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Hello and welcome back to Business English Pod for today's lesson on describing trends during a presentation.
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Every great presentation has two things, good content and skilled delivery.
These aren't separate features.
The content becomes good through skill delivery.
And skill delivery means bringing the content alive, rather than just reading from a slide deck.
This marriage of content and delivery is especially important with charts and graphs.
Many people know that visuals can enhance a presentation, but we've all had the experience of seeing a graph that's so confusing that we come away feeling we know less, not more.
So as a good presenter, you need to tell the graph's story.
A graph's story is all about change, or lack of change.
When we are presenting a graph, it's always good to begin by introducing the theme, so people know what they're looking at.
Then we can bring people's attention to specific parts of the graph and we might describe how things are decreasing, staying the same or increasing.
In today's dialogue we'll rejoin a presentation from Pat, a director with a mobile phone company called Ambient.
Pat is giving a presentation to his sales team about market share.
He's talking about their own company as well as the competition, describing the trends in market share.
As you listen to the dialogue, try to answer the following questions.
One, what does Pat say is a theme of the chart that he's showing?
Two, which company's market share decreased in 2007?
3.
What does Pat say about the market share of all the smaller competitors in recent quarters?
Alright, let's leave sales there and move on to market share.
Now this graph shows us the trend in market share starting in the first quarter of 2006, moving up to the present.
The vertical axis represents billions of US dollars.
Looking at the figures for 2006, Cirrus had the biggest slice of the pie.
After remaining unchanged at around 30 for the first half, their share started fluctuating in Q3 and Q4.
Meanwhile, we were struggling to catch Kaltel as their budget models came online.
That said, we were still able to hold our ground thanks to some hard work on your part.
Things get interesting when we compare the latest IDG figures for spring 2007.
Recently, as you know, Cirrus has taken a hit on the release of their problematic G3 rollout.
Actually, their share has slipped back a couple of points to about 27%.
Meanwhile, Calltel has grown, largely at their expense.
Our own position has been further consolidated this year as we successfully fended off competition from Calltel on the bottom end and gained on Cirrus in the prime multimedia segment.
And let me just draw your attention here to the effects of the new Asian players entering our market, as we see their growth reflected in the 5 increase of the combined others group, which now accounts for over a quarter of the entire European market.
All things considered, the exec team is fairly pleased with the overall picture on market share and the underlying trends for 2007.
Now let's go through the presentation again and look at the language and techniques Pat used to describe the trends in the graph of market share.
Market share is basically how much of the total market a company has captured.
It's often expressed as a percentage.
All right, let's leave sales there and move on to market share.
Now this graph shows us the trend in market share starting in the first quarter of 2006, moving up to the present.
The vertical axis represents billions of US dollars.
Many graphs show us how something changes over time.
In this case, Pat is talking about how the market share of different phone companies has changed.
He tells his audience clearly that they'll be talking about trends in market share.
A trend is just a pattern or direction of change.
As Pat shows, it's a good idea to tell people exactly what they're looking at when you use a chart or graph.
If you give them a clear idea of the overall theme, then they will understand your explanation better.
Let's try some more ways of introducing a chart's theme.
Now let's look here at what has happened with revenue this year.
This chart gives you a general overview of the structure of our department.
We can see how employee satisfaction has changed over time in this graph.
This particular slide will show you how much change we've seen in the industry.
Now, Pat mentioned that the vertical axis is billions of US dollars.
The vertical axis is the up and down aspect of a line graph.
The right to left aspect is called the horizontal axis.
In this case, the horizontal axis shows time.
Let's listen as Pat points out key trends.
Looking at the figures for 2006, Cirrus had the biggest slice of the pie.
After remaining unchanged at around 30 for the first half, their share started fluctuating in Q3 and Q4.
Even fairly simple graphs require us to figure out what we're looking at.
And a good presenter doesn't let people spend too much time feeling lost.
Instead, she will draw attention to certain parts of the graph to help people see what's important.
Pat is pointing out the trends of the market share, or slice of the pie of one of their biggest competitors called Cirrus.
As he says, their market share stayed the same for half the year, then started fluctuating or changing.
What are some other ways we can draw people's attention to one part of a graph?
Let's run through some more examples.
Let's zoom in on Q2.
Notice the strong relationship between cost per unit and revenue.
I'd like you to focus on the key trend here, headcount.
Now let's hear Pat talk about what happened when another competitor introduced a new, cheaper line of cell phones.
Meanwhile, we were struggling to catch Calltel as their budget models came online.
