As sales and account management professionals, we have seen and made countless presentations. There are many things we can do to ensure a positive outcome, such as doing our research and rehearsing our presentation.

Unfortunately, there are also many things we can do to drive a negative outcome. One of those things is to apologize for our presentation efforts. These apologies can come in both blatant and subtle phrases, such as:


"I'm sorry I'm not as organized or prepared as I'd like to be"
"I'm sorry I didn't have time to do my homework"
"I'm sorry I'm not prepared to address that point"
"This isn't my deck of slides and I'm not too familiar with it"
"This isn't a great slide..."
"I know this is a complicated slide, but..."
"I'm almost out of time, so I'll just hit this one quickly"


By using this type of phraseology, we are apologizing for our lack of preparedness or proficiency. Neither is a good idea. Instead of apologizing, we should make sure we are prepared and confident in our efforts. If we're not as prepared as we want to be, we have options. We can skip some slides we don't like or we can make the best of the situation and have a positive message for each slide we use. Instead of saying "This isn't a great slide" we can say "The key point of this slide is..." By doing this we are taking a positive stance and helping the customer cut through the noise to get the message we're trying to send.

Remember that the presentation is not the message, the presenter is. The audience will judge our presentations based on the confidence and enthusiasm we project as we deliver them.