Frequently Asked Questions

Good presentations inspire a reaction from the audience. If the audience doesn’t react then it’s not a good presentation! In order to inspire a reaction like gaining support, approval, a change in belief or behaviour then you need to have a mix of things in your presentation.

Here are some of the ingredients to good presentations:

Empathy and rapport – demonstrate that you understand them and their “pain” or needs

Motivation – at least three reasons why they will continue to listen to you as you talk

Emotion – people are moved by emotions not just facts and figures, make the audience feel a certain way and your onto a winner

Data – information shared in a simple and easy to understand, ideally visual manner gives us a reason to back up our emotional choices

Engaging – if you’ve done all the things above its likely your presentation will be holding the interest of the audience. Making the presentation more of an exchange of ideas or two-way conversation (where appropriate) rather than a lecture is a good way to be more engaging

Actionable – if you want to inspire a reaction make sure you are clear on what the actions you want the audience to take in response to their reactions. E.g. If they support the idea (reaction) do you want them to sign off-budget (action)

Memorable – if you are relying on the audience taking action at a point in the future, when there is likely to be competing tasks then you need to ensure your message and actions are memorable enough to stick. So when it comes time to take the action they don’t question why they are doing that, or delay doing it. You want them to clearly recall the key points in their minds eye which endorphins them continuing to take the desired action

Some clients before we worked with them didn’t prepare at all because of what we call the “Public Speaking Monkeys”. The kind of monkeys that tell you not to prepare might be a monkey’s need for perfection or not to look stupid. The monkey’s rather warped logic is that if you’re not prepared and the presentation doesn’t go well you can blame the lack of prep rather than your own imperfections or stupidity.  

Some people say “I prepare last minute” – for those that do prepare, most people’s methods aren’t ideal – pulling all-nighters or causing unnecessary stress for you, colleagues and family around you. Whilst last-minute preparation might be working to an extent, it’s better to prepare in advance to:

• Reduce stress and sleepless nights for you and your team before presentations 
• Ensure that you and others have time to think and feedback on the draft content increasing your chances of success
• Set a good example to others in the team and company
• Give you time to practise your delivery and positioning of the content (ideally with others present) and improve accordingly, increasing your chances of success
• Increase your confidence and clarity in the message increasing your chances of success  

Our approach to preparation is tried and tested by all our clients. Initially, it’s a change to what most people do now, and that’s a good thing for all the reasons above.

We recommend people follow our tried and tested Simply Amazing Structure (SAS) for all preparation. It involves starting early and staying bigger picture. By hand scope out all the elements of the presentation and always thinking of it from the listeners’ point of view.

Consider WHY they want to listen and what their motivations are for engaging in your communication. Then you’d tell the WHAT they need to know, the content laid out in an easy to follow, logical and well-paced manner. Then you go through HOW (assuming they are now convinced) they can action your suggestion – similar to an action plan for the listener. Within that section you may be answering relevant questions to overcome any objections. And finally, you cover any more random questions or thoughts and in longer presentations give a motivational reminder summary to spur them into action. 

There’s more on these steps and the order in which you prepare them (which is different to how you deliver them) in our book High-Performance Presentations, it’s so important we’ve decorated three chapters to the Simply Amazing Structure (SAS).

The main goal of a presentation is to create some change in the audience. Either a change of mindset – helping people to think differently about something, or a change in behaviours – helping people to do something different than before. If your presentation does not seek to make a change then is it worth giving? 

Some people might say well I want to reinforce a message and in that case, I’d say you are wanting a change, you want them to go from average support to high support, or not slip from high buy-in to less buy-in or less action. 

Many poor presentations occur because the speaker either doesn’t consider the audience at all and is just happy to have personally survived the ordeal! Or the presenter only thinks about the action they want to take themselves (not what they want the audience to think or do).

Plenty of humans, unless reminded tend to think of themselves first!

Assuming you are delivering a typical business presentation then end your presentation with the following three elements. 

1. Ensure that the audience knows what actions you want them to take i.e be very clear on their next steps and make them as easy as possible for them to be taken
2. Engage the audience in a two-way discussion – ask for their questions, thoughts or observations on your proposal wherever possible. You aren’t just wanting questions, you want to elicit buy-in to your ideas or find out if they don’t like them and why. It’s always better to know now before they leave the room! 
3. Once they have had their objections overcome and they believe in the idea and/or next steps then it’s a good idea to finish on a short motivational summary highlighting
   1. the negative consequences if they don’t do as you suggest (don’t do this bit if they have already agreed to it) 
   2. and finishing with the positive benefits when they do the thing you suggest.  

