BEP 246 – Product Presentations in English (2)

Product Presentation in English

Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson on giving a product presentation in English.

There’s no better way to show off a new product than talking to a group of customers directly. You can teach them about the product and gently persuade them that they need it. And you can adapt your presentation for specific audiences. Whether you’re at a trade show, a corporate event, a conference, or a customer’s office, you can learn to work the crowd in front of you.

Working the crowd during a product presentation is probably familiar to anyone who works in sales and marketing. But the techniques involved are useful for anyone in a company who has to talk about products or deliver presentations. In this lesson, we’ll cover many of these useful techniques, including relating changes to customer feedback, highlighting user benefits, and demonstrating a feature. We’ll also look at anticipating concerns and encouraging questions from the audience.

In the dialog, we’ll rejoin Jenny, who’s presenting a new software upgrade to a group of customers at a trade conference. She’ll also be joined by Tony, who works for a partner company called PaySys. Together, Jenny and Tony are explaining how their products work together.

Listening Questions

1. What does Tony say customers have asked for?
2. Tony mentions a few benefits of the recent product changes. What are they?
3. What does Jenny think that some people might be concerned about?

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BEP 245 – Product Presentations in English (1)

Product Presentation English

Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson on giving a product presentation in English.

Okay, so imagine your company has just launched a brand new product, or a new and improved version of an existing one. Now it’s time to get the word out and show the world what this new product is all about. And how do we do that? Well, nothing beats a great product presentation. You can go to the customer directly and show off the item, talk about its features, and demonstrate how it works.

So how can we make sure our product presentations are effective? How can we talk to our customers in ways they understand? Fortunately, there are several key techniques you can learn to deliver a great product presentation. In this lesson, we’ll cover many of these techniques, including presenting the current situation, relating features to audience needs, and giving an overview of features. We’ll also look at how to call attention to something on-screen and deal with technical issues, which can mess up any well-planned presentation.

In the dialog, we’ll hear Jenny, who’s at a trade conference representing her company, ProBooks. They’ve just launched a new upgrade called ProBooks Fusion, and Jenny’s explaining what it’s all about to an audience of existing customers.

Listening Questions

1. What is the key concept behind the most recent ProBooks upgrade?
2. What feature of the software does Jenny want to demonstrate?
3. What is Jenny’s solution to the technical problem?

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Skills 360 – Running a Brainstorming Session 2

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Welcome back to Skills 360 for today’s lesson on how to run an effective brainstorming session.

Have you ever conducted a brainstorming session that simply goes nowhere? A few people throw out some ideas, but most participants seem uninspired or bored? You ask questions, but people don’t answer? Well, today I want to give you some tips for kickstarting the process and getting the juices flowing.

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Skills 360 – Running a Brainstorming Session 1

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Welcome back to Skills 360 for today’s lesson on how to run a brainstorming session or meeting.

Every company uses brainstorming sessions to generate ideas and solve problems. But do all brainstorming sessions generate good ideas? Does everyone leave a brainstorming session feeling like they accomplished something? Well, that often depends on the facilitator. And if you are the one to run the show, there are several things you need to think about.

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BEP 244 – Debriefing a Project (Part 2)

English for Project Management

In this Business English Pod lesson, we look at discussing the outcome of a project.

When you, your team, or your company finish a project, what do you do? Do you rush into the next project and put the last one behind you? Or do you take the time to talk about what you’ve done and try to learn from your mistakes? Let’s think about this another way: do you find that certain problems keep coming up in one project after another? Well, they don’t have to. Not if you take the time to learn, to discuss, and to debrief.

Yes, it’s important to discuss the projects we’ve completed. And in these types of discussions native speakers will use many common and useful expressions. Sometimes we call these useful expressions “collocations.” That’s a fancy way to talk about a natural combination of words. Just think about an expression like “to launch a new product.” We don’t say “start” a new product, or “let out” a new product. The natural collocation is “launch a new product.” As you listen to the dialog, try to pick out some of these expressions and we’ll go through them later in our own debrief.

In the dialog, we’re going to rejoin Dean and Michelle, whose company has just finished a project to expand a manufacturing plant. In our last lesson, they talked about some of the successes and delays in the project. Today, we’ll hear them talk about how to resolve some of the problems they experienced.

Listening Questions

1. What is Dean’s main concern about the problem with City Steel?
2. What was another contributing factor in project delays?
3. What does Dean suggest to Michelle about how to do things better?

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