Presenting Effectively Over Zoom
Hey, everyone. Ken Holden here, a signature selling. So I wanna talk today about how to present effectively on Zoom. Of course, in my own business, pre pandemic, we were 100% face to face with customers. We are a b to c business to customer.
Kenneth Holden:So we were going to their homes. And so a lot of traveling back and forth. If you have a no show, it was terrible. Get the drive back home. We live I live in Alberta, Canada, and, of course, we have winters with real snow, lots of ice.
Kenneth Holden:And sometimes in the winter, which is a big part of the year here in Canada, especially in Alberta and other parts of, the country, It's kinda dangerous driving to someone's appointment on highways, not to mention you get to the home, you finally get there, maybe you brought coffee for everyone, and they are a no show. They don't show up. For whatever reason, they are not there. Now you turn on drive home. It's just a bad experience.
Kenneth Holden:So with the pandemic, everything changed. Everything changed. So now a no show, while it's still no fun, you book an appointment and you show up on camera and they don't show, it's no fun. But we have to remember what we came from. We came from many of us, whether business, whether it's b to b or b to c, you have to remember you are on the road.
Kenneth Holden:So especially if you're in direct selling or you're in financial services, life insurance, RESP business, that sort of thing, you get to work from home. And so now when a no show happens, you turn off the cameras, the lights, the computer, and you go spend time with family. You spend more time in the office. And so one of the huge things that happened is the advent of the digital era. I was heavily digital even prior to the pandemic just by nature of who I am.
Kenneth Holden:I love technology, the chat gbt and copilot, and I'm using gbt. I'll do a podcast on that soon. I'm using that now as my personal assistant. So if I run into an Excel issue, I can get a quick answer. It can help me develop scripts and the men's script.
Kenneth Holden:So many things you can do with it. It's crazy. But no shows are not as painful. No no one likes them, have to learn how to, excuse me, connect on Zoom. It's super, super important.
Kenneth Holden:And the first thing I wanna talk about, a lot of this is practical, and the first thing I wanna talk about is the importance of your background. Your background is your office. So when we were face to face, we went to someone's home, the background was their house, that was their house. The state of their house did not matter. It didn't affect their judgment of me or their perception of me because it's their house.
Kenneth Holden:And so that's where they live, and if they choose not to clean it or make it orderly, that's their business, but it's no reflection on me. Now pre pandemic, if they're coming to my office, it's in a nice building, it's got nice wood. It's got nice carpet. It's got a cafe. It's got a front desk.
Kenneth Holden:So it has all the right things. So when they come in, they get to see my office, and there's credibility. Now in the pandemic era, when the pandemic first happened, everyone was scrambling trying to figure out how to do business. You could show up looking slightly disheveled and you could everyone was in the same shoe and people were very forgiving. They weren't worried about backgrounds.
Kenneth Holden:There was, like, this wide spread trust and everything was fine. We are out of the pandemic, and we still have people who have backgrounds that were there when the in the 1st year of the pandemic where people were very forgiving. The standard has gone up. The pandemic is over. And now when you invite someone to a meeting with you and you bring them to your Zoom meeting, that is your office.
Kenneth Holden:And if this is a low context, low trust scenario where you're meeting people for the first time, they are not just studying you, they're looking at the background, they're looking at your lighting. They're looking at your sound. They're checking everything out. They're trying to see if they trust you. So when you are doing a Zoom meeting, they are coming to your office.
Kenneth Holden:You should make that Zoom meeting amazing. Absolutely amazing. And I'm gonna walk you through how to make your new office, which is now digital for many of us in direct selling. So I'm sorry if you're in real estate or car sales. For the most part, you're probably still on-site.
Kenneth Holden:But for many of us in direct selling, multilevel marketing, a lot of things are being done over Zoom. It's time to upgrade your office. If you haven't done it, it's time to fix it. So take your time, find out how you're gonna set your office up, make your office look amazing. It might take a $1,000.