There’s more on these three steps to closing your presentations in our book High-Performance Presentations where we go into more depth covering the HOW and WHAT IF sections of our unique Simply Amazing Structure (SAS).

A good presentation includes all the following things

1. An appreciation and empathy with the people listening so you can deliver the right content at the right level
2. Rapport with the audience so they know like and begin to trust you 
3. A clear purpose – a reason WHY people want to listen this helps keep people’s attention
4. Facts and information delivered in a clear and simple manner
5. Delivered in an engaging confident manner with humour or passion when appropriate 
6. A flow or theme that holds all the elements together 
7. An appropriate call to action informing the audience what you want them to do as a result of the presentation
8. Flexible enough to adapt to the audience in the moment as you react to their body language etc
9. It contains the answers to any obvious objections – often best if brought up before they are asked
10. It is paced well for the audience – often including a variety of speeds depending on them the message 
11. Supporting data and evidence where required perhaps in the appendix or handouts
12. Engaging stories that help support the message, are more engaging and memorable

Yes, if we are the right people to help we will. If not, we can probably recommend you to someone else who can help – so get in touch anyway! My colleagues and I do have other areas of specialisation, for example, I worked with Toyota Motor Europe developing a bespoke, 5-day-long “Train The Trainer” Marketing course for all their trainers across Europe. Using NLP as the underpinning for the training was critical to its success.

Kerry O’Neill – Parts and Service Training Manager, Toyota Motor Europe:

“Dee was responsible for the development and delivery of our marketing training programme aimed at our aftersales retail managers across Europe. She delivered this training in a number of sessions to our trainers from over 15 of our national offices … Dee felt like a part of our team from the first meeting by demonstrating an understanding of and empathy with our company culture and the business case for this training program. She has built a strong rapport with training delegates who had varying skill levels and business needs and were from a wide range of cultures. Dee’s marketing skills and experience are advanced and she has the ability to communicate an understanding of these skills to others. I highly recommend Dee.”

Often at locations in Hertfordshire, Dorset or London (external venues or client premises), but we can provide courses anywhere in the UK – nationally plus internationally.

For Team Presentation Skills and Presentation Skills Mastery programmes we limit numbers to six delegates per trainer in order to maximise the practical exercises and give everyone plenty of presentation practice.

For management communication training courses, the number varies according to individual client requirements. More trainers can be used for larger groups.

Keynote talks and conference trainings have no maximum limit! The more the merrier!

Our presentation skills one-to-one training programmes are often needed in a hurry, so we are ready for that and can respond quickly. As with many things, the more notice the better so that clients can complete the pre-work.

To get the maximum out of our bespoke courses, organisers need to share their objectives and goals with us and often delegates also benefit from speaking to us to give us some simple inputs in advance, usually via telephone briefing. This makes courses as effective and as personal as possible. Our lead time for bespoke courses is often one to two months sometime more and sometimes less so get in touch today to find out more!

Investing in our courses is money well spent. Prices vary according to location, course size and format – you’ll find cheaper, but we believe you won’t find better value for money. As a safeguard for you, we also offer a satisfaction guarantee on many of our programmes. Please ask for more information.

In total there are approx. 60 mins of videos, in bite-sized chunks ranging from about 2 mins to 12 mins each.

Yes. These videos have intentionally been created to reach everyone and not focus on one profiling tool. Generic personas (e.g. Rachel Results and Gary Caring) are used based on Innovation/Extraversion and Thinking/Feeling preferences.

No, whilst it is helpful to have taken some sort of personality profiling test before watching it is not essential. We take you through an overview of what the different styles are and perhaps after watching you’ll be intrigued to find out even more about yourself by taking a personality profile questionnaire.

Yes, this training has been designed for individuals, teams, departments and whole companies to use.  Speak to us about a discount for buying in bulk and additional supporting materials to help it come alive for your team.

