Archive for September, 2008

Some experts advise holding all questions until the end. Others advise answering every single question no matter how irrelevant; even if that means you never get to your main points. Neither approach works.

One of the first things you will have to grasp if you want to be a foolproof presenter is that it is not YOUR presentation. The presentation belongs to your audience. This is a learning experience for them, not for you.

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No.  I plead with you; please do not try to read your presentation.

You may be tempted to think something like this, “This presentation is really important and I want to get it just right. I don’t want to screw up. It is an important audience and I’m going to be nervous and I’m afraid I might forget something. I haven’t had time to rehearse the presentation or memorize it, so if I read it, I won’t forget anything or make any mistakes. Besides, I’ve been reading my whole life, how hard could it be?”

I can sympathize with your thinking, but there are some serious flaws with the reasoning here. Reading a speech is actually an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well—it’s not for amateurs. While it is true that reading is a basic skill mastered by most first graders, reading a speech in front of a roomful of people is extremely difficult and is mastered by very few.

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Yes, you should rehearse. From a presentation coach’s perspective, the following 25 words are the dumbest phrase in the English language:
“I don’t want to rehearse because I don’t want to seem canned. I want to seem spontaneous and fresh so I’ll be better winging it.”
Ugh!!!

It is true that if you try to memorize your speech during rehearsal, you will cause problems and set yourself up for failure (exceptions for any reader who is a trained Broadway actor). But rehearsing your speech should never be about memorizing your words. If you don’t rehearse, you are throwing out your rough draft of your presentation to your audience. And rough drafts of most things are, well, rough.

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This goes right up there with “never move  your hands when speaking” when it comes to bad presentation advice. If you don’t believe me, take this little test:
Quick: How many emergency exit doors are there on a 737 airplane? Any time I ask this to a group of presentation trainees, I get answers ranging from 2 to 12. Everyone has a different answer. My point is that anyone who travels has been told exactly how many exit doors there are dozens or even hundreds of times and yet we still don’t remember (confession: I have no idea how many exit doors there are) We don’t remember how many doors there are on the plane because when we are being presented with this information it is done in such a boring and perfunctory manner, typically right after we are being told how to fasten a seat belt, that we aren’t listening, therefore we don’t remember—no matter how many times we hear it.

And yet, we all have some presentations permanently etched into our memory, even though the presenter said something once, but in a memorable way. I can still remember my 5th Grade teacher, Mrs. Evans, telling me, “young man, you are going to have to hold this door for me, whether you like it or not.”  Yet she only said it once, yet it stuck because it was frightening!
Here is the fundamental insight: it doesn’t matter if you say something 3 times or 300 times. If you say it in a boring and unmemorable manner, no one will ever remember it. If you say something once in a memorable, visual, emotional, specific, relevant way, people will remember what you said minutes, hours, days, even years later.
The goal of telling them what you’re going to tell them, telling them, and then telling them what you told them is to get your audience to remember your messages. This is an excellent goal and I applaud you for focusing on this particular objective. But at the tactical level, this method isn’t very effective. A far more effective technique is to package your messages with interesting and memorable stories, case studies and examples and to deliver them with passion and feeling.
There is one scenario when it does make sense to do the tell them what you are going to say, tell em, tell ‘em what you told’ em technique. This is when you are in a classroom teaching setting and all of your students are writing down detailed notes in preparation for a test on the subject matter later. In this case, your organization will make it easier for the note taker to see the outline and structure when reading the notes later.
But your new business prospect is not going to write down notes on your pitch presentation—and if he/she does, it won’t be studied later. Your boss isn’t going to write down notes of what you say at the Monday morning staff meeting. Sales people listening to you at the annual sales meeting will not write down what you say. You have to realize that most people in the world in non-academic settings are not going to be writing down everything you say and study it later. Therefore there is a lot more pressure on you to present your information in a way that is easily digestible, understandable and memorable for your audience.
So spend less time focusing on telegraphing the outline of your presentation to your audience and spend more time simply being interesting.

Yes. It’s often much better than using overly complicated PowerPoint slides. These low-tech tools are especially effective when you are presenting to groups smaller than 50 where everyone can see you clearly.

The beauty of using a white board or even an old-fashioned chalk board is that you can only draw one line or one arrow or one thing at a time. This slows you down, which is good because your audience can only focus on one thing at a time. If you are drawing a diagram or chart, live, in front of your audience, it forces you to simplify and to focus on just one or two variables at a time. This makes it much easier for your audience to focus and grasp what you are talking about. Your audience can look at the one thing you are drawing at that moment.

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There are 20,465 books on PowerPoint for sale on Amazon, which means that there are more than 4 million pages of content you could read to learn about how to give an effective PowerPoint presentation! You don’t have to read them all. In fact, if you just follow the 10 tips below, you will consistently be the most effective PowerPoint presenter anyone in your audience has ever seen.

1.    Create two separate PowerPoint slides, one for projecting on a screen, one to email audience members in advance and to hand out after your presentation. Your email/print PowerPoint slides can be jammed packed with words, numbers, text, data points—make it 200 pages if you like—the more the merrier.)

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That depends; do you want to use technology to genuinely enhance the learning experience for your audience? Or are you using it as a crutch for yourself because you think it will make it easier for you to give the presentation? Worst of all, are you using PowerPoint because everyone else is using PowerPoint and you feel stupid if you don’t?

