Even with a prepared sales presentation, a compelling speech, multiple rehearsals, there’ll always be some listeners who won’t agree with you afterwards.

Don’t worry though, receiving negative feedback is unavoidable, and you won’t be able to please everybody. People will always have different opinions from others.

On the other hand, you can minimize the effect by identifying who you’ll be presenting to beforehand. Are they creative directors who focus more on the execution, and design style of your works? Or executives who just want the bare basics, and benefits of what you offer them?

This should be accomplished by knowing their corporate ethics, cultural values, and their social background. Are they the type to prioritize making the customers feel welcome in their shops? Do they prioritize superior products above all? Or are they the type to build solid working relationships between their employees and customers alike?

With that information, you can then tailor your pitch to suit their behavior and give the impression that you share similar company beliefs and working ethics. In this way, you can easily appeal to a common ground and lessen the negative responses from the audience once you start.

Always Be in Control

Tony Dungy stated in his book, Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life, that unwanted circumstances may come unexpected, but you have the ability to respond to it positively or negatively. The choice is yours if you will focus on possible opportunities, or let yourself be swayed by negative situations.

While some presenters battle with stage fright, being afraid of getting interrupted is challenging. How will you react if a listener opposes you? Will you respond negatively or use it to your advantage?

These people may be difficult to handle, and you’ll undoubtedly run into them during a pitch. But the outcome of your presentation will depend on how you respond to them. This is why it’s important to be willing to listen and work with their problems as a professional when facing such unpleasant situations.

While you can prepare for possible disagreements, preparation is not enough in some cases. When that happens, react positively with three ways:

1. Face the Issue

Most people take corrections or oppositions personally because they think it’s themselves who are being attacked. Don’t let this kind of mindset deceive you, after all, even experts get negative feedback from others.

Remember that in any disagreements, the topic is the main object of discussion, and not the person itself. Public speaking coach Eamonn O’Brien advises that when dealing with someone who opposes your argument, you need to focus on the issue being brought up instead of tackling the person.

Instead of thinking about escaping from the situation, learn how to handle it professionally by responding positively. You could ask the person to clarify their point, or elaborate on the question while you let yourself think or return to your notes for reference. Don’t allow any negative comments to dictate your attitude since it won’t solve the issue. It’ll only heighten the tension and make things worse.

If he demands for further evidence to convince him to believe, do so without showing any sarcasm. Show them any facts you can either on-screen, or through discussion. Remember: it’s your topic that they’re critiquing, not you as an individual. Be professional by taking constructive criticism as opportunities to improve your brand.

Let anyone opposed speak their minds, then transform their input into beneficial feedback for you.

2. Listen Attentively

No matter how positive or negative the comments are, listening to your audience lets them notice that you respect not only their concerns, but also their presence. Mentally note down their concerns so you can either address them, or take note of it and promise to get back to them. You’ll give them the impression that you’re valuing their needs by lending them your ears, instead of talking too much about yourself and bombarding them with information.

Taking advantage of this opportunity creates a better way to understand others. If someone disapproves your argument, listen and then ask questions. Are they looking for other examples that can further explain the idea being discussed? Or are they just confused about what your topic entails? Keep track of what they ask you and how they react to your presentation. Giving them the chance to speak out allows them to clarify their points so you can give appropriate feedback.

Doing so increases your credibility as a speaker, proving that you’re willing and ready to understand their side of the story.

3. Show Professionalism

Listening is not enough to prove that you understand the person giving unpleasant comments. The way you respond is crucial, since your audience’s reaction depends on your answer to their concerns or clarifications. In times like this, keep a level head and maintain your pace to help you analyze what needs to be told without offending anyone. By focusing on what issues they raised, and listening to what they ask you, you get information that you can use to respond.

Instead of reacting aggressively and not considering what your audience might feel, you end up solving their problems like a professional.

Remember, your audience is the entire reason why you’re doing a presentation. Your goal is to engage and connect with them to successfully deliver your message and sell your proposal. Show that you care about meeting their needs by looking for things that you both agree with.

The Takeaway

The fact still remains that you want all your audience’s approval. This is why you need to answer in a way that gets the rest of the audience on your side.

Responding positively to opposition proves that you can handle unexpected situations well. If you receive negative feedback after your pitch, acknowledge it but don’t let it bother you too long.

Instead of focusing on the problem, concentrate on how you can properly address it without offending anyone from the crowd. Listen more closely to what they have to say, and find a better way to satisfy your clients’ needs.

Dealing with negative responses positively makes the audience trust you and more likely to do business with you.

If you want to know more about effective presentation, pitchdeck.com is willing to help you out and address your concerns. Give us a call today!

References

Dungy, Tony/ Whitaker Nathan. Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices, & Priorities of a Winning Life. Tyndale House Pub, 2007.

