III. Project work

Prepare to give a business presentation. Choose one of the samples offered.

• Try to revise the model samples for study and analysis (A, B) as a preliminary exercise.

• Observe the use of phonostylistically relevant pitch patterns, rhythm, rate, volume.

• Try not to forget that making business presentations has a different purpose of communication and a different rhetoric strategy.

• Before trying to prepare this project for your classroom performance practise over the lecture and political speech samples. Concentrate on the invariant phonostylistic features to contrast those of making business presentations.

• Look back at your last performance when you are preparing for your next one and consider:

• Is your voice boring?

• Do you speak in a monotone or vary your pitch?

• Is the speed of your delivery constant? Varied?

• Do you drop your voice at the end of an utterance?

• How do you make a point or emphasize a key issue? Do you raise your voice? Do you speak more slowly? More quickly?

Note: As you speak you emphasize certain words in each sentence. Emphasis affects the message. It does two things:

1. it provides the “realistic sound” to the message;

2. it sends nonverbal personal messages about the speaker and thus adds information to the message.

Try and use emphasis appropriately. Raise volume to sound authoritative. Raise pitch to sound disbelieving. Lower your volume and pitch to sound professional or reasonable. The result will make your message more dynamic and your listener more receptive to it.

• use the assessment form to evaluate each other’s presentation technique. If possible record your performance and use the recording for feedback

			excellent
		good
	fair
poor

• articulation

• pitch patterns

• rhythm

• rate

• volume

Sample A

Director of NETCOUNT Software Ltd outlining the competitive position of the company

What I’d like to do is to outline a SWOT analysis of the company, which we have recently carried out. As I’m sure you all know, SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

So let’s start with the strengths. It’s apparent that our main competitive advantage is our range of products. Our accounts software packages are perceived as the most user-friendly on the market, relatively easy to install, requiring much less training than our competitors’ packages and representing better value for money. So, all in all we’ve got an excellent product. Our other main strength is our people – especially on the after-sales side. Our after-sales team is perceived as faster, more qualified, friendlier and generally more efficient than our competitors’. This applies both to the helpdesk and the field maintenance people.

Right. Let’s turn to the weaknesses. Although we have such a strong product, we haven’t achieved the sort of market penetration we should have. Basically this is because our marketing is not so effective as our competitors’. One especially, STERLING, has a much stronger presence in the market both in terms of sales and profile. We’ve relied too heavily on product quality, not enough on promotion. We’ve got to put considerably more effort into our advertising and direct mail campaigns.

So, that brings me to the opportunities. We’re clearly not taking the opportunity we have to dominate the small business user market. We could be achieving significantly higher sales – I estimate fifty to sixty percent more. We could also be building a much more extensive customer base – this would ensure a more secure future as well.

Our main threat, of course, is STERLING. They’ve got a much more impressive dealer network and their promotion is a lot more sophisticated than ours. On the other hand, we’ve got the better range of products. We should be capitalizing on this.

Sample B

A director of Logistics describes the supply and distribution chain in his electronics business.

One of the key areas of our operations is logistics – namely the management of materials movement – all the way through from raw materials supply to end-customer delivery. It’s vital from two points of view: firstly, customer satisfaction in terms of quality and delivery times; and secondly, internal financial control in terms of inventory levels and manufacturing costs.

Now what I want to do today is to take you through the process and identify some key areas for improvement, both in quality and timing.

So, as you can see on this foil, the process starts with the supply of raw materials – mainly board – to our cutting room at the start of the production process. We stock – maximum – five days’ supply of board to manage fluctuations in demand – I’ll come back to this later. So, the board moves on into the primary production process where it is coated; the coated board then moves forward to the assembly line where it is joined by, firstly, a supply of electronic components and secondly, the supply of chemicals for the assembly process. These chemicals and components are stocked on a ten-day demand basis in our stores on site. The printed circuit boards are then assembled and transported into the finished product stock area, where we currently hold five days’ average production volume. Finally the finished boards are packed - we receive our packaging material on a weekly order basis – and then loaded onto trucks for distribution to our customers.

Now, we can identify three potential bottlenecks which can lead to inventory levels rising to unacceptably high levels. One I mentioned at the start, where we supply the boards for cutting before they move onto the coating stage: as I said, we supposedly stock five days’ supply. That’s OK …

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