Presentations - ensuring your slides go down well!

I was talking to a colleague recently about the "Bring Back Bovril" presentation I'd once delivered on a training course to illustrate the link between my favourite football team's decline and its removal of Bovril as a hot drink option for spectators. I convinced my fellow delegates through graphs and anecdotal evidence that re-introducing the beef-extract beverage would help restore the team to its former glories, and by the end of my presentation they were all chanting my BBB war cry!

The conversation arose because my colleague was worried about an upcoming presentation, so they'd asked me for some tips. As my suggestions and stories seemed to go down well, I thought it would be a good topic for an article.

In my experience, successful presentations are built around two main pillars - preparation and delivery.

Preparation

Thinking about slides immediately conjures up memories of spending many happy hours in adventure playgrounds as a kid, and many frustrating hours as a father trying to build them in the back garden from a flat pack with instructions seemingly written in hieroglyphics!

All great slides take several steps to get to them, but if you misjudge them in a business setting, you'll end up with bruised egos rather than bruised knees! With that in mind, here's my suggested approach to minimise those contusions:

1. Design a skeleton framework of headings for the presentation, brain dump everything you want to say under each heading, and then start to refine your bullet points.
2. Make it interesting and/or informative - consider your target audience and tailor it accordingly. What would you want or like to know if you were in their shoes?
3. Consider using a theme or an analogy. I remember doing a 10 years' service presentation to one of my direct reports who was a big fan of The Smiths, so I incorporated the lyrics from some of their songs into my slides. To add to the occasion, I had volunteers singing the lines behind cut-out faces of the band members complete with bunches of gladioli in their back pockets! So, what difference does it make, you might ask in your best Morrissey voice. I think themes and analogies help to bring presentations to life and make them more memorable as well as being easier and more enjoyable to write.
4. Include graphics, tables, and videos to add variety to your slides. People respond to different styles so mixing up your presentation will widen its appeal and ensure there's something in it for everyone.
5. Be concise with your bullet points - less is more. Don’t use three words if one will suffice and don’t show off by using complex words or jargon that people may not understand. It's likely to backfire - people will lose interest or start googling the word and miss what you say next. In short, if you think you might have to explain what the word means, don't use it.
6. Use animation appropriately and sparingly - it shouldn’t deflect from the message so ensure it's not too gimmicky. You want people to remember your words not the way they crawled across the screen!
7. Check if there's a standard template that you need to use and ensure you adopt a consistent font and style, so the slides look like they belong together.
8. Ask a colleague to proof-read your slides so they can point out any typos or mixed messages.
9. Practise your delivery to check that it flows well and re-order your slides if appropriate. Time it to ensure it's not too brief or too long. Don't try to wing it - you might get away with it a few times but why take the chance? Run through it with a friendly audience to help you develop your style, try out a few things, and build your confidence in a safe environment - think of it as your presentation playground!

Delivery

One of my inspirational bosses used to say that successful presentation delivery was all about "telling them what you’re going to tell them, telling them, and then telling them what you’ve just told them". Here are some more tips to make sure your slides land well:

• Advise your audience that you’ll circulate the slides, if you haven’t already shared them, to save people getting distracted by taking notes.
• State upfront if you'd prefer questions during your presentation or at the end. It's swings and roundabouts really - taking questions during your presentation will make it more interactive but there is a danger that you'll lose control to some of the more dominant players. Taking questions at the end will ensure you get your message across the way you intended but people may switch off or get frustrated if they have to wait to make their point. A compromise may be to ask for points of clarification during your presentation and questions at the end.
• Pick out the salient points - don’t just read the slides verbatim. Bring them to life with specific examples and stories that demonstrate your understanding and subject matter expertise.
• Agree to take issues, raised by your audience, offline if they’re becoming a distraction.
• Slow down and take your time - it's not a race to the end! Give people sufficient time to read and digest your points before you move on. If your time is cut short, skip over the less important slides - don't just speak faster as you will lose impact.
• Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide! You should consider adding humour to your presentation but only if it's appropriate. If you haven't presented to the target audience before, check with colleagues who have so you don't fall flat on your face. I vividly recall my first presentation to a CEO at one of my previous organisations and him giving me a very tough time after I'd joked about some of my findings. Our only interaction prior to that had been in his Town Halls where he'd adopted a very offbeat and quirky delivery style. I'd tried to copy his approach during my presentation, and he nearly bit my head off. My boss told me afterwards that the CEO always adopted a serious tone in the Exec meetings because there were important external stakeholders present. It may have been more than 20 years ago, but I've never forgotten that important lesson. To this day, I still ask about presentation styles if it's my first time in front of a new audience - sometimes epic fails are the best learning experiences!
• Request feedback afterwards from the attendees and any co-presenters, so you can capture the key learning points. What did and what didn't work?

I thought it would be appropriate to present the above points on a slide - I hope you find it useful. Please use this link to view it on Slideshare.

So, if you get your presentation preparation and delivery right, everything should slide into place!