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.

As I mentioned in the foreword if you are giving a presentation to 30 prospects on Thursday, then get three colleagues to listen to you practice on Tuesday. After your present is over, ask your three colleagues what they remember. If they don’t remember your key points, you must go back to your material and come up with more examples, case studies and anecdotes. If they don’t specifically remember your slides, then go back to your slides and rework them. Chances are you got too greedy with your slides and tried to back in too many points and words and not enough visuals.

Let’s say you have to give a sales presentation to 30 different regional offices around the globe and there are 100 people at each location hearing you present. After the first presentation, you   (and/or anyone you work with) should walk up to people and ask them “what messages do you remember from this presentation? What slides do you remember? If one of your colleagues got stuck in traffic today and missed the presentation how would you describe the presentation to her in a couple of minutes or less?”

Beware if the person in the audience says something like this “Wow the presenter was excellent, he seemed so poised. He was interesting and funny. I liked it a lot.” If that’s what you hear, it means you communicated nothing—you failed. Sure, we want people to form nice impressions about us as speakers, but our primary goal is to communicate messages. If all they can do is comment on our speaking style, then we have failed miserably.

If you really want to test your presentation in a thorough manner, then you should wait three days and then email people in the audience and ask them what ideas and messages they found most useful from your presentation. If you really communicated, you will get a lot of substance emailed back to you. If you failed to communicate you will get a lot of emails that look like this “Hi Jim, Great speech! See you soon, Brandy”

There is a bureaucratic danger in most larger organizations in that a marketing or sales presentation is written and re-written 20 times, then given approval at 17 different levels before it is ever given the first time. Then, the presentation is treated as if were the Gospel and to change one word of it would be a sacrilege. So the same boring presentation is given 30 times over the next 11 months. This is the wrong attitude. It’s fine for corporations to approve key messages at an institutional level, but how the messages are presented should be a continual improvement and refinement process.

I always get a kick out of people who speak about Six Sigma strategies for seeking out defects and improvements in business practices, but they never seem to think that giving presentations should be a part of this. No presentation is perfect. Every presentation could be improved. If you ever have to convey the same set of messages to different audiences then each presentation should contain some improvements and changes over the last one.

Properly viewed, a presentation is a process that you can and should engineer. I f you are building an oil pipeline, you plan a system so that if 100,000 barrels of oil flows into the pipeline, you expect 100,000 to flow out hours or days later at the other end. You don’t say, “Oh well only 50,000 gallons came out at the other end, there must be a few links, there is nothing we can do.” No, you would find the leaks, plug them up and make it work. You’d work all night; you’d spare no expense, you’d work until you got it right.

Most business presenters start off a presentation with 70 key messages and are happy if, at the other end of the process, the audience member remembers one or two ideas and maybe a general feeling that the presenter was competent. This is crazy!

People who build oil pipelines don’ just sit back and “hope” that it works. They test before, during and after the pipeline becomes active. You don’t have to “hope” that your presentation goes well either because you can test it before and after each presentation too. And it will cost you a lot less to test your presentation than it will to shut down an oil pipeline for three days.

You can complain there is no time to test your presentation in advance because you are busy re-writing the PowerPoint slides until 2 AM the morning of the presentation. This is a horrible thing to do, but that still doesn’t get you off the hook. You can still test. As soon as you finish your presentation, people will typically come up to you and say that you did a good job. Don’t just say “thanks!” Instead, say “thanks, what part was most helpful? What part resonated with you the most?” Then listen carefully. What you are about to hear is worth tens of thousands of dollars of valuable marketing and focus group research and it is yours for free! Remember, if all you hear are generalized positive comments about you, chances are you didn’t communicate much and the audience member is just trying to make you feel good.

Consistently making great presentations has nothing to do with the mood of the audience, who spoke before you or “luck.” Like any world class athlete know, you make your own luck. You can foolproof your presentation by testing before, during and after every presentation—it really doesn’t take much extra time and the results will be well worth it.