Lesson 3: Public Speaking Delivery

Public Speaking Delivery of Your Pitch

How you say things and the way you say things are just as important as what you say. 

The 3 Vs of Communication: Verbal, Vocal, Visual

1. Verbal is your content. It’s the words you choose. You should use simple words to make your pitch easy to understand. The more industry terms, acronyms, and jargon you use the less people will fully understand what you’re saying.  

2. Vocal is the way you say things. By changing your pitch (high, low), volume (loud, quiet), speed (fast, slow) and pausing you can convey a wide range of different emotions. They are incredibly powerful tools. When done thoughtfully it is the best way to keep a presentation engaging. Think about what type of emotions and energy your type of company should convey and then make these elements match accordingly. An enterprise financial software pitch should probably have a different energy then a Caribbean rum brand pitch. 

i.e. – If your start-up is working on a cancer treatment maybe you want the sections where you’re talking about the problems to have a serious and sad tone, so you slow down the pace and deliver in a deeper tone. Then as the presentation goes on, you’re talking about the results you’re seeing, you want the tone to be optimistic, upbeat, exciting so you speed up and speak louder. 

You can practice incorporating these items once you have your pitch ready or as you’re creating it. If you use a script, you can add notes directly or use items like underline, bold, italics and colours to signal you to use different vocal tools. Recording yourself practicing is the best way to get these items right.

3. Visual is how you look while presenting. It’s your body language, your gestures, and your slides. Keep your appearance professional (clothes, hair, etc…). Keep your gestures in control. You want your movements to be natural and subtle. If you’re waving your arms all over the place it sends the wrong message and distracts the listeners. Like Vocal you want your gestures and facial expressions to match the tone of you presentation. On Zoom you should keep your shoulders square to the camera and be looking into the camera. When standing in a room you want your hands at your side most of the time and make eye contact with each person in the room. When seated in a meeting you should have a relaxed upright posture and keep your shoulders square and open (don’t cross your arms). Your presentation materials should match visually what you’re trying to convey as well. Read up on the psychology of colours, choose your images thoughtfully and have a professional clean design. 

 Mistakes to Avoid When Delivering Your Pitch Through Public Speaking

1. Too much energy. Often, we see people’s excitement or nervousness get the best of them and they tend to speak too fast. It can be difficult for the listener to comprehend everything since a lot of the information they’re hearing is new to them. Adding to that high energy gestures, posture, volume, pitch etc… and the presentation can easily become overwhelming and even unpleasant for the listener. Make sure you take pauses at important facts, figures, and statements to let them sink in before moving onto the next items. 

2. Too little energy / monotone delivery. Being too calm can also be a bad thing. Presentations that move at a slow pace and don’t have changes in delivery methods become very boring and hard to follow. The human attention span is very short so you need to make sure you are changing up the tone and pace throughout if not the listeners mind will start to wander off. 

3. Eye contact. Whether you’re in a room of one, many or on a Zoom eye contact is very important. It helps create engagement. If you’re in a room be aware of yourself that you are making a good amount of eye, contact. If you’re on Zoom, make sure you look into the camera. If your head is down or away it sends unwanted messages. 

4. Messy pitch deck. Your materials reflect you and your company so if you have spelling mistakes, unorganized text, and images it reflects poorly. You should give the design just as much consideration as the content.