Only use technology if it helps your audience understand and remember your messages more effectively. A related question people ask me is “Do I need to use PowerPoint or video in my presentation?” Again, you as the speaker should never need to use PowerPoint or any technology. You should be great simply by talking. The real question is “Can your audience benefit in anyway by seeing some visual, graphic, image or video of what you are talking about in order to better understand your ideas?” If the answer is yes, then start creating a PowerPoint slide or use another method of showing video clips.

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It’s very simple; you test it. The beauty of creating a great presentation is that it is much easier to test than, say, a new drug, which might take 10 years of Food and Drug Administration testing before it can reach the market. Testing a presentation is easier than developing computer software which might take 6-12 months to test to get out the bugs.

If you want to know if your presentation works, all you have to do is ask people who listened to you what they remember. If they remember what you wanted them to, your presentation worked. If they don’t remember what you wanted them to, it didn’t work. Please keep in mind that if your audience doesn’t remember your message, it is never their problem or their fault; it’s your problem and it’s your fault.

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Personally, I don’t like stories. I wish you didn’t have to use stories in a presentation. I wish we could use our presentation time to cover more message points. Stories take up time and they are an inefficient way of communicating message points. I really wish we didn’t have to use stories.

There’s only one problem: no one cares what I like.

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In every presentation there are three possible outcomes for the presenter:

1.    A good impression was made.
2.    A bad impression was made.
3.    No impression was made.

The biggest blunder most presenters face is not that they humiliated themselves or embarrassed themselves or that they froze and had to be carted away. The huge disaster most presenters face is that they show up, give their presentation, and come across completely professional, polished and smooth. They give their presentation exactly as planned. No problems. Then they sit down.

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How should I use humor?

Humor in a presentation is a good thing, because if you get audience members to laugh, you now know the following 10 things are true:

1. They were listening to you and not sleeping!
2. They understood you.
3. They processed what you said.
4. They liked what you said.
5. They are communicating back to you in the form of laugher.
6. You likely said something unexpected.
7. You aren’t boring them.
8. Because you aren’t boring them, they like you more.
9. They aren’t diving to their cell phones to check email this second.
10. You have brightened their day.

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I get asked this question every day, and I always respond with a question, “why do you want to be concise?’

Typically, people don’t have a good answer for this other than some vague, general notion that, all things being equal (they never are), it’s better to be concise than it is to be long-winded.

Most business presenters aspire to be concise because they realize that based on their own experiences, most business presentations are really, really boring and seem to go on way too long. So, if you have a choice to be really boring for a long time, versus being really boring for a short time, then it’s better to be really boring for a short time because that will cause less pain.

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This is a huge question that every presenter must answer. Most presenters decide the answer is ME.
This is about MY Speech.

My PowerPoint.

My outline.

My lectern to stand behind.

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You have three choices:

1.    You could guess. The problem is that you are probably the worst person to make a good guess in this area because you are too close to the situation and the content matter. Messages that are so obvious to you that they don’t even warrant consideration for you might well be what your audience is most interested in.

2.    You can “play it safe” by covering every conceivable message point you have on the topic. This way, no one can accuse you of leaving something important out or being less than thorough. This is what the vast majority of sales people and business people do. The problem, of course, is that this isn’t safe at all. It’s an extremely dangerous way to present because when you dump too much data you drown out your own message. Instead of communicating everything, you communicate nothing because your audience doesn’t remember any of your points.

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Your marketing director is going to want you to include the top 15 marketing points. Your sales manager will throw in another 10. Your corporate attorney will want you to add 5 more to protect yourself. And you will want to show everyone how smart you are by throwing in another 37 points. So add them all up and that comes to….one thousand too many.

The bigger a corporation or organization you are in, the harder the pull will be on you to add more and more points to your presentation. There won’t be anyone advocating for you to have fewer message points. Everyone will be making a forceful and compelling case to add more messages. There is only one little flaw with this strategy—it doesn’t work on audience members.

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According to a U.S. Defense Department Study in 1974, the perfect length of a presentation is 17.4 minutes. Really, this is what the research found.

Don’t believe it.

Here is the only rule you need to follow when it comes to presentation length: Speak for as long as you need to, provided you are consistently interesting and memorable to the people in front of you.

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I think you should have five specific goals every time you present.
1.    You should want to look comfortable, confident, relaxed, and authoritative. You want to look your best. Partly, because we are all vain. But mostly, because this way make our messages more memorable and believable because we seem more credible. By looking comfortable and relaxed, we allow our audience to focus on our message without distracting them.

2.    You should want to be understood. If you use too much jargon or insider lingo, no one will understand you. Also, if you speak too quickly or too softly, no one will understand you either. If people don’t understand you, then no real communication is going to occur.

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There is no one perfect way to start a presentation. You don’t have to tell a knee-slapping joke or start with a poignant anecdote. But you don’t want to start the way most presenters do. Why? Because most presenters start of by talking about themselves too much.

As a presenter, you have to make one fundamental choice about how you start: are you going to focus on yourself, or on your audience? If you focus on your audience, you will likely be a success. If you focus on yourself, no matter how polished you are, you will likely fail.

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