At my last Organizational Management class for the first semester of the MBA program at Howard University, my case group and the other groups all had to give a presentation on an HBR case study. Everyone gave an excellent presentation, and I learned a lot from my classmates. We even got great advice from Sylvia Alston, a Managing Partner at Momentum Risk Management LLC. Our professor, Dr. Holmes, also provided us feedback on our presentations and a set of recommended presentation tips to take with us.
- Stick to the time limit. Time is money. Make them hungry for you. With the time given, deliver precisely the value your audience seeks.
- Don’t read from the slide, don’t copy and paste, and have keywords that trigger the conversation for you. This can help with your presentation flow.
- Have an ice breaker, figure out who’s in the room, have an opening question, and figure out how to bring people into the room. Making it a dialogue at different points in your presentation can help capture your audience’s attention.
- Don’t have too much text on the slides. If it looks like a chapter in a book, it is too much. Your audience isn’t there to read; they want to listen to what you have to say.
- Never have an entire paragraph on a slide. Again, your audience isn’t there to read.
- Incorporate some graphics. In this Zoom life, add something stimulating. Virtual meetings have dramatically increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Have an excellent seamless handoff between the presenters. Maintain the flow of your presentation when you and your partners take turns talking.
- Be alright with different styles from MBA to conversational. Be able to dance between the two. Some of these opportunities are not always in a formal situation.
- People who make decisions will be captivated by you in informal places. By the time you get to the presentation, you have sold them. Sometimes you will be in a situation where you meet with key audience members before your actual presentation. You have to be ready to share your story during an unplanned time.
- Be nimble enough to dance with your slides and when you can’t use your slides. Always be ready to tell your story with slides or without slides.
- Sometimes the audience just looks for your personality. Be that person that if they ran into you on the street, they would find you likable and are curious about your story.
Image courtesy of Wonderland.
