to react.
3. Don’t Lose Confidence If you experience a mishap, don’t take it personally. Problems happen to the best of us. Keep your cool and tell yourself that everything will turn out all right. If you can keep your head clear while you look for solutions, you’ll be sure to find them faster.
4. Pray While you’re seeking solutions, don’t forget to ask for help from a higher power. You may be surprised by how quickly an answer appears. (I do this ALL the time!)
5. Maintain a Sense of Humor When things go wrong, the audience is feeling for you, so if you’re distressed, they will be too. If you can find the humor in the situation, and even joke about it, you will not only put yourself and your audience at ease, but, seeing how well you handle stressful situations, they will like and trust you even more than if everything had gone well!
6. Don’t Panic and Throw Out Your Plan You’ve thought long and hard about what you’re going to do, so don’t let a last-minute disruption make you throw the baby out with the bath water. During a book tour, an author I know had only a few people show up at an event. Rather than focusing on the people who had attended, she became upset at the “poor” turnout and assumed that her talk wouldn’t work in an intimate setting. The trouble was, she didn’t have a Plan B. She fumbled her way through, panicking inside. Finally, she went back to her outline and got herself back on track, realizing that small tweaks to her presentation as she went along were sufficient. She salvaged the event (including hitting her usual sales conversion rate of 50%) and, on to #7, learned several lessons.
7. Learn Those Lessons Don’t beat yourself up; milk the mishap for lessons. Sometimes when things go wrong, there isn’t a happy ending. A person with authority might step in and make a decision that truly wrecks your sales and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You lose money, but you can look for the lessons in the experience. One of them might be to negotiate better up front next time and state certain conditions in your contract that you need in order to attend. For example, if you plan to make an offer when speaking, make sure there is a 20-minute break after you speak and that, aside from announcing what time they should return from the break, no one is speaking between you and that break.
The bottom line: no matter how carefully we prepare, we can’t protect ourselves from every contingency. Our job is to learn how to flow with the things that go wrong; if possible, prevent them from happening again; and look for the gifts of insight and learning.
If nothing else, our setbacks make memorable stories that help others avoid the same fate. How have you “saved the show”? What have you learned from things that have gone wrong during presentations? Let us know on our blog.
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Sales-from-the-podium expert Lisa Sasevich has x-ray vision for seeing the sales opportunities that exist in every company, and the creativity to convert them into gold! If you’re looking for simple, quick and easy ways to boost sales without spending a dime, get your FREE Sales Nuggets now at www.theinvisibleclose.com.
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– Cathy Goodwin, blog owner and your host for these guest posts