We always want our business presentations to get off to a great start, but many of us find that our openings are not as strong as we would like them to be. 

Sometimes, presenters spend lots of time planning what they want to say, but when they step in front of their audience, something is missing.

Sometimes, when a presenter begins to speak, they  worry that a lack of confidence is going to let them down, 

Sometimes, the audience stops paying attention after just a few moments, and there's a risk that the presenter's important message will go unheard. 

If you recognize yourself in any of these situations, this spotlight course can help. We'll show you how you can look, sound, and be more confident in creating and delivering engaging, effective, and audience-centred presentation openings. 

Business Presentations: Opening with Confidence is a self-paced course, with a total estimated time for completion of two to three hours. The course also contains optional reflection questions and tasks which may increase the overall completion time for participants who choose to use them. 

The course highlights an often overlooked part of business presentations: the Question and Answer session. It briefly reviews direct and indirect question structures, then gives advice on how to prepare for the most common questions, before guiding students through the process of:

• Opening the floor to questions
• Acknowledging the question
• Rephrasing questions and clarifying them
• Deciding whether to answer questions or not, and
• Checking back with the questioner.

For each part, the student has access to common expressions to use, so that they can feel confident to deal with any questions.

This course teaches participants how to successfully move through each step of a business negotiation. It includes common language used in written negotiation, a section on negotiation etiquette, practice tasks to help students use the language they are learning, and a realistic scenario that puts the language into use.

This course is suitable for people who need to negotiate as part of their job, or who regularly deal with customer requests and problems. It is also suitable for people who want to further develop their business communication skills for career development.