How to Make Presentations Over The Phone More Effective

Even in a time like this, businesses grow and your client base continues to expand. Compounded by social distancing, it probably will be challenging to interact with everyone face-to-face. As a result, a challenge rises, in maintaining the same level and continuity of service in a world that is becoming more and more virtual.

Presenting over the phone is an appropriate way to do this. With tools like MultiCall, you can connect either with someone in the next building, or internationally as well. However, this is subject to the planning and execution of the phone presentations beforehand.

With no face-to-face interaction, a greater degree of flawlessness is expected as well, particularly with meeting skills. Effective communication is the quintessence of any business operations- be it for communicating to clients as a creative professional, or for task management with your internal teams.

This begs the question as to how one can make presentations over the phone more effective. Here’s the good news: it only takes four steps, and the right tool.


 

Prepare

Battles have plans of attack. So does that presentation you plan to launch as well. Whether you meet in person or connect over a call, you need to put together a fool proof layout for your presentation. This should be one that involves everyone who’s in on the call, so no one is or feels left out.

The meeting is only as productive as it is well organized, to allows each participant to feel comfortable and actively involve themselves. This is where a tool like MultiCall proves to be useful. Not only does it allow you to call many with the ease of calling one, the Call Monitoring feature assists with the ability to ensure everyone is online and has participated.

Additionally, you can add contacts from your own phone directory one by one, or set them into frequently contacted groups and favourites as well. Preparation is important toward initiating the call on time as well.

Sending your attendees the meeting information in advance would allow everyone the time to know how to join the call in a timely manner. Someone walking in late can be very distracting;throwing your presentation off. This is where MultiCall is helpful again. With the feature of Call Scheduling, meeting timings can be modified or rotated to better adapt for people in different places.

Once the call has begun, it’d be appropriate to provide an outline of how the meeting will proceed, so everyone is prepared to receive your presentation and provide a meaningful contribution. You can then proceed with the presentation.

Maintaining Engagement

The main benefit of meeting face to face, is that it allows monitoring of visual cues and body language. Eye contact and gestures help in having conviction, relaying your message, and engaging your audience. This is not the case in audio conferences.

Needless to say, you need to get creative and use your words in ways that will hold your audience’s attention. When you’re delivering a presentation through a conference call, the conversation can seem pretty one-sided. It’s important to constantly engage the people on the other end of the line.

It's quite possible that your conference call could bring together people who don’t know one another. In this case, it’s essential to use participants’ names regularly. This will help everyone understand and keep track of what’s going on and who is speaking, and it will make each listener feel included.

With your call monitoring screen as reference, circle around to each participant throughout the call to make sure they feel included and that their contributions matter. This will also help in that it keeps them alert, with lesser tendency to get distracted, or for their attention to flag.

Make Sure Your Message is Heard

In a call, no one will be able to see you gesture, cross your arms, or detect any other non-verbal communication. Your voice is all you’ve got.  Properly enunciating your words, speaking speed, and pitch come into play. Laugh, too. A smile can be heard over the phone.

This also means you will require a tool with superior audio quality, free of static interference. It can be rather annoying if you have to repeat yourself or second guess through garbled sounds as to what someone is saying during a call. If you have attendees getting disconnected or dropped from your conference call.

This is where MultiCall turns out to be an excellent tool. Much unlike the common call media like VoIP which uses Internet for the entire call, MultiCall requires Internet only to initiate the call, with PSTN technology to conduct the call after that.

In simpler words, you need data only to start the call, and you can carry out your presentation with an audio quality that parallels that of a landline. Even if participants get disconnected or dropped, they only need dial back to the number they were contacted, and they can resume in the call uninterrupted.

Recording your Calls

Despite everyone’s best efforts, it may not always be possible for everyone to attend a presentation. It additionally would be difficult to know what went right and wrong after a presentation without any material apart from the presentation itself to go over.

Going merely by memory may not be reliable enough. Recording will allow analysis word-for-word. But much as it’s critical to mistakes, recording calls catches opportunities too. For instance, managers can understand how their teams have been dealing with clients.

MultiCall’s Call Monitoring feature helps again, in that it lets you record your calls. In case any participant is indisposed to participate in the group call, the recording of the conference can be transferred to him/her as audio files and he/she can stay up-to-date with the developments.

When hearing the word “presentations,” a conference call may not be the first thought that comes in mind. But unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. Modern conferencing solutions have revolutionized the manner in which meetings and events are conducted, to a magnitude that nearly eliminates the costs associated with such meetings. With appropriate tools such as MultiCall, presenting over the phone becomes not just possible, but effective.