Many of us have to deliver presentations at work. Whether that’s something you relish or dread, it is something you want to do well. It’s crucial to get your message across and keep your audience engaged. Here are some useful articles for inspiration on how to deliver a killer presentation.
10 Tips for a Highly Memorable Presentation by Mark Suster is a fairly comprehensive list of tips for making sure your audience will remember you and the presentation after the event. These tips are mostly common sense, but well worth repeating – for example, learn how to structure, stick to your time and make sure you practice your material well. For my money, the best tip here is to tell a story and, if discussing a product as part of the story, make sure you focus on benefits. As Mark Suster says, “You should never lead with features, no one cares about them other than your product manager and your developers.”
Sims Wyeth agrees on the importance of telling stories when presenting, but goes one step further to suggest that these stories should be personal to the presenter. In The Best Presentations Wrap a Message in Surprising Personal Stories, Sims notes that the majority of business presentations lack personality and, while a predictable format may work well enough for everyday internal meetings, “…it is not effective for engaging disengaged employees, or for potential customers who find it hard to distinguish one company from another.” So, if you need to make a point, inspire, or change people’s minds, you need to stand out: “One way to create a contrast is to make a point by wrapping it in a personal story. The wrapping will make your content special, like a gift, even though it may be simple and mundane.”
The 7 Must-Know Rules of Productive Meetings by Kevin Meany covers meeting productivity in general, but includes a good point about presentations: “When a visual presentation is required, we have a few guidelines about those, too. We use more pictures than words. (I like to follow the rule of Twitter — no more than 140 characters — when it comes to words on a slide.) We ditch jargon. We end with a summary of decisions and next steps.”
I hope one or two of these articles give you some good ideas for your next presentation!
Read other posts on communicating effectively:
10 Tips to Avoid Death by PowerPoint
7 Tips to Present Disasters in Communication with Developers
Managing Remote Teams: Top 4 Tips for Success
