A presentation in a meeting or at an event is meant to be the beginning, not the end, of a conversation. So why are you bombarding people with copious and irrelevant information in your slide deck? And why are you so boring?
I know a lot of people who are much better presenting something in a phone meeting than in person. I guess they probably feel safer behind the artificial, impenetrable barrier of a phone or web connection, strong in the knowledge that whatever happens they will not have to withstand the heat of physical interaction with real people.
When stepping on stage and given the task to present, even to an often moderate number of people, the phone/web-presenters typically move around awkwardly, stumble upon their own words, hardly look at the audience or stare fearfully into space when asked a question they don’t necessarily understand or know how to answer.
I admit it: I’ve been guilty of the above in my early days. But little by little, with patience and a lot of practice, I started to develop a sort of health checklist for my own purpose, which I routinely use when preparing slides and materials to support my talks and presentations.
In doing that, I compiled a down to earth, practical explanation of why most presenters, and their presentations, usually suck. The “you” in the list below was actually the “me” staring back from the mirror.
Great presenters are great storytellers, who in turn become great entertainers. Your business presentation should first and foremost entertain the audience, then captivate it and only then inform. Or it should at least disrupt the audience to the degree of them wanting to chase you out of the room!
This checklist has served me well so far, and I make the effort to consistently go through it before any speaking engagement. The final litmus test I run is the following:
When stepping on stage and given the task to present, even to an often moderate number of people, the phone/web-presenters typically move around awkwardly, stumble upon their own words, hardly look at the audience or stare fearfully into space when asked a question they don’t necessarily understand or know how to answer.
I admit it: I’ve been guilty of the above in my early days. But little by little, with patience and a lot of practice, I started to develop a sort of health checklist for my own purpose, which I routinely use when preparing slides and materials to support my talks and presentations.
In doing that, I compiled a down to earth, practical explanation of why most presenters, and their presentations, usually suck. The “you” in the list below was actually the “me” staring back from the mirror.
- You don’t start with why. Simon Sinek articulated this topic in his book “Start with Why?” much better than I can possibly do here. But reality is, it’s all very simple. We might care about what you do and even how you do it, but not for very long if you don’t tell us why you do it. The why is the sustainable motivation for us to believe in your proposition. At the end of the day, how you do something is about execution, which is clearly very important. But if you are clear on the why, you tell us about your purpose and that’s the most important thing we want to know, whether we want to buy from you, invest in your enterprise, join your club, read your book or simply use your services.
- You talk too much. I’m sure you like the sound of your voice, but we might not. Talking too much is definitely a sign of being uncomfortable, kind of using all the conversation bandwidth yourself so others cannot interject and cause you trouble. Talking too much can lead to talking too fast, which is in itself another mistake, especially if you are not a native speaker in that language (your tongue will twist words here and there) or if the audience is made up by different nationalities (you will lose them along the way).
- “Yes”, “No” and “Don’t know but I will find out” are all perfectly good answers, which you never use enough. If you know your subject and are clear about its why, then in 90% of the cases you do not have to elaborate on a direct question, because you will have built a reply to that during your presentation, or you can follow up with more details at a later stage. Clearly, answering “I don’t know” too often can be a sign of lousy preparation, and that’s something you do not want. But contrary to what many experts will tell you, on the web, books or essays, “I don’t know” can actually be a powerful answer. Yes, it can be interpreted as a weakness, but more often than not it’s simply an honest admission of being human, fallible, and thus can help get you closer in emotional terms to your audience. Nobody likes a “know it all”.
- You focus too much on what’s missing (features not yet available, slipping availability dates, etc.) and not enough on what is there. I see this almost all the time in technical presentations and product introductions. As you start telling me what you or your product do, you have the masochistic tendency to start listing the features that are not in your current version, or those that will only be available at a later date, etc. Instead, dwell and expand of what can be achieved with the current product or service, tell me the hard benefits that will be provided for me — the client — and how it will make my business better.
- There’s too much text on your slides. Anybody can read faster than you can speak (unless you use fonts smaller than 10…), so please don’t fill your slides with text. Slides are meant to be a support to your story, not the verbatim account and repository of everything you will say. I’ve been to too many events where the speaker would be showing his back to the audience most of the time or never make eye contact with anybody, being too busy on reading slides from the screen on the wall or from the teleprompter/computer screen in front of him.
- The pictures you use are pointless (i.e. slide fillers). This is a trend that is developing in the corporate space like a fungus. It manifests as high quality if pointless pictures of people and places that have, more often than not, no relation whatsoever with the topic being covered. Lately it’s either a lot of highways and speed of light vehicles or incredibly complex and tall industrial and office buildings. I truly believe images can be much stronger than text. But you need the right image to express what you want to say or underline. Use similitudes, metaphors, epic, social and historical images to do that. And please stop showing pictures of sport teams!
- You don’t have a story. No matter how many slides you use, whether you start with why or not, whether your pictures are relevant or pointless — if you do not have a story, it shows. Worse, since nobody can remember figures and facts alone, your lack of a story or at least of a familiar context setting will make us completely unable to recall anything of your presentation. Anybody can build better stories.
- You cannot tell a story. Let’s assume you have built a reasonable story and that your slides are actually not too crowded, not too numerous and to the point. I can bet that most of the presenters would still lack the tone of voice, the gestures, the drive to engage and the ability to make that story resonate with the audience. Anybody can become a storyteller.
Great presenters are great storytellers, who in turn become great entertainers. Your business presentation should first and foremost entertain the audience, then captivate it and only then inform. Or it should at least disrupt the audience to the degree of them wanting to chase you out of the room!
This checklist has served me well so far, and I make the effort to consistently go through it before any speaking engagement. The final litmus test I run is the following:
- At your next event/meeting, ask any of the presenters if he’s ready to go. Then just a few seconds before he gets on stge, switch all power to the electric outlets off. See how he performs with no slides and not laptop. You’ll be surprised by the degree of paralysis the majority of speakers will fall into.
- Next time you attend an event, listen to any one of the presentations. Then just after it’s finished, without looking at the materials or your notes, try to re-tell the story covering what you perceived where the key aspects. Let a couple of days go by, then try again. Now take your reports and compare with the presentation slides. See how much you correctly recalled. If you run this exercise on a fair number of attendees, you will be surprised how many don’t actually recall much. That’s a sign of a bad presentation and/or a bad presenter. Or simply of the lack of a good story.