Putting Your Presentation Pieces Together

This Blog Series has been a blast to write. In short snippets you’ve gotten practical and hopefully useful content on all aspects of planning/delivering presentations.

NOTE: “Presentations” = formal and informal speeches, or when you’re on a conference call, or chairing a meeting. Practically every time you open your mouth.

These next few blogs will be around final observations on your “presentations”.

1. Be engaged and engaging. Start with something besides, “Today we are going to discuss 4^th quarter results.” Rather – “Remember when you played on a seesaw during recess in elementary school? Today we will talk about the “Seesaw Effect” of our product as it relates to 4^th quarter gains.”
2. Less is more. Please don’t inundate your listeners with endless PowerPoint slides with tiny print, indecipherable graphs and quotes that you read verbatim. Kill me now. Actually, your audience has died. They look alive but they’re reading texts on their watches.
3. Use more examples, metaphors & stories. Create word pictures by comparing your subject to something universal. I.e.: “Your brain is like a sieve: you retain 25% of what the listener says and 75% goes through your sieve-head holes.”
4. Know what you want to gain – your Call To Action. Up front, know what you want your Board of Directors, Vice Presidents in your company, or your team to do, think, or feel differently as a result of your time in front of them.
5. Know who you are talking to – what makes them tick? If you say to a corporate audience at Disney, “Let’s not Mickey-Mouse around here…” you can, at that exact moment, pack up your notes and leave!

Stay tuned to our next blog in this series on final fix-its on how to give a presentation.

Karen Cortell Reisman, M.S., author of 3 books and President of Speak For Yourself®, works with organizations and executives on how to communicate to make more money. It’s all in how you speak for yourself. Read more at www.SpeakForYourself.com/blog/