Dee Clayton’s most recent book is aimed at helping business professionals to give even better presentations so that they can engage, persuade and inspire those around them. With better presentations and communications comes better buy-in engagement and career opportunities too! Dee has also uniquely linked your personality style to your presentation skills probable strengths and weaknesses with her unique “Presenter Personality Styles” highlighted as you read through the book and detailed in the quiz in Chapter 2.

Dee Clayton’s first book, “Taming Your Public Speaking Monkeys” came about from Dee’s passion for helping clients to realise that you don’t have to live with a fear of public speaking. People think it’s normal and therefore that it is something they need to be scared of forever. Dee and the team are passionate that it isn’t’. If you want to learn how to tame those mind monkeys that yell at you saying things like “You aren’t good enough” or “You’re stupid” as soon as you stand up to speak then read this book.

We are a multi-award-winning company because we are easy to work with and offer engaging and interactive training solutions that work in the real world.

We are passionate about helping our clients increase their confidence, improve their communications and build their capability.

Dee Clayton, our founder, is a highly experienced NLP Trainer. She and the team use ‘Business NLP’ techniques which are so powerful and far-reaching that they underpin many of our courses. Dee has over 25 years of business communication experience on brands such as Jacob’s Creek and Jammie Dodgers and now trains individuals and teams internationally.

Our Licensed Practitioners and Associates are passionate business professionals, highly trained in areas of expertise such as Presentation Skills, Team building and Time Management.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is often referred to as the study of success. It is a field of work that looks at successful people, performance and outcomes and learns from (‘models’) that success for application elsewhere. NLP is interested in understanding what we say, think and do and how that impacts upon the individual and those around them.

• ‘Neuro’ refers to what is thought and our mindsets.
• ‘Linguistic’ is what we say both non-verbally & out loud.
• ‘Programming’ is a little like our habits and repeating patterns – it’s about what we do and how we do it.

At Simply Amazing Training we use ‘Applied Business NLP’ to bring the benefits of NLP to individuals, teams departments and entire businesses.

Profiling is a useful way to generalise some important elements of our personality.

By understanding ourselves first, more specifically our personality styles, we can gain a greater insight into who we are at work and how we behave (the good, the bad and hopefully not any ugly!).

Then after we’ve understood ourselves better, we can learn about other people’s styles and what makes them tick (or ticked off!).

The final step is improving our understanding of those around us so we can adapt our styles and modes of communication to be even more effective communicators around our teams, colleagues and bosses.

Insights Discovery is a psychometric tool based on the psychology of Carl Jung. Insights Discovery is built to help people understand themselves, understand others, and make the most of the relationships that affect them in the workplace.

The Insights Discovery methodology uses a simple and memorable four colour model to help people understand their style, their strengths and the value they bring to the team. We call these the colour energies and it’s the unique mix of Fiery Red, Sunshine Yellow, Earth Green and Cool Blue energies, which determines how and why people behave the way they do.

Dee Clayton, the founder of Simply Amazing Training, is passionate about ‘Applied NLP’. Dee is a Trainer and Master Practitioner of NLP and was the Marketing Director for the Association for NLP for several years. We have our Licensed Practitioners who are either NLP Practitioners, Master Practitioners or NLP Trainer level and all our associates are trained in NLP to varying degrees.

Yes, Dee gives ‘colourful’ keynote talks on presentation skills, management communications and  personality styles using Insights Discovery. Talks are designed to be interactive and leave delegates feeling inspired. If you want to give your team the tools they need to maximise success, or require a change of pace for your conference or team meeting, then please get in touch.

On our one-to-one presentation skills programmes we offer a “100% money back guarantee” when you take Stage 1, 2 and 3 with us.

You tell us what you want to achieve and assuming at the beginning we agree it’s possible then we’ll stand by our word (subject to the client playing their part in the process). We will take all necessary steps to rectify matters or reimburse fees under our quibble-free money back guarantee.

See our full guarantee page here.

At Simply Amazing Training we are proud of our small but well-formed team of Licensed Practitioners and Associates.

Our Licensed Practitioners work with most clients on the presentation skills training side of the business.

For Management Training and Executive Coaching, you may be working with Dee Clayton, the founder, and/or Licensed Practitioners and Associates depending on availability and the core skillsets required.

Call or email and we’ll take it from there. Our first priority is always to understand a client’s needs before offering a solution.