Persuasive speeches are quite difficult to master since they’re supposed to encourage the audience to take action and agree or disagree with a specific viewpoint.
But with the right approach, you can create a persuasive speech that’ll leave a skeptical audience enthusiastic to get on board with your company’s project.
What is a Persuasive Presentation?
What is persuasive speech?
A persuasive speech or presentation features a presenter who is trying to influence the audience or prospect to agree with the points they are covering.
Persuasive presentations rely on spoken words, visual aids, facts, logic, empathy, story-telling, and more to help the audience accept new information and take action.
How to Plan a Persuasive Presentation
Not sure how to persuade an audience?
Here are 5 ways you can create an effective presentation to persuade your audience:
Decide on a Single Task
Before you start creating your presentation, think about the key point you want to get across. A persuasive presentation is centered around one easy-to-understand focal point. Focusing on too many things could result in the audience losing interest, getting confused, or rejecting the entire thing.
Focus on Fewer (but more relevant) Facts
Ensure the message you’re trying to get across resonates with the audience. You can do this by doing comprehensive research on the audience and finding out how your company’s product or service can solve their problems.
While presenting, ensure you empathize with the audience and keep their unique concerns in mind.
Build a Narrative Around Your Evidence
A successful presentation tugs at the heart strings of the audience.
What do we mean?
It’s not enough to just win over the audience’s brain – you need to get their hearts in it too! Fortunately, you can connect with your audience easily by sharing a personal story related to your organization and its product or service and by speaking passionately.
Your audience is only human and a little bit of emotion can help them connect with your company and the value it provides.
Confidence Matters
Before the big day, ensure you’ve practiced your presentation a couple of times. This includes familiarizing yourself with the speech and visual components that’ll aid your presentation.
Rehearsing your speech can help you deliver a smooth and confident presentation to the audience. This is crucial since you don’t want to end up pausing a lot or saying “um” way too many times while presenting!
But remember not to memorize the entire thing – you don’t want to sound robotic. So, ensure you familiarize yourself with the entire presentation enough to deliver organically on the day.
Prepare for Common Objections
While preparing for your presentation, ensure you consider what concerns or objections the audience might have. After all, you don’t want to end up saying “I’m not sure” or “let me get back to you” when a prospect asks you an important question. Not knowing the answers to crucial questions can make the audience think that you’re unprepared or unconfident in your product or service.
As a result, you need to research the topic of your presentation thoroughly and prepare for common and uncommon questions or objections your stakeholders might pose. This way, you can deliver an incredibly convincing and solid presentation.
If you want to learn more about creating and delivering a persuasive speech, visit the Corporate Class website today.
We offer a Course and Lunch and Learn on presentation skills. In this 1-day experiential presentation skills training workshop, you’ll receive training from expert facilitators who will equip you with the skills, tools, and practice you need to hone your business communication skills.
Participants will learn how to persuade an audience, convey leadership and authority, and deliver a professional presentation.
Contact us today to learn how to deliver a persuasive speech.