Presentation Skills for Quivering Wrecks, Second Edition

Spiders, death, dentists, snakes and flying are in the list of the top ten fears of businesspeople (Book of List). But the top position is held by “public speaking”. So great is this fear that most businesspeople have a single objective: to get off the platform as soon as possible.

This book, based on a hugely successful course given to thousands of businesspeople, shows how anyone can speak with confidence to an audience of any size. Laced with humour and wit, the author emphasizes that you don’t have to be a brilliant orator to be an effective speaker in business. Simply being good is plenty, because 95% of all business presenters are so awful!

10 reasons you must buy this book and avoid “death by slide-show”!

1. Most business audiences have a single objective: to get out of the room.

2. Most business presenters have a single objective: to sit down in the audience again.

3. Most corporate audiences can’t remember, 24 hours later, what was presented, the title of the presentation or the presenter’s name.

4. Like it or not, 55% of the persuasive power of a presentation is transmitted by the speaker’s body language, 38% by the speaker’s voice tone and only 7% by the content.

5. 75% of speaker-nerves disappear with correct rehearsal.

6. You can discover how to generate applause when you want it.

7. There is a simple model you can use which will create a terrific presentation for you every time.

8. Bullet points are not what slides are for, and using all capital letters makes long stretches of text very hard to read.

9. Reading words off slides (as most presenters do) puts your audience to sleep in about 30 seconds.

10. Good presenters are very rare. When you become a good presenter you can often negotiate better employment terms, a higher salary, and even get yourself promoted – I did... so can you!

About the Author

For over 40 years, Bob Etherington has built a reputation for sales success in a career that has spanned many key global markets. From Rank Xerox in London, he was headhunted by Grand Metropolitan Hotels and then became a Money Broker in the City. He joined Reuters in the early 1980s and became a main Board Director for the Transaction Services in 1990, moving to New York in 1994 to take control of their major accounts strategy for US banks.

In 2000, Bob left Reuters and set about expanding SpokenWord Ltd., a London-based sales training business he had already established with his then business partner and the company's current owner, Frances Tipper. Bob has conducted seminars and courses in selling, negotiation and presentations to major companies all around the world.