That said, we were still able to hold our ground thanks to some hard work on your part.
Charts don't just show change.
They also show when things don't change, for better or worse.
In this case, Pat is talking about how their company held their ground or maintained the same market share.
When there's more competition, remaining unchanged might appear as a success.
There are other ways of describing a trend in which something stays unchanged.
We might use words like steady or stable, as you can hear in the following examples.
You can see here that prices started to level off last month.
Revenue growth was fairly flat for the first part of the year.
As you just heard, sometimes we use the word flat to describe something that isn't changing, because that's what the line looks like over time.
Flat.
Now, how do we talk about decreasing trends?
Let's listen.
Things get interesting when we compare the latest IDG figures for spring 2007.
Recently, as you know, Cirrus has taken a hit on the release of their problematic G3 rollout.
Actually, their share has slipped back a couple of points to about 27%.
As Pat moves into talking about the current year, he is showing how Cirrus has decreased in market share.
You can imagine this appearing as a line going down from left to right.
He talks about how Cirrus took a hit, which means the results were disappointing.
He also says their share has slipped back, meaning it has gone down.
What are some other ways of talking about a decreasing trend?
Notice in the following examples how we often use adverbs like slightly or sharply to describe the significance of the change.
Overall, prices have decreased sharply this year.
After 2024, stock prices plummeted by 30%.
Market share has shrunk 5% in the last six months, bottoming out in May at 18%.
You've just heard other words meaning decrease like plummet, which means decrease a lot, and shrink, which generally means a smaller decrease.
But what about describing numbers that are going up?
Meanwhile, Calltel has grown, largely at their expense.
Our own position has been further consolidated this year as we successfully fended off competition from Calltel on the bottom end and gained on Cirrus in the prime multimedia segment.
In this part of the presentation, Pat is talking about how the different companies changed in relation to each other.
Market share isn't unlimited.
One company grows at the expense of another company, meaning the other company loses share.
And Pat talks about how they fended off or protected their share in one part of the market while gaining from Cirrus in another.
Next, Pat talks about a graph line showing others, or all the smaller competing companies as a group.
And let me just draw your attention here to the effects of the new Asian players entering our market, as we see their growth reflected in the 5 increase of the combined others group, which now accounts for over a quarter of the entire European market.
Notice that Pat is talking about a 5 increase to the others group of companies, so he's talking about how much that has changed, before mentioning their current market share.
Again, it's the changes or lack of change that is important.
Pat used the word increase to mean that a number is going up over time.
We might also use words like gain, rise, and improvement, as you can hear in these examples.
We've seen incremental gains for most of the year.
Activity has increased dramatically in the last 30 days.
Overall, we've seen a 15% improvement in customer satisfaction.
Sales rose from 30 million in Q1 to 35 million in Q2.
Pat has talked about several different companies and how their market share has increased, decreased or stayed the same.
But what's the overall story?
Let's listen.
All things considered, the exec team is fairly pleased with the overall picture on market share and the underlying trends for 2007.
The overall picture or story is positive for Pat's company.
He mentions that the executive team is pleased with the underlying trends.
The underlying trends are the basic patterns or directions that the graph is showing, and Pat has done a good job of explaining the whole story to his audience.
Now let's practice some of the language we learned in today's lesson.
Imagine you're giving a presentation to a group of managers about customer satisfaction.
I'll ask you to make statements that describe a chart showing satisfaction in different regions.
We'll guide you through each step in the practice and provide an example answer for each response.
Ready?
Let's give it a go.
Start by introducing a chart that shows changes in customer satisfaction.
Answer.
Let's have a look here at changes in customer satisfaction.
Now, tell the audience that you'd like them to focus on the past six months.
First, let's take a closer look at the past six months.
Next, state that in most regions, customer satisfaction has remained steady.
In most regions, we can see that customer satisfaction has remained steady.
Now, point out that satisfaction has dropped by 11% in North America.
Answer.
But I want to point out that satisfaction has dropped by 11% in North America.
Finally, state that you've also seen a 15% increase in complaints in the same region.
We have also seen a 15% increase in complaints in this region.
We've reached the end of this lesson on how to describe trends on a graph during a presentation.
We've covered how to introduce the theme of a chart and how to draw people's attention to specific points.
We've also learned how to talk about numbers going up, going down, and staying the same.
For more practice.
Premium members can access the online resources and PDF transcripts for this and other lessons on the BEP website.
Thanks for listening, and see you again soon.
