Why business presentation training matters for all professionals

Written by

Josh Storie

I was walking through an art festival with an artist friend one night when he asked me a rather philosophical question: How do you determine the difference between good art and bad art?

I thought about it for a moment and realized I didn’t have an answer. He went on to say, “Art is good when someone is willing to pay for it — when it allows you the opportunity to make more.”

When it comes to business presentation training, a similar question is often asked: What does a good business presentation training look like? After all, if I’m investing in a business presentation training, I want to know if it’s worth it.

The answer? When it sets you up to accomplish your communication goals.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when trying to find a good business presentation training:

• Does the business presentation training allow you to successfully raise the capital you need?
• Does it equip your sales force to close more deals?
• Does it help you design a visually stunning deck?
• Does it help you hone your delivery skills?
• Does it help you move audiences the way you desire to move them?

Business presentation training play a crucial role in equipping professionals with the necessary skills to deliver impactful presentations in a corporate setting. However, not all training programs are created equal. To ensure that your investment in business presentation training is worthwhile, it’s important to understand the key elements that make a training program effective. In this blog, we will explore the essential components of a successful business presentation training and how it can help you achieve your communication goals.

What is business presentation training?

Business presentation training are courses that provide the necessary skills to successfully present in a corporate setting.

These courses can be consumed in a variety of different formats. Some corporate business presentation training courses are workshops that gather in-person at a specific destination. Some are courses where you meet with a group to learn and collaborate in a virtual setting. Other online courses function like an on-demand master class, allowing you to learn at your own pace. And if you’re in the market for something highly tailored, there are business presentation training with consultants who function as coaches, crafting custom development plans.

The beauty of current business presentation training models is that they can flex or scale to meet a variety of business needs and budgets. If you need to train a sales force of hundreds or even thousands, on-demand business presentation training courses can scale to help sellers from all over the globe develop at their own pace. If you have a small team that is looking for personalized training, working with a consultant to build a tailored development plan could be a beneficial option, as this type of training can be delivered on-site at your office on a day and time that you choose.

7 factors to look for in a business presentation skills training

When evaluating business presentation training courses, there are a lot of factors to consider. Outside of the obvious like cost, time investment, size of your organization, and delivery format, there are a few other considerations to review before making your final decision. Here are seven of the top ones.

1. Tailored content

A good business presentation training program should be designed to address your organization’s specific communication needs. Whether it’s raising capital, closing deals, designing visually stunning decks, or honing delivery skills, the training should provide practical approaches to meet these goals, for all types of industries and sizes of businesses.

2. Multiple learning formats

Everyone learns differently. An effective business presentation training program should offer a variety of training formats to accommodate different learning styles and preferences. Some individuals may prefer in-person workshops that allow for interactive learning and immediate feedback. Others may benefit from virtual training sessions that provide flexibility and convenience. On-demand online courses can be valuable for self-paced learning, while personalized coaching can offer tailored guidance.

3. Audience-centric

One of the key elements of successful business presentations is understanding the audience. A good business presentation training program should teach presenters to consider the specific needs, concerns, and interests of their audience before developing their talking points. Duarte tackles this with our Audience Needs Map™, so look for a resource or other evidence to support the program you are evaluating is in fact, audience centric.

The win here is that truly understanding your audience and their perspective, presenters can better tailor their presentation to effectively engage and connect with their listeners.

4. Incorporates storytelling techniques

Storytelling is a powerful tool in business presentations. It offers timeless techniques that help captivate and engage the audience, and the best business presentation training programs will include storytelling principles that teach participants how to structure their content in a narrative format. By using storytelling techniques, presenters can create a compelling and memorable presentation that resonates with the audience on an emotional level.

5. Development of visual communication skills

Visual aids are an integral part of business presentations, and a good training program should focus on visual design skills. This can include designing visually appealing slides that enhance the message and avoid clutter, to learning presentation design basics. Either way, learners should learn how to effectively use visuals to support their narrative and convey information in a clear and engaging manner.

6. Public speaking and delivery techniques

Delivering a presentation with confidence and impact is a skill that can be learned and refined. A comprehensive business presentation training program should include courses focused on public speaking and delivery techniques. Learners should learn how to engage the audience, use body language effectively, manage nerves, and deliver their message with clarity and conviction.

7. Ongoing support and practice opportunities

A great business presentation training goes beyond the initial training workshop. Ongoing resources and support should be built in, as well as opportunities for participants to practice and refine their skills. This can include follow-up coaching sessions, peer feedback, or access to resources and tools that allow for continuous learning. By providing a community for ongoing support, participants can reinforce their learning and continue to grow as effective presenters.

What can you expect to learn from a Duarte business presentation skills course?

The goal of every presentation is movement. Whether it’s persuading your audience to think in a new way, believe in a new way, or behave in a new way, you never want your audience to stay the same. There should always be movement. And business presentation training should provide practical approaches to moving those audiences.

At Duarte, our emphasis is on moving audiences through an empathetic approach to communication. Many business presentations focus on a set of talking points that don’t consider the audience’s specific needs. When this happens, presenters can alienate their audience rather than connect with them because their audience doesn’t feel heard.

