How important is Public Speaking when Networking?
Heights, spiders, flying, death. Look through any list of the human race’s worst fears, and these will commonly appear. Along with one other – public speaking.
But when you promote your business through networking – online or in person, you will have to speak in public.
Think about a time when you’ve seen a good speaker. It could have been live, or perhaps a good TED talk. What sort of impression did they create? Were you interested in their product or their cause? Did they position themselves as an expert in their field?
Done well, speaking offers a massive opportunity to promote yourself, and gives your business credibility. The fact that someone has asked you to speak to an audience demonstrates that you have something interesting to say – and this will mean that people will want to listen.
You may not be delivering a keynote presentation in front of hundreds of people or delivering a TED talk – but even doing a simple business pitch at a networking group will have the same effect if done well.
There are speakers that command fees for whatever talk they do, and there are plenty of others that use speaking to generate business. If they deliver good value from the stage, members of the audience will engage their consultancy services, or use them as suppliers. As a speaker myself, I have done various ‘showcase’ talks for no fee, that have led on to paid speaking or other work.
There’s another very practical reason why speaking in public will help you grow your business. Of course it can be scary to speak to an audience, what do you have to do when you are pitching to a potential client? That may only be a one on one ‘speech’, but the confidence you gain from delivering your message in a broader context will make it easier to do.
Over many thousands of networking meetings attended, I’ve lost count of the number of people that I’ve seen go through a positive learning journey when it comes to speaking.
The best example of this I ever saw was a number of years ago with a young entrepreneur called Mark. I remember visiting his networking group when he had recently joined – and he was the typical nervous presenter when he spoke. He mumbled his way through a presentation on his carpet cleaning business, shaking like a leaf, and while the presentation was only 60 seconds long, it felt like an age.
Everyone in the room was just willing him to get through it – although I’m sure there some were just pleased it wasn’t them.
About four months later, I attended an end-of-year awards ceremony, and one of the features of the evening was for peer voted businesses to do a presentation to the room of 400 or so people. They’d been voted on the strength of their presentations to their groups – so you can imagine my surprise when Mark took to the stage.
It was only when he was halfway through that I twigged who it was. The guy who’d been in such a nervous state just months previously had no notes, engaged with his audience, and delivered a very strong message, promoting himself brilliantly.
There’s a phrase in life, that says: ‘The way you do anything is the way you do everything’ – and while that is often a very positive statement (i.e. if you do this small job well, I’ll believe that you’ll do this much bigger, more lucrative job well too) – it can also give you a challenge. If you don’t look confident while speaking in public (e.g. when out networking), people will assume that’s what you’d be like in front of a client (if you were referred).
So think carefully about how you come across as you promote yourself when networking. What can you do to improve your public speaking so you come across better?
