5 Tips for your next Presentation
Your next Presentation is looming. It might be to an audience at an event, to colleagues, to investors or to a potential new client. Whoever it is you are presenting to you clearly want to make the most of the opportunity.
So here are 5 tips for your next presentation to help you deliver a successful and engaging presentation. All of them are easy to implement and are the ones I shared to a business group earlier this week – which I did without slides – there’s a challenge for you – a presentation without slides!
If you’re looking for a high energy speaker to inspire your business group and to help them deliver better presentations going forward give me a shout. In the meantime, use these five tips to make the most of your next presentation opportunity:
- What’s the Outcome? Before you begin to prepare your presentation ask yourself – ‘what do I want the outcome to be?’ – after the presentation has finished what do you hope to have achieved? what do you want your audience to do? what do you want to happen next? This is the Purpose of your presentation – the reason why you are presenting. Outcomes might be inspire your team, share information, attract a new customer, raise your profile, promote a new product or service….
- Be ruthless with your content – Your content should benefit your audience and help you achieve your desired outcome. So make it, particularly at the beginning, about your audience and why what you are sharing will be of interest and benefit to them. Don’t talk about you and how great you are. If any of your content doesn’t help achieve your outcome leave it out, no matter how much you want it in! Remember your audience want to be engaged, educated, enthused, even entertained by you. So no drum banging, awards, client logos or team pics at the start!
- Slides – Almost all presenters feel the need to use slides. If that’s you then consider this: minimise the words, don’t write in sentences, don’t read the slides and ensure any words can easily be seen by all of the audience. Lots of slides with few words is better than few slides with lots of words. Think about using props. Slides are a prompt not a script.
- Keep your audience informed – run the presentation as though it were a meeting – tell your audience what’s coming up (but don’t have an agenda looking slide), share the key content, and then summarise what you’ve told them. In the first bit remind them how long you’ll be presenting for, how questions will work, what you will be sharing, what you hope they will want to do when you’ve finished. If you use slides introduce the next slide before your press the clicker.
- Preparation and Practice – Do thorough preparation – who are you presenting to? what are they expecting? How much time have you been allocated? will there be a Q&A? what kit will you use?. Take practice seriously. Speak out-loud standing up if that is how you will be delivering your presentation. Time it and to get the timing right on the day in practice aim to deliver in 80-85% of the allocated time. Investing time in preparation and practice will make such a difference.
There we go 5 Tips for your next Presentation – I hope they are useful
Connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me an email trevor@trevorjlee.com
I am looking for people to trial my on-demand short courses for free in return for feedback. The courses are:
How to be a Confident Presenter
How to Start your Presentation
Win More Sales Pitches
Interested ? then drop me an email and I’ll send you more details and a code to get the course you choose for free.
