50 Quick Start Soft Skills

How to Deliver a Compelling Presentation

Standing up in front of an audience may terrify you, but sooner or later you’ll be asked to make presentations to co-workers, clients, and perhaps even senior management. You also may be asked to do demos and webinars, run training classes, moderate panels, and introduce speakers. If you try to beg off, you’ll get the usual advice to nervous presenters: “Just imagine that everyone in the audience is stark naked.” This is supposed to help?

In reality, public speaking is a learned skill. The more often you get in front of audiences, the more you’ll feel comfortable and in control. You’ll figure out what works, what engages your audience, which little tricks can improve your performance.

Public speaking is also an important skill. Most great leaders, influencers, teachers, celebrities, innovators, and successful artists and writers have learned to stand in front of an audience and deliver a powerful, persuasive, engaging talk. If you never master basic presentation skills, your career path is probably going to be limited.

Five useful tactics:

? Talk about what your listeners want to hear: Most of your audience will be too polite to complain that you’re wasting their time. But they will stop listening to you if your talk isn’t directly relevant to their personal interests. Lengthy textbook explanations, sales pitches, and evangelism are almost always a turnoff. Kelly Stoetzel, who preps speakers for the prestigious TED lecture series, cautions speakers against trying to hammer home a message. “Don’t think, ‘This is a message I must communicate,’” she says. “Instead, think ‘People will love knowing about this!’”

If possible, try out your presentation theme (not the presentation itself) on three or four likely audience members. If they’re not enthusiastic, ask what you’re missing. Focus on content issues, not on delivery technology: Bad content can kill your talk, while ugly fonts will only annoy a few people.

Whenever you’re speaking to a small group (say, 30 or fewer people) a good way to get your content on track is to invite questions right at the beginning, rather than holding a Q&A session after you’ve finished speaking. You’ll find that early questions often trigger lively follow-on discussions among audience members, which you can moderate for a few minutes before returning to your main discussion thread. And be ready to edit the rest of your talk on the fly, based on issues that surface during early audience interaction. (This tactic is especially important when your presentation involves a scripted product demo or capabilities presentation. As quickly as possible, find out what your prospect wants to know and deliver a blow-their-socks-off answer to that specific question.)

? Keep your story line simple: Make sure the flow and logic of your talk are absolutely clear. A good reality test is to ask whether the title of your talk makes a promise that accurately describes the content of your talk: “Three Reasons Why Our Q4 Sales Are Up,” “How We Improved Customer Satisfaction,” “A Tour of Our New Retail Signage.” If you can’t sum up your subject in a few words, you should probably prune away a lot of the verbiage.

When you’re explaining a fairly complex subject, often the best approach is literally to tell a story. The classic narrative formula is based on three parts:

» Problem: For example, “Our major maintenance clients were unhappy with support reps who didn’t understand the client’s business.”
» Search for a Solution: “Our company researched dozens of possible solutions and decided to introduce business-savvy account managers.”
» Resolution: “Our clients were delighted and renewals increased by 15%.”

This formula underlies virtually every popular tale from Cinderella to the latest Law & Order episode… because it works.

And don’t be afraid to build interest by incorporating characters, anecdotes, conflict, and other story-telling elements. BusinessWeek.com columnist Carmine Gallo points out that Steve Jobs—one of the technology world’s most admired presenters—developed a narrative-based style that always left audiences spellbound:

A Steve Jobs presentation has all the elements of a great movie—heroes and villains, stunning visuals, and a supporting cast. And, like a movie director, Steve Jobs ‘storyboards’ the plot… In every classic story, the hero fights the villain. The same holds true of a Steve Jobs presentation. In 1984, the villain was IBM, known as ‘Big Blue’ at the time. ‘IBM wants it all,’ he said. Apple would be the only company to stand in its way. It was very dramatic and the crowd went crazy.

? Clean up your charts and graphs: Numbers are tough to present in an interesting fashion. But a lot of corporate presentations exist largely to report trends, operating results, financial performance, and other numbers-intensive data. If you simply paste raw Excel output into PowerPoint, you’ll be left with slides that your audience has to squint to see and information that you can’t easily explain. “Here in cell C136 you’ll notice that the error rate for last month is trending upward, compared to C126 and C116…” Is anyone listening?

Better: Learn how to create professional-looking charts and graphs from within Excel itself, which has reasonably good tools for managing color, fonts, 3D views, captions, and other effects. Add arrows and other highlights to demonstrate trends or items you want to explain. And take a close look at how popular business magazines and newspapers create “infographics” that tell a clear story about complex numbers. If your job calls for frequent number-crunching presentations, the time you spend learning to produce stronger charts and graphs is likely to be a wise investment.

? Watch the clock: Running out of time is a common failing of disorganized speakers, and a too-long talk usually disrupts everyone else’s schedule. Motivational speaker Hugh Culver also points out that lack of time discipline can sabotage your main message:

I don’t know how many speakers I have seen rush through their last 15 slides, and in a panicked voice try to motivate an audience in three minutes… No one will miss what isn’t there. Punch the number of your closing slide into the keyboard, jump to your close, and forget the rest.

If you’re expected to do frequent short presentations—for instance, status reports, demos, new employee introductions—look into a popular new presentation format called PechaKucha. The discipline is simple: speakers get no more than 20 slides, with just 20 seconds to spend on each. Any concept or graphic that doesn’t fit this format has to be cut or revised. Autodesk CEO Carl Bass is a big fan of PechaKucha, which he says “makes people crisp.” He adds, “I won’t tell you that PechaKucha prevents people from giving bad presentations. The good news is that they can give them for only six minutes and 40 seconds.

? Maintain eye contact: Good speakers never turn their back on the audience to read slides or look down at their notes. Never. Unbroken eye contact creates a sense of a one-on-one conversation between you and each listener, and very few audience members will turn away or otherwise disconnect if you’re looking right at them.