Our approach, however, focuses on understanding our audience before developing our talking points. Why did they seek us out? What keeps them up at night? What are their current frustrations or concerns? Once we understand our audience, we can tailor our communication to meet their needs.

All of our business presentation training courses are designed to help you tailor your communication to your audience’s needs. But in addition, we also tailor our training to meet your business’s needs.

Building your own custom learning journey

While there’s no one-size-fits-all training solution, at Duarte, there are ways to bundle some of our workshops to create custom learning journeys. Afterall, every organization is different, and the needs of one department and industry could differ vastly from another.

Additionally, there is the capability of customizing these individual workshops even further. For your industry, for your company, even for a department. Talk to our team to learn more about those options!

Adaptive Listening™

This is Duarte’s newest communication training. While we tend to think about communication in terms of presenting or speaking, we all spend more than half our workday listening to other people. And a lot of the inefficiencies, tensions, and strained relationships in the workplace come down to poor listening skills because listening is more than just “paying attention” or “not interrupting.” Great listeners know how to uncover the speaker’s goals and adapt the way they listen to help the speaker meet them.

Our Adaptive Listening™ workshop provides business presentation skills that allow you to take a more customer centric approach to communication by truly hearing them.

Resonate^®

Storytelling has become a business presentation buzzword. A lot of business leaders know storytelling is important, but they may not know how to incorporate storytelling principles into their presentations.

Available in-person and online, our Resonate® course will reshape the way you develop content, using story structure and audience empathy to effectively communicate in a persuasive manner.

Duarte DataStory^®

Data drives decision making more than ever. But data can’t make a recommendation on its own. It needs a storyteller, someone to give the data meaning.

Our Duarte DataStory® workshop teaches you the most effective ways to turn your numbers into narratives that drive action. This workshop is especially great for teams in data, finance, research, analytics, engineering, and other numbers-first roles in your organization.

Illuminate™

Leading through change is one of the most difficult skills a business leader must learn. Because while change may be clearly good for the business, people in the business must be persuaded it’s good for them too.

Driving organizational transformation is tough because change is scary to most people. Many will react by expressing discomfort, doubt, or outright resistance. To overcome their fear and skepticism, people need to feel hopeful that the outcome will be positive for them even when the path ahead may be murky. This requires authentic, emotional, audience-centric communication. This is where storytelling comes in.

The Illuminate™ workshop will equip you to communicate in a way that sparks and sustains change by exploring the story structure inherent in every change journey.

VisualStory^®

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, we don’t typically take that approach with business presentations. We fill slides full of text or graphs that bring clutter rather than clarity.

Our VisualStory® workshop gives you the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of both narrative and visuals in a consolidated format.

Captivate™

Figuring out what to say in a business presentation is challenging, but it’s only half the battle. Once you’ve developed your content, you must deliver the content in a way that’s equally as compelling. Luckily, great public speaking is a skill everyone can learn.

Our public speaking course Captivate™ gives you the model and tools to become a more comfortable, dynamic, and empathetic speaker. This highly participatory workshop uses a mix of instruction, examples, and live coaching sessions so you can immediately put your new skills to practice.

Slide:ology^®

Most of us aren’t designers, yet we create presentations all the time. When we design slides, we can fall into classic traps — from overusing bullet points and cramming multiple ideas on one slide to using lots of colors, shapes, and fonts. When presenting to an audience, these slides often fail to convey what we most need the audience to know.

We blame PowerPoint® when we wind up with cluttered unattractive slides, but presentation software is just a vehicle for our communication. We forget that it’s our job to communicate our ideas, yet our visuals can obscure that idea because visual expression isn’t easy or intuitive. We may not have learned it in school, but thinking visually is crucial in persuasive communication.

Bringing together compelling content with engaging visuals is a powerful way to move an audience. The Slide:ology® workshope helps you get better at the visual part. It’s not about pretty pictures, it’s about persuasive visual communication.

Why pick a combination of our business presentation training courses?

For the last 30 years, Duarte has helped world’s leading brands and thought leaders improve their communication skills, such as Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Cisco, VMWare, and many others.

Our training is highly-rated, with an average 9.5/10 rating on our facilitators, and an NPS score of 9/10 for all of our training.

When it comes to partnering with Duarte, there are two options. Either we build your business presentations for you through our agency services division, or we train your team for you so your employees can build business presentations as often as they see fit.

• Upskill your team with Duarte courses to see results

  When Duarte opened its doors 35 years ago, we began working with a company who desired to create a culture of storytelling. After this company took Duarte’s corporate storytelling courses, they’re now a $1 trillion company known for their storytelling prowess.

• Hire our agency to do the pitch deck portion to scale your sales messaging to your whole team

  Veeam®, a $1B software company, needed to update their very technical sales deck for a non-technical audience of business decision makers. Our agency utilized VisualStory® principles along with other custom work to uplevel their presentations by shifting the focus from product features to business outcomes.

You have a lot of options when it comes to choosing a training program that meets your specific needs. Remember, effective business presentations are not just about delivering information; they are about engaging and connecting with your audience to drive meaningful impact. If you’re ready to talk about custom learning journeys for your team, talk to our Training Concierge today.