I’ve been informally studying what makes some presenters successful. These are the top ten tips, tool and techniques that I have identified:

1. You, the salesperson. Great presenters have mastered the ancient art of sales. The sooner you recognize that your mission as presenter is to sell your idea, the better your presentation style will be.  See yourself as a succesful salesperson. It is amazing how your mindset changes when you realize this.

2. Be prepared: Identify the core message. The key to successful presentations is to focus in one and only one core message. The more messages you try to deliver, the higher the chance that your audience will not get it.

3. Be Prepared: Identify your audience, and tailor your language to that audience. If you are talking to other Executive level members from your organization, make sure you use executive-level lexicon. Talk about Return on Investment (ROI), bottom line, strategic plan, etc.

   Do you really think that the CFO cares if the latest application was built using Java or .Net? Oracle 10g instead of MS SQL Server 2008? He and the CEO probably will care more about the amount of investment required. The VP of Sales will not care about Mac or Windows Vista, but how your application will help her to close more sales.

   On the other hand, your technical staff probably will understand better if you present terms in a more techie-like language.

   If your audience is mixed or unknown to you, avoid specific terms. Stay away from jargon and acronyms, or at least introduce them before using it (for example, say “following the Systems Development Life Cycle – SDLC, a set of best practices to develop system, will improve our chances to deliver the project on time“, instead of just SDLC, with no explanation).

4. Use the power of 1. As it has been said, “A death is a tragedy, a million a statistic”. If your message involves something that will affect many people, make sure you make it personal. Present the scenario for one person, name that person, and tell how what you are proposing impacts her. Then quantify the impact. Later, ask the audience to imagine the same effect for the whole targeted group. People will get it that way.
   For example, say you are presenting to the board of directors an idea to provide the sales staff with an application that runs on their handheld device, to check inventory online. You may want to present the scenario for one of the sales rep in the group:

   Jane, one of our best sales representatives, was visiting our customer Acme, inc last Friday to offer them our new product, the widget 1.25.

   She did a great job of presenting the case for the product, and Mr. Clark, Acme’s procurement executive, was ready to put an order. Mr. Clark asked Jane if we had 150 units ready to deliver by the end of the month. Jane promised Mr. Clark she will have the answer for him next Monday, as she couldn’t check the inventory at that point.

   Jane checked first thing in the morning and yes, we could deliver the product as requested. However, Mr. Clark was not as excited about it anymore and asked her to stop by next month to check again about their needs.

   We couldn’t close the sale that day. We don’t want anything like that to happen anymore. That day we lost $75,000 in revenue. If this happens only once a month to each of our 100 sales reps, we are missing the opportunity of closing $750,000 of profit per moth during customer visits.

   We are requesting additional $250,000 to design and deliver a system that allows the sales staff to check inventory and product delivery capabilities online, from their phone or PDA.

   What do you think the board of directors will say after this explanation? How can they logically say no to your request? Do you think this would be more successful than just saying:
   

   “I’m requesting $250,000 to develop a new application for PDAs. It will help sales people to get inventory information online.”

   I certainly believe that Jane’s story will give you a better success rate.

5. What’s in it for them? Make sure you present your audience with reasons to keep listening to you, to pay attention to what you are saying, and to even consider support you or agree with you. Make them care.

6. Make it a Dialogue, not a Monologue. Ask questions. When needing support from them, ask a positive question, and start nodding as soon as you finish the question. Keep nodding for 5 seconds, before answer positively to your own question. That will establish a relationship between you, the presenter, and your audience, as now all of you are nodding and agreeing.

   When possible, ask for input from the audience, ask them engaging questions constantly, like “are you following me?”, “does that make sense?”, “are you with me?”

7. Make it a Mystery. One of the reasons why the TV show Law and Order is so popular is that they present you a case, and then they start giving you clues. You are hooked. You start answering the questions posed, and filling the gaps. Do the same. Present a problem. Don’t tell them the solution right away. Let them wonder what is the right solution. Circle around the solution. Guide them to the solution, but don’t give it to them. Let them arrive to it by themselves. Only deliver the solution at the end, when some of the attendants have already guessed what is the “right” solution. People love to be right. I know I’m always right, right?
8. Say NO to death by powerpoint. There is nothing worse than a presentation where the presenter goes through a slide full of text, cheesy graphics that have nothing to do with the topic, and he is only reading the slides. Trust me, in 99% of the cases, your audience can read the slides by themselves, so don’t offend them by reading to them. In the other 1% of the case, you audience can’t read, then why having the slides in the first place? The powerpoint or keynote slides should be just a guide for the presentation, not the presentation itself.

9. Draw it. Instead of showing to the presentation with a Visio or Photoshop image that represents your idea, draw it in front of our audience. Use markers and a whiteboard, and draw it. Your audience will follow the process to arrive to the end result, they will make it to the solution at the same time with you. If you think you are not a visual person, I recommend you read The Back of the Napkin, which provides a great set of tools to present your ideas visually.

10. Use analogies and examples. When presenting a newer, abstract concept, try bringing the point home by using an analogy. If you are presenting a new intranet portal for the company, don’t tell them you are implementing a new shinny website. Tell them you are implementing “the Google of the company“, where they will find all the information that exists inside the company. You don’t need to tell them anything else. They got it by now. At this point your only concern is to live up to the expectation, but have no doubt, people “got it” during your presentation.

There you have them. Ten tips. I know that you probably already knew half of them, if no more.

Oh, and by the way, the most important tip, the one that will make or break any presentation:

Be Passionate. If you don’t believe in what you are saying then your audience won’t care. People know when the other person is not honest. If you are presenting something that you don’t really care about then your words won’t have the same effect.

Let me know which of these point you agree or disagree with. I want to hear from you.

Post from: Strategic IT Planning Blog, by Andres Vivas.

Ten Tips to Better Presentations

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