Kenneth Holden:It might take $500. It might take 2 or $3,000. But if you're gonna be working there for the next 1 or 2 or 3 decades, put time into making your office a place that you want to go and set it up properly. And I'm gonna walk you through the most essential elements to setting up your office. So the first one is background.
Kenneth Holden:It should look professional. Choose a clean wall, nothing on it except a really well appointed picture. You can go to Walmart and you get lots of nice pictures wherever you wanna go or you if you are in of nice art or something of that nature, keep it simple, and I'm gonna give you a couple of tips. Don't make it busy. Make it so abstract seminars I've been in listening to experts, the mind will start to focus trying to figure out what's in a picture.
Kenneth Holden:So make it something that they can't do that with. Make it look beautiful, make it look simple, maybe have a green plant, but make it uncluttered. Don't put a bookshelf behind you because people start trying to figure out the names of the books, and it's just a bad idea. It might look sophisticated, but it doesn't work. You you wanna have something that is super simple, super clean, and super professional.
Kenneth Holden:So that's number 1. You don't have to over complicate this and you can make it look really great. Number 2 is lighting. I often see in Zoom terrible lighting. And so lighting is really important that you have that down right.
Kenneth Holden:It takes time to get it right. You might have to take a Saturday, sit there for 3 or 4 hours, but go to a good quality camera shop. Tell them you're set up, that you're working from home, you wanna make it better, take a picture with you of the house, make several pictures. They get an idea of what it is, and ask them what I should get for lighting. And there's gonna be, like, some really good high quality lighting that you can get.
Kenneth Holden:It might cost you 4, $500, but you can get some really good quality key lights and fill lights. They'll tell you how to set your office up. It will take you a few hours and a Saturday to get right. You will have to make adjustments, but it will make everything in your image look 10 times better. So super important to do that.
Kenneth Holden:So lighting is important. Now we get to the really important subject of sound is really important. In fact, this is something I've learned recently on YouTube, if your sound is excellent but your video quality is bad, they will still listen and not go to another video. But if your video quality is amazing, but the sound is bad, people tend to move on. So that sounds counterintuitive.
Kenneth Holden:You would think in a video, the video has to be perfect. That's not the case. It's the sound that has to be more important. How do you get good sound? You do not trust the microphone on your computer, Mac, or PC.
Kenneth Holden:Go out and get an 80, $100 mic. I use, RODE mics. I prefer RODE, just my personal preference. There's the RODE NT USB mini. But you can go to Best Buy or any of these electronic stores and ask for good quality plug and play mic, please.
Kenneth Holden:When you go, take a picture of your computer and the ports so that you get something that will fit into your computer. You have to have an external mic, and it is important because it will absolutely change how you sound and without even knowing it, it will dramatically improve your credibility. Make sure you have a current preferably a current Mac or PC. I use Macs. And you want something not so old that it slows everything down.
Kenneth Holden:So that's another key factor to make sure you have a good quality computer. So we got lighting, we got sound, and sound is super important. We gotta make sure we have a good PC. The next one here is Internet connection. Do not have those slow high speed networks.
Kenneth Holden:You say, that doesn't even make sense, slow high speed. You have to be careful with the term high speed. There's different levels of high speed. There is people who think they have high speed and actually have really low speed. So you really wanna preferably, if you're running a business or in sales, you wanna have something like a PureFibre optic network.
Kenneth Holden:That's gonna give you 5, 6, 700 megabyte download or upload or higher. So, pure PureFibre is essentially important, and then don't rely on Wi Fi. It's critically important to hardwire from your router in to your computer because Wi Fi is very subject to electromagnetic interference. So no matter how fast your Wi Fi network is, if electromagnetic wave from whatever flows through, it's gonna wipe out your network. You're gonna get frozen on screen.
Kenneth Holden:And, unfortunately, whenever our screen freezes, it's usually our worst pose as Murphy's Law. If you are getting gas and you drop the gas cap, so that doesn't happen anymore. It's often attached. It will roll to the center of the car. So for whatever reason, when we freeze on screen, it's always our worst pose.