O’Brien, Eamonn. “Turn Negative Audiences to your Advantage.” The Reluctant Speakers Club. November 24, 2011. Accessed May 13, 2015. www.thereluctantspeakersclub.com/blog/2011/11/deal-with-negative-audiences-or-trolls

No matter how skilled or well-trained you are, you still need to have the right attitude to maximize your potential. You may have been able to create great and memorable pitches when you’re delivering your message to your audience, but failing to consider your behavior will put you in a bad light.

Ethics is a set of values concerned with what’s right and wrong. In terms of presentations, one can develop an interactive pitch deck and prepare an engaging speech while being unethical. The reason might be because it’s become a habit, or part of upbringing has made certain people believe that nothing’s wrong with their actions.

But since it involves both discipline and attitude, you need to know how to properly value your audience’s needs and concerns. And this not only includes creating compelling slides, but also observing and evaluating yourself as an individual and a practitioner. What kind of treatment are you giving to your audience? Do you happen to overlook small things like showing respect and valuing their time? Considering these can go a long way in convincing your audience to reciprocate what you’ve made them feel.

In line with this, speech coach Stephen Boyd explains that there are several ways a speaker can maintain credibility on stage. This includes how you treat your audience, and how you project your personal image.

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Now we’ll look at some of these guiding principles and see how you can be an ethical and engaging speaker:

1. Know the Value of Preparation

Recognizing your audience’s presence involves careful preparation. Failing to prepare leads to unorganized ideas, unfiltered information, and uninteresting slides that won’t gain you attention. Procrastinating can only prevent you from being productive and achieving your goal – to seek your audience’s approval and inspire them to act on it.

If you’re scheduled to deliver your pitch or showcase your proposal, it’s important that you plan on what to say and how you say it within a given time frame. Since you only have limited time to talk about your topic, label your points – from the most important down to the least important ones. This will help you include what you want them to remember, and remove those that won’t contribute much to your pitch’s impact.

Do advanced research about your topic, write down the subject’s main points, and craft an engaging pitch deck. Doing so enables you to share useful insights to your listeners and lets you present your pitch with ease and confidence. Practice your pitch until you become familiar with it to sound more natural and conversational when speaking to your audience. This shows how preparation and practice work well together.

2. Show Proper Respect

Respect begets respect. Since everyone’s expecting to get the same respect they show others, they do it to avoid misunderstanding and quarrels. Who doesn’t want to be respected? Your audience surely wants to be.

Don’t forget how vital respect is when dealing with their gender, race, religion, and culture or social status. Avoid using examples that can put down or discriminate them in any way. Filter out negative and offending examples from the preparation stage. Keep in mind that your speech’s success depends on how these people react.

Part of respecting your audience is valuing their time as you’d want them to value yours. Prepare well to stay within your speech’s apportioned time. Sticking to the time limit will help you deliver your message effectively without the need to rush and lose people’s attentions.

Starting and ending your pitch on time also makes your audience feel that you respect them and displays that you’re a disciplined presenter.

3. Practice Radical Honesty

Presenting unreliable facts and information to your audience not only causes confusion, it also ruins your image and changes the way people perceive you. This is why verifying each detail you include in your pitch is crucial. Ensure all your sources and references are credible to avoid misleading the audience and putting your reputation at stake.

If you’re unsure about the information you’re citing, don’t include it in your speech to prevent disappointing your listeners. This leads back to the necessity of ample preparation to keep you from facing such situations.

Since you’re responsible for gaining people’s trust, you should take good care of it. Remember, trust is the foundation of healthy and profitable relationships. Being true to them will keep them from questioning your expertise and credibility.

Avoiding plagiarism is also a big factor in showing and proving your honesty before others. Defined as claiming one’s idea and regarding it as your own, the practice of plagiarizing others’ works can negatively affect your image and undermine your credibility. It doesn’t promote proper attribution to someone, and makes you seem unprofessional.

Conclusion

Treating your audience the way you want to be treated is important in building good and lasting relationships. While focusing on all the materials that you need for your pitch can result in a successful pitch, you need to consider how you’ll be able to bring satisfaction without compromising your professionalism.

Know the significance of preparation to let you organize your ideas and avoid being viewed as unqualified and unprofessional.

Give respect by making sure that every point that you’ll cover won’t offend anyone. Valuing their time also shows that you care more about them.

Practice honesty to maintain good standing and increase your credibility. This prevents misleading information that might upset the audience and make them lose their confidence in you.

These moral principles show that you value them and their needs more than yours. As a professional presenter, understand how to treat them properly to help you obtain their trust, and eventually their loyalty. This is why embracing and mastering these ethical practices makes you better and improves your pitch’s success.

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References

Boyd, Stephen D. “Ethics In Public Speaking” The Sideroad.
“The Ethics in Public Speaking: Why So Important?” HubPages. January 16, 2014.

Your pitch deck doesn’t end when you finish delivering your pitch. You might have an interactive pitch deck or award-winning speech that determines your success, but the effectiveness of your overall performance all points to one objective: getting your message across clearly to your audience.

