What do I mean by ‘dealing with objections’? Well, I mentioned this earlier when I was talking about how we get people to reduce their fear by creating great content that they know the audience is going to enjoy or love. You may remember the lady going to talk to a room of architects, where she went from a fear level of 8 down to 3 just through getting great content and dealing with the audience objections she thought she would face.

She was very, very scared. No confidence at all in her ability to deliver this presentation. And all we worked on was the content – making it more interesting and added the ‘in‐motion’ walk up start.

I also said we dealt with some objections she thought might exist within the audience about her and her presentation, and then all of a sudden she was a 3 out of 10 and we didn't even have to use any actual fear‐reduction techniques at all. A lot rested on the fact that her content wasn't there in a way that she thought would be interesting. Nor in a way that she thought she'd be able to remember it. She thought it was a boring presentation, so, therefore, the audience weren't going to enjoy it either. But a big thing for her too was that she felt that the audience would have objections to her presentation.

This female client was about 30 years old and was going to be presenting on a technical element of architecture. And she was going to be presenting to about 60–80 architects, they were going to be mainly male, and they were going to be around about 50 plus age‐wise.

She thought – and it doesn't matter whether this is true or not because what she thought was affecting how she felt and her confidence – that they'd be sitting there thinking negatively about her presentation along the lines of:

‘What does she know about architecture? She's not an architect and she's so young. What's she going to be able to teach us? What does she know?’

Therefore, she was worried that the audience wouldn't even engage with her presentation, they would dismiss it and her from the very start and not even give her a chance.

Now this is a problem that a lot of people have.

I've had people say things like:

• ‘I have to talk to many male audiences and I'm female.’
• ‘I have to talk to many females, I'm male.’
• ‘I'm really young and the audience is much older.’
• ‘I'm very old and the audience is much younger.’
• ‘I think the audience will find the topic boring.’
• ‘They will think they have heard all this before.’

And the answer to this is that you come up with an opening to your presentation that deals with the objections you think the audience may have about you as a presenter and/or the topic you are presenting.

Now the audience may not be thinking anything negative at all; but, even so, if you don’t address this you risk ruining your performance because it is something that will be worrying you before and during your presentation.

It's the same in sales. If we think a potential client or customer is going to have an objection to our product or service, we raise it and solve it upfront so it doesn't get raised by them.

What I did in this case, with the young female architect, was tell her that what she needed to do was to open the presentation with something that addressed how she felt. So as soon as she was introduced, her walk up ‘in‐motion’ start needed to be something along the lines of:

‘Now, I know that all of you in this room have got far more experience than I've got in architecture, but I've been specialising in this very, very niche small area, and have got amazing results for other architects just like you. And what I want to do right now is share these ideas with you so you can see how this can be very helpful to you too, if you want to reduce costs and increase profits on your projects.’

Now you see, in that opening statement she has said to them:

• ‘Yes, you're more experienced than me.’
• ‘Yes, you've been in this longer than me.’
• ‘Yes, you're probably think you are cleverer than me.’ (Although they're probably not!)

She ticked all those boxes. And now they have heard that and it's out there, along with the reasons why they should still listen to her and the big benefits she can give them!

Even if they were thinking all of those negative things – and we don't know they were – they're now much more likely to think, ‘Okay. Well, let's listen to this. Let's see’. They're going to start to listen and engage on a more neutral or even positive level to her presentation, rather than being negative about it and thinking things like: ‘What does she even know? What can she teach us?’

So, instead of looking for the faults in her presentation, they'll more likely be looking for the value and benefits they can gain.

The big answer, in summary, is whenever you think the audience are going to have objections about your presentation or you, if you raise them upfront and deal with them early on they will probably change how they think and you'll be more confident when delivering your presentation as well.

There's another example I will always remember, and this is going back a few years now. There was an Independent Financial Adviser I was doing some coaching with on delivering great presentations that would help him to win more clients. This meant that when he was networking or when he was putting on his own seminars, he'd be able to win a lot more clients at the end of his presentations.

My goal was not only to get him more confident at giving presentations, but also to help him to develop a presentation that would lead to the audience wanting to take action and wanting to engage with him.

Due to the nature of the presentation, slides had to be used. This client wanted to use slides, I couldn't get him away from the slides and, to be fair, owing to his graphs and trends analysis a visual presentation was needed. Slides are fine as long as the whole presentation isn't on them. The slides are there to support the presenter, not take the place of the presenter. If the slides are just full of the text that the presenter is going to read out, then the presenter might just as well have stayed sitting down and let the audience read them themselves!

Generally, his slides were quite good. There wasn't too much information on them. There were charts that the audience needed to see. But we came to this one slide and it was total ‘Death by PowerPoint’. It had so many bullet points on it, it was unbelievable. I didn't think it was possible to get so much text on a slide!

What's worse, he did not feel comfortable enough to split the content over more than one slide because when he was reading it he didn't even want to have to change slides! He wanted it all on one slide.

I said to him, ‘Well, if you're going to keep that there, the audience are possibly going to think …when they see that slide, “Does this guy not know how to do slides or presentations? Doesn't he know that's not acceptable?” Or something like that’. I felt there would be some objection from the audience about this slide which was an unbelievable mass of text.

I thought carefully, then said to him:

‘What we'll do, is we're going to put a little asterisk at the bottom of the slide before this one. When you've finished talking about the slide before the “Death by PowerPoint” slide and you see that asterisk, you're going to say to the audience: “Now, you've heard of death by PowerPoint I take it. Well, you haven't seen anything yet”. Then flick to the slide and go: “Look at this baby”.’

Now, because he's made fun of the slide himself, the audience are not so likely to take that slide seriously – they're going to see it as a little funny add on. We have turned a bad situation into a positive light‐hearted moment in the presentation.

Sometimes people do end up with a particular slide where, for whatever reason, they feel they need to read from it. This can cause an amount of concern for the presenter because they worry the audience are going to be thinking ‘They are just reading this off the slide, we could do that ourselves’. Again, the answer is to raise that potential objection yourself when you come to it, by something like:

‘As it says on this slide …’

Or:

‘I am going to read this next bit to make sure I don't miss anything out, as it's important …’

You could even add a bit of humour:

‘So, like being back at school, it's story time, so once upon a time … .’

Raising objections upfront is a really, really important part of doing any presentation when you think there might be something about you, the topic or both that the audience might have a problem with or an objection to.

You simply raise it upfront; you put it out there and you raise it in a positive manner whenever possible.