Avoid the 7 biggest presentation pitfalls.
As a professional speaker I must have witnessed thousands of presentations given by people in the corporate world, non-professional speakers who have been pushed on to the stage and told to give a speech. Many of them are nervous, few of them are well prepared and most are completely misinformed about what is required, what will work and what will make a great presentation.
Here are 7 simple rules for preparing and delivering a presentation that will WOW your audience:
- Start preparing very early – one of the most common things I see when I am speaking at a conference is non-professional speakers preparing the slides or rewriting their words 10 minutes before they are due to deliver the presentation! If you prepare your presentation several weeks before you are due to deliver it then your subconscious will have a chance to work on it and perfect it for you.
- Use a tried and tested structure – in my experience very few presenters understand what the OBJECTIVE of their presentation is, and I often see speeches that are totally devoid of any structure. They have no strong opening, no logical sequence in the middle, and no call-to-action at the end. There are many different speech structures available and they are easy to find on Google or YouTube.
- Understand the proper use of VISUAL AIDS in a presentation – I have heard several presenters say that their words are so powerful that an audience won’t need any visuals. This approach fails to take into account how people best learn and understand information. Many people also believe that showing a slide containing bullet points of information to the audience constitutes good use of visuals. A bullet list is almost always just your notes – the points you want to make. Putting this list on screen will not help your audience to understand and implement what you are asking them to do.
- Make sure you practice enough – another reason for early preparation is to give you time to practice. Any musician or sportsman could tell you that it takes hours and hours of practice to be able to perform something perfectly under pressure. We all improve when we practice but poor presenters tend to fail to grasp this simple idea and just decide to ‘wing it’, hoping that things will turn out for the best!
- Plan time at the start to build audience rapport – All comedians and musical stars understand that they need to create some rapport with their audience BEFORE they start performing. It’s not spontaneous when they say things like ‘it’s great to be here in your wonderful city’ before starting their first joke or song. Everyone likes to feel important and special and it is the presenter’s job to find a way to do that at the beginning of their presentation.
- Have a conversation with the audience, don’t lecture them – few people attend a meeting or conference to learn what they have been doing wrong, or to find out 100 new ways of doing something better. They prefer to be informed in an entertaining way and to be ‘offered’ ideas, not have them rammed down their throats! Telling people what to do rarely works, but having a relaxed conversation with them, asking them questions and telling them stories, does.
- Make your presentation about them, not you – We need to introduce ourselves at the start of a presentation but we will lose the audience if we continue just talking about ourselves, what we can do and what we have achieved. We need to turn the talk to one where we speak about the audience, their problems, their concerns and then provide them with a solution that can help them achieve what they want to achieve.
If you bear these simple rules in mind when planning your next presentation then, believe me, your audience will thank you for it!