The other crucial elements that define your pitch’s impact are: your manner of speaking, voice projection, body language, and how you convince your audience to listen and take immediate action.

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However, there are things that some presenters fall short of when addressing questions.

Here are three practices you might overlook the next time you speak onstage and entertain audience questions. Avoid these blunders before they disrupt your success:

1. Failing to Prepare

You might have spent most of your time preparing your deck and pitch before the big day. But it’s not enough to anticipate immediate success. Failing to formulate questions that might be tapped during the Q&A portion can leave you out of control, especially when you’re asked with a difficult question. Remember that the crowd has invested their time and effort to listen and learn. This is why you need to show your respect by being well-prepared to prevent them from being disappointed. Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned speaker, it’s important to list down what your audience might bring up to help you construct a more direct statement as your response.

International speaker Alan Fairweather advises presenters to think of possible questions that might come up while planning and preparing your pitch. This will not only allow you to give useful answers for your audience, but will also prevent you from being viewed as unprofessional. Having enough practice also lets you ask for other’s feedback and encourages them to ask more about your topic. It can also keep you from being noticed as unconfident and incompetent. In this case, you can have someone from your colleague to seat in front and observe your performance. Let him listen to and understand your topic while doing a mock pitch. Once you’re done talking, demand questions and convince him to raise questions. Not only will it help you rehearse for the actual pitch. It’ll also make you more comfortable in addressing any kind of questions.

This gives you an idea on how to properly respond to audience concerns and provide a more logical answer that’ll make them satisfied.

2. Getting Sidetracked by Trivial Questions

It’s no surprise that some of your listeners will raise questions that seem irrelevant to what you’re discussing. The reason might be because they’ve misunderstood the topic, or they might just want to clarify a certain idea that you’ve covered. If you encounter this kind of question, English Teacher Artur Pivovarov mentions a few answers that you can use: “Can we talk about that on another occasion?” or “That’s interesting, but I’d prefer not to answer that today.” Such scenarios happen at some point, but you shouldn’t allow these certain kind of queries to dominate the entire Q&A forum. This is to avoid ruining your performance and confusing other audience members.

Accommodating every question won’t help you make things clearer. Worse, doing it might lead you and your audience astray. Before anything else, make sure to tell your listeners that you’ll be entertaining questions after your pitch. This is to let you finish the entire pitch and prevent you from getting caught up by misleading queries.

Filter every question that comes up, and answer only relevant questions to save time and focus on your main points. Always go back to your main objective to guide you all throughout your speaking engagement.

3. Being Untruthful to Your Audience

While careful and in-depth preparation enables you to handle Q&A with ease, there will always come a time when unexpected questions will come to light. According to speaker and trainer Gilda Bonanno, when someone from the crowd raises a certain question that you think you can’t answer, don’t hesitate to admit it. After all, it would be much better to tell the truth than to provide false arguments that might affect your credibility as a presenter.

Although this scenario happens when you haven’t researched enough for your topic, it can also occur when you can barely understand the question being asked. In this case, you can tell them that you’ll address that question once you know the right answer and give you time to conduct a follow-up research. However, you need to think of other ways on how to deliver it in a more decent approach. Instead of merely saying “I don’t know,” you can say something like “Thanks for bringing that up. I think I’ll have to look after my references and check other resources to answer that question.”

Showing your interest to clarify certain ideas after the entire session can make a difference in convincing your listeners that you’re willing to provide them with fact-based answers, not just plain opinions. Don’t leave your audience hanging and misguided. Rather, give them something they can remember without lying. This is to avoid putting your integrity in question and losing your audience’s trust.

Conclusion

Understanding these points allows you to avoid mistakes when you answer your audience’s questions. This helps you maintain your credibility and professional look as you address them graciously and rightfully.

While it’s good to cover all possible questions in your pitch without the need for any clarifications, there’ll always be some listeners who’ll make their way to give feedback. Given that your time is limited to present your message, it’s important to prepare for possible questions to help you provide clearer and more concise answers.

When entertaining audience feedback, maintain your performance by letting your speech tone and body language show you’re interested and willing to answer any questions.

Since your entire performance depends on how you successfully start and end your pitch, you shouldn’t neglect how this section completes your pitch’s success.

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References

Bonanno, Gilda. “Public Speaking: Six Mistakes to Avoid When Answering Questions.” SelfGrowth.com. n.d. www.selfgrowth.com/articles/public-speaking-six-mistakes-to-avoid-when-answering-questions

Fairweather, Alan. “9 Tips for Handling Public Speaking Questions.” Lee Hopkins. n.d. www.leehopkins.com/9-tips-for-handling-public-speaking-questions.html

Pivovarov, Artur. “Presentation Skills. Unit 8: Dealing with Questions.” SlideShare. May 1, 2012. www.slideshare.net/ArturPivovarov/unit-8-12763217