Presenting & Storytelling

Presenting & Storytelling The two-day seminar for anyone who stands in front of people and wants to achieve something: you learn to build a talk that holds, to show numbers so they are understood, and to stand in front of a group in a way that makes people follow you.

Presenting & Storytelling at a glance

• Format: 2 days on site + self-learning track
• Level: foundation to advanced
• Participants: max. 16
• Language: English
• Certificate: AEI certificate of attendance
• Investment: 290.00 euro net plus VAT

Most bad presentations are not badly delivered. They are badly built. The speaker talks fluently, the slides are tidy, and at the end nobody knows what the point was. The audience took notes, it did not understand.

This seminar works on the structure first, then on the delivery. You learn to turn a goal into a structure, data into a statement, and a statement into a story that sticks. Only once that holds do we move to voice, presence and nerves.

You work on your own talk. Bring one you actually have to give — a quarterly review, a pitch for a business idea, a results round in your team.

What you take away

• A structure you can apply to any presentation in twenty minutes.
• The ability to extract the one core message instead of showing five of equal weight.
• Story patterns that work in e-commerce and do not sound like sales training.
• Rules for slides that hold and numbers that read without explanation.
• Techniques for voice, pace and pauses you can use without a practice programme.

Your learning objectives

• You formulate the goal of your talk in one sentence before building the first slide.
• You order your material so the audience can follow the argument.
• You show numbers so they make a statement instead of being a table.
• You speak loudly, slowly enough, and pause in the right places.
• You keep your structure when questions and objections come.

The levers at a glance

A talk without a goal is a list. Whoever cannot say what should be different afterwards does not have a talk, they have a pile of material. The goal decides scope, order and ending.

One core message, not five. Audiences keep one sentence. Whoever tries to fit five loses all five. The skill is in leaving things out — and in leaving things out, everyone is too timid at first.

Stories are not decoration, they are working memory. An abstract connection, put into a situation with a person and a problem, is remembered. The same connection as a slide with four bullets is forgotten. That applies to numbers too — especially to numbers.

Delivery is not talent, it is repetition. Stage fright does not go away by talking about it. It becomes manageable when you know your first sentences by heart, have entered the room beforehand, and know what happens in the first two minutes.

Who is this seminar for?

For people who speak in front of groups regularly and feel their content is better than their effect.

• Specialists who have to present results without being marketing professionals.
• Founders pitching to investors.
• Managers who want to convince in meetings rather than merely report.
• Anyone who gets nervous before presentations and refuses to accept that as a personality trait.

The seminar assumes no stage or rhetoric training. Anyone with a goal and a talk to prepare brings everything needed.

It is not for people who mainly want to work on charisma. We work on structure and craft, which is more reliable and can be learned.

Investment and dates

Participation costs 290.00 euro net plus VAT, including the self-learning track, materials and certificate of attendance. There are six dates per year in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich and live online, plus an in-house version for teams. All dates are listed on this page.

Funding through a training voucher or professional development programme is possible; we check what that looks like in your case before booking.

After the seminar

You keep the structure patterns as a one-page checklist, the slide templates in two variants, and the recording of your own practice talk. Two weeks after the seminar you receive a short follow-up with one exercise for your next talk.

If you like, we review your next real presentation in one-to-one coaching before you give it.

For teams the seminar is available as an in-house event using your own templates and talks. The structure stays the same, the examples come from you.

Programme: 2 days

Day 1 – Structure and dramaturgy

• From goal to structure
• The core message
• Why stories work
• Story structures in e-commerce
• Slides that hold
• Showing data understandably

Day 2 – Delivery, media and follow-up

• Voice and presence
• Handling stage fright
• Questions and objections
• Follow-up and effect

Both days run from 09:00 to 16:15 with breaks in the morning, at midday and in the afternoon.

Each day has three parts: a short introduction to the pattern, an exercise on your own talk, and a review in the group. At the end of day one you deliver three minutes of the talk you are working on; on day two, ten.

The seminar includes a self-learning track. It contains the patterns from both days as short units with examples and a self-test each. You can work through it before the date to clarify terms, or afterwards to repeat what stuck and what did not. It does not replace the two days — it keeps what you learned from fading after four weeks.

The track also contains the two feedback sheets we use in the room, so you can keep evaluating talks — your own and other people's — in the same way afterwards.

The room matters less than you think. A talk that is well built survives a bad beamer. A talk that is not built well cannot be saved by a good one. That is why we spend most of day one on paper and structure rather than on slides and effects.

Our approach

We work on your talk, not on examples from a textbook. You bring one you actually have to give and leave with a revised structure for it. Between the two days there is time to implement one sequence.

The exercises are short and repeat in variations. That is deliberate: structure is not changed by insight but by practice on real material.

Work happens in pairs, in threes and in the group, with changing partners. Every participant receives feedback on their effect, not only on their wording. The camera runs, and the recording is yours afterwards — it stays in the room, not on the net.