If you’ve got a presentation coming up here are three tips to help you deliver an engaging, impactful and action driving business presentation that achieves its desired outcomes.
Your presentation might be to colleagues, or a potential client or possibly at an event. Whatever it is it’s important, otherwise why deliver it.
So what’s your plan?
Dig out a previous presentation, make a few tweaks and then rock up and press go?
Aim to spend time preparing and practising, recognising that some of that time will get shelved as something will come up that takes ‘priority’?
Work with a presentation coach to ensure you deliver an impactful, on point, engaging and action inducing presentation?
Whatever route you take here are three tips to help you deliver a great presentation:
Don’t fill your slides with lots of words – if you put words on a slide you are only doing so for someone to read them – that’s you and/or your audience. Ideally you don’t want to read from your slides as if you do you will almost certainly be turning your back on your audience. If your audience start reading the words on the slides they won’t then be listening to you. Words on slides should be prompts not scripts! So keep them to a minimum – start with a single word and add if you really need to.
Before you plan your presentation answer this one question: ‘Why are you presenting and what do you want the outcome to be?’ The answer is the purpose of your presentation. Build your presentation around that purpose. If you find yourself including stuff that is all very nice but doesn’t help you achieve your purpose then be a ruthless editor and leave it out.
Run on time. Most occasional presenters really struggle to run to the time they are allocated. If you’ve got a 15 minute presentation slot and take 20 you’re unlikely to be popular with the organisers, the audience and the next presenters. Here’s how to avoid running over on time. When you practise time your delivery and aim for taking no more than 80-85% of the allocated time. So for a 20 minute presentation that’s 16-17 minutes. Take 20 minutes in practice and you are almost guaranteed to run over on the day.
There we go – I hope that’s helpful
And if you do decide to hire a coach to help you deliver that engaging, memorable, impactful and action inducing presentation I’d be keen to offer my services so do drop me a message and we can talk about any help you think you need – trevor@trevorjlee.com
If you need help with your presenting check my offerings here: https://www.trevorjlee.com/presentation-training/
And if you prefer to learn in your own time at your own pace then follow this link to my series of on-demand presentation courses, each of which come with a 1:1 coaching session: https://www.ondemandpresentationcourses.com/
