Giving out Winning Presentations

Regarding Power Point and slide presentations, it makes little difference what sort of business you are in. Power Point is present to us all in our work routine. Not only through the economic sectors it is widespread, but through all hierarchic levels of any organization, therefore we all should be concerned about learning the subject. Anyhow, as an employee, or as an entrepreneur, you will not only need to be great technically at what you do, but you may be expected to excel here too. Giving out successful presentations is a solid strategy to reach acknowledgement at work.

Considering how many people could possibly benefit from exchanging tips and experiences, I am hoping to share a few of my own that could be useful in order to quickly pull up enthralling and winning presentations.

First things first:

Before coming up to you; reader; with a list of suggestions, it is essential to bear in mind a couple of considerations. Initially, lets not forget that presentations could either be directed to one single person in specific, or, alternatively, to a larger audience. Therefore, consider the kind of audience you will be giving your presentation to before you even begin. What could be their possible interests in what you have to offer through your work? Where and when do you add value to their business or their lives? What is expected of you as a solution? Is the same level of competence expected from your competition? Why? Or why not?

All those questions are not your core-concern, in the process of preparing your presentations, but could be very insightful to you. They are effective to give you a wider perspective of the problem at hand.

What’s really essential though is to have in mind your primary goals for the presentation itself. Those are:

• To present the problem which concerns your audience (as you are naturally expected to) and give back your own proposition for a solution
• To answer all the questions from your audience
• To catch the attention and empathy of your audience
• To sell your idea

Those four goals are not necessarily seen as objectives, but can also be used as metrics for evaluating the level of success of your presentation, if you analyze how many you did accomplish successfully. If you notice, the first steps such as “presenting the problem (…)” are more simple to accomplish and were listed first whereas “selling your idea” which is far more complex came in afterwards.

Keep those four metrics in mind in every new presentation you get. In order to have clear goals and to compare your own performance from time to time. There are a few more characteristics that I find useful. Those are my personal worries for building up a presentation, therefore they are subjective aspects. You could either follow them as a guideline, or you could add your own touch to it.

1.    Be straightforward

No matter the nature of your presentation, it is vital that you know clearly why you are doing it; who is buying your idea; and what is more and less relevant for this person, or group. By answering those simple questions, you will find it easy to prioritize what comes first (and what comes after). When starting your first slides, it might be a good idea to spend some time planning the structure of your presentation before actually developing it (consider how much time you have). You should always start by trying to focus primarily on those questions that you can’t afford to leave unanswered.

If you are assembling a presentation regarding a topic with higher level of certainty (more simple problems), you will want to address your ideas and propositions, right after the problem is presented. You can do this and still be creative. The sky is the limit, but never lose track of time. On the other side, more complex problems require a logic and structured thought and may not be answered so directly, so try to leave all steps clear and easy to understand and follow through until you can conclude your point.

In case you prefer to work like me, and you go for the main structure first, you will notice that once you have it ready, the whole presentation and its contents will certainly be more tangible to you. You will find it a lot easier to enrich the slides with highlights and discoveries of your own that could contribute for you to sell your final idea more effectively.

2.    Be mindful of your deadlines

Usually, preparing a simple and straightforward message can be more time-consuming than just a tedious and long sequence of unnecessary contents distributed throughout endless slides. Of course, you do have to be certain that you are including all the content that is required for you to share. However that will never be everything from your work. People (specially investors) don’t want to know all you’ve been through to come up with your solutions, but only what’s relevant of it for them. Keep in mind what your audience would want to know and try to answer their questions at all times. If, something you are adding is not aiming to answer those questions, you need to make sure that it will, at least, give you further basis in order to reach your final four objectives.

3.    Keep it clean

This may seem far too simple to point out, but still very important to emphasize. People usually see order where others, sometimes, see disorder.

When we refer to someone who is looking at your presentation for the first time, we need to realize that the cleaner the contents are, the faster that all those ideas within each slide can sink into the thoughts of your audience. Now this degree of simplicity can be a powerful tool! In my opinion it was the main tool often used by Steve Jobs to inspire Apple consumers to create far deeper desire towards Apple products and bring the company back to number 1 at Brand Value worldwide. Cleanliness also walks side-by-side with straightforwardness (Topic 1). Together they turn your presentation simple and effective.

4.    Know where to throw more energy

Since your work will be presented orally, you should make good use of the energy you can throw into different parts of your presentation. The parts you should give more energy at are usually your own personal highlights for the presentation, but more importantly, emphasize what you can offer that your competition cannot. Therefore you will stand out amongst them all and will earn a major preference.

5.    Use of your Body language.

It is scientifically proven that every gesture we do will shape the type of person we are, whereas successful people usually have self-confident and yet relaxed body language (or at least, not tense at all), while champions from many sports often have an extroversive body language, usually spreading their arms up to celebrate some sort of achievement. There are plenty videos and contents concerning this topic throughout the web. Body language in itself is a very wide subject and I would never be able to cover it here fairly at all, but if you are serious into giving out the best presentations, you ought to research and learn it well.