3 Tips for Worry-Free Business Presentations

by Stephanie Faris on Monday, June 06 6:00

Webinars and PowerPoint presentations have become an important part of running a business. Whether professionals are demonstrating concepts, leading brainstorming sessions, or pitching a potential client, the right visuals can make all the difference. Yet scheduling and preparing a presentation are only part of the process.

Most IT professionals will be called to help with a malfunctioning presentation multiple times over the course of a career. When that happens, it s usually an emergency, with everyone waiting while tech support troubleshoots the issue. If a company s information technology staff can limit the number of presentation disasters, they ll be able to reduce stress and provide better customer service. Here are three tips to help.

Permanent Equipment

If projectors and videoconferencing equipment must be moved from one conference to another, issues can easily occur. Consider dedicating one or two conference rooms to multimedia, permanently attaching the necessary equipment. Your IT team can then regularly test items to ensure they re working and troubleshoot issues before important meetings. Having a dedicated area also means IT personnel can become familiar with the environment in the room and take control of the area. Instead of wandering the building searching for equipment, employees will need to reserve one of the multimedia-equipped conference rooms for their meetings, which will cut down on the need to assign responsibility for presentation equipment checkout.

Employee Training

Employees should be fully trained on using each piece of equipment. If your sales and marketing team do the majority of presentations, set aside a short amount of time to train them on using the equipment. If these types of complex meetings are organization-wide, train someone in each area to set up and manage presentations and ask them to show their team members. You may not be able to completely eliminate help desk calls related to presentations, but you ll reduce them. You can also train all of your technicians to handle the equipment, which will even out the workload when those calls do come in.

Set Rules

Some organizations assign presentation equipment to IT, allowing them to oversee use. In other businesses, items such as projectors and web cameras are assigned directly to end users. Either way, maintaining, inventorying, and troubleshooting the equipment usually fall to the technicians, since they have the skills necessary to handle it. If IT is managing these devices, they should have some element of control over it. This often comes in the form of policies, set by the IT team, and pushed out to the rest of the team as a precursor to using the equipment. Policies should include assigning responsibility for ensuring the equipment is secured at the end of the meeting. You should also set internal policies relating to how often you ll replace equipment to avoid breakdowns due to aging projectors and screens.

If your business s employees regularly conduct presentations, your IT team can put practices in place to cut down on emergency help desk calls. With careful preparation, you ll find that your end users soon handle their own presentations and you have fewer equipment malfunctions.