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.

So what is the magic number of points to cover in a presentation?

It’s exactly five.

Where did I come up with this number?

For the last dozen years I have asked this question to my presentation training clients between one and five times a week: “Think of the best speaker you have seen in the last year in your field where you saw the presenter in person. I’m not talking about a professional motivational speaker or a celebrity like Bill Clinton—just focus on someone in your industry or maybe even your company. Now, how many specific, distinct message points do you remember from that presentation?”

Occasionally, people say “I can’t remember a single thing…I must have a bad memory…plus I only see boring speakers in my industry.”

Often times people will remember 2 or 3 points.

Very, very rarely, someone will be able to summarize a great speaker in a minute and cover five specific key messages.
In all of the years I have been asking my clients this question, guess how many remembered more than five message points and could list them?

0.0 Percent. That’s right, not one. And it doesn’t matter how well educated audience members are, what    industry they are in or what continent they are from, I work with them all and they are all the same on this issue.

So when I suggest your presentation have five points, it’s not because five is my favorite or lucky number; it really does seem to be the most adults can remember when sitting down and listening to someone speak.

Mark Twain said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead.” It’s easier to prepare a speech that has 57 separate message points in it. No tough decisions have to be made about what to put in and what to leave out. But remember, your audience doesn’t care about what is easy for you, they only care about what is easy for them and it’s too darn hard for them to remember 57 new ideas they just heard once!

So much of delivering a foolproof presentation has nothing to do with the mechanics of speaking or the quality of your voice. Instead, it has to do with fundamental judgment. Too many presenters don’t use enough judgment on what message points they are going to cover in their presentation. And if you try to cover 57 or 157 points, you will fail.

Instead of setting yourself up for failure, you need to list all of your message points in a numbered fashion and then go though them all and put them in priority. Isolate your top five ideas. Those are the ideas you should speak about. All of the other ideas you can give in a handout, email people in a slide format, give them a t-shirt with the bullet points on it—whatever! Just don’t talk about more than five in your actual spoke presentation.

Most presenters think the “real world” choice when it comes to message points is “do I do a thorough, professional job and cover all 70 points or do I do a lazy, half-baked job and only cover five points?”

But I live in the real world and assume you want to as well. In the real world, your choice is “do I communicate five points or do I communicate absolutely nothing at all?” Remember communication is not when it comes out of your mouth but when it is heard, understood and remembered by your audience. You can communicate every time, if you respect and listen to the needs of your audience.

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