Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

Secrets of Putting Together Great Presentations

Businessman presenting in front of projection screen

How many times have you been impressed with presentations you have attended? Have you seen people like Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Armand Morin, Robert Kiyosaki, Donald Trump etc. present in front of large audience, the complete group seems to be mesmerized by what they are sharing and the style in which they are sharing it.

How would you like to create and deliver great presentations? Let me share with you the secret formula of highly effective presentations.

I divide the secrets of putting together great presentation in 2 parts:

-      Preparation

-      Delivery

Preparation

A very simply structure of presentation that I learnt during my MBA course is:

-      Tell them what you are going to tell them (what to expect)

-      Tell them the content (meat)

-      Tell them what you told them (summary and action point/s)

That’s it. No fancy formula.

It’s about setting expectations in the beginning, so, you need to tell them what you are going to cover in your presentation, outline the objectives. This is like telling your listeners the favourite channel they want to hear WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). You presentation should start with an impact; we are majorly impressed when someone throws startling data at us, something that we never knew or some startling revelation. Do a good research on your topic and put together first couple of slides that will catch their attention. Very much like salesletter, we need to have an impressive start.

State the objectives of your presentation, what you are planning to accomplish from the presentation or what will they achieve by the end of presentation. This kind of tells them what they will know by the end of your presentation.

Dive in to the content, present your topic; here also it will be good to have numbers and facts as a part of your coverage. I am planning to write a separate post about what to cover in your presentation to make it impressive. But, one thing that I can say for sure is, know your topic really well. It can be through Google search or you are an expert in your field. But, you need to know more than what your audience knows. This is to ensure that they respect you.

Finally, conclude with a summary of what you covered in your presentation and put in action item. People would like to know the take away and what you expect them to do. So, it is very crucial to tell them the action point, also, have some time for question and answer session.

That’s in brief about Preparation part. Now, let’s talk about Delivery.

Delivery

The presentation that seems to be very natural and effortless, be rest assured that lots of effort gone in by the presenter to make it effortless. Have you read The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo? The author mentions that before any public presentation Steve Jobs presents in front of his launch team for at least 2-3 days, they ensure that the presentation is flawless and smooth.

Whether you are delivering a presentation on stage or webinar, you should rehearse it and ensure that you are not always reading the slides verbatim. The content on slide should be small bulleted points and supported by clip arts or photos where ever possible. Don’t put everything on slide, you should use slides as starting point to expand the thoughts. When making public presentation it is important to make eye contact with your listeners than just reading through your slides. Would you like someone who is just reading through the PPT without even looking at you throughout the presentation?

Rehearsing is also important to time yourself. Be it seminar, knowledge sharing session or webinar, you want to ensure that you stick to the time given to you for delivering your presentation, if people have more questions and that needs extra time, that’s fine. But, you should aim to complete your main presentation in stipulated time.

While you are delivering the presentation ensure that you take pauses at appropriate places, check with your audience whether they are following or not, check with them if they are fine with your pace or not and invite participation from them. While sharing factual data or numbers, speak as naturally as possible, without putting great emphasis, the impact of data should be felt by them and not by you in your voice, because you have already gathered the data and digested it to deliver in your presentation1 J

While concluding your presentation thank your audience for sitting through and listening to you, tell them what you covered and finally tell them the action you expect from them. This technique can be used in sales presentation, information sharing session or webinar.

So, there you are with the simple formula revealing the secrets of great presentations. Have a format to your presentation which lists objectives, meaty content and summary with action point; follow this with rehearsal and sound delivery.

Share some techniques that you use while making presentations?

Related posts:

  1. The PERMANENT Formula to Package Your Knowledge for Maximum Sales – 2

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Category: Marketing / Webinar