Kenneth Holden:So you don't want that happen. You wanna reduce that. You can't control the Internet on the other side, but at least control yours. Get high speed true true high speed Internet and then hardwire from your modem and router into your Mac or your PC. That is, like, up there with oxygen.
Kenneth Holden:You don't wanna freeze. You don't wanna have the sound cutting out. You don't wanna have a scenario like the old Verizon commercials for those of you who are old enough to remember, can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Can you don't want that.
Kenneth Holden:You wanna eliminate the technology and make it literally fade into the background. So high speed Internet, make sure it's hardwired. Then the last thing you wanna do is make sure you're sitting properly in your picture that you're not sitting so low. A lot of people, you you get them their head top of their head is halfway down the screen that doesn't look good. You don't want your forehead disappearing over the top of the screen.
Kenneth Holden:You wanna be filling up that screen properly and if, you don't know how to do that, ask a friend. Just Zoom at somebody and just say, hey. How do I look in the picture? Am I sitting right? Ask someone who knows.
Kenneth Holden:Don't ask a random stranger. Make sure you ask people who might have some knowledge about how to best set up for video and stuff and ask them, am I sitting right in the camera? Get all of this down really well and so, again, the last point here is to test it with several different people asking them hey does this look right? Is my lighting good? Is my sound good?
Kenneth Holden:Is my background good? And let them tell you if it's good or not. So often when you're in a Zoom meeting, you think everything looks amazing until you get on the other side. And so ask several different people, how do I look? And again, preferably ask people who are in the know so that they can give you some real positive feedback and criticism that you should be welcome to.
Kenneth Holden:And, of course, then ask other people maybe who aren't so informed because many of the people you're meeting with aren't experts. But a lot of folks might not even notice that it looks amazing, but it will really help you to build trust on Zoom if you follow these things. Another very important point here that I want to emphasize is Zoom is the singular most distracted place on earth. People got text messages, emails, projects they're working on, surfing the Internet. They've got notifications coming in.
Kenneth Holden:There's so much going on that people take the advantage of multitasking, which is not a real thing. It's rapid task switching, but we won't get into that. The point is they're taking all the time in the world to not take this seriously and to go do other things, which they would not do if they were face to face. So we you and I are in the middle of selling in a very distracted environment, and we have to be aware of that if we're going to succeed. So the worst thing you can do in the Zoom era is to do these long monologues and so people are easily distracted and you need to break it up, use more visuals, have natural breaks if you're using a PowerPoint, maybe after every slide, use technology like a Stream Deck to rapidly switch between slides or stop sharing so that you keep disrupting the distraction.
Kenneth Holden:I hate to say it that way, but you're just you're disrupting the distractions of the customer who might be taken away. So when you actually come right back to stop sharing and they see you, they're back in and then so you have to keep at this. You have to keep at making sure you're finding ways to use visuals not so long at monologues, finding ways to engage the customer. Even Zoom now has a lot of third party apps you can use that are quite useful. You can use polls to ask people for some reason.
Kenneth Holden:So many different tools in there. I I'll dedicate a podcast to this on this sometime soon, but at minimum, know you're in a distracted environment. Super important to use visuals, not do monologues, engage with the customer, stop sharing, engage, reshare, engage, and make sure you're doing that or you're gonna lose the customer very quickly if it's a monologue. The other thing is use technology to keep yourself in focus with the customer and not your slides. Again, there's lots of third party software you can integrate into Zoom to make sure that the entire time you're screen sharing, they have a full view of you because that's important to maintain eye contact, and it also reduces their ability to be distracted.
Kenneth Holden:So they're coming to your office, make it amazing, set up your background, take time to build your office, set up your background, get the lighting, go to a proper video audio visual store, get a good microphone, always use an external microphone, get that background correct, get a true emphasis on true high speed internet connection, hardwire it into your computer, test with a friend, sit properly in the camera. Super important to get all of this down straight and please practice screen sharing so that it comes really easy. That is it for this week, get your Zoom office correct, if you're going to be selling on Zoom, it's a signature selling idea to make sure that everything is near perfect in your Zoom room. Thank you.
