Take your presentation one step ahead
It is very amazing how far a presentation can take you in your career, the way you present information on a power point a prezi or any other tools can take a long way in getting more for your business. From my experience I have seen a lot of good examples and some examples that I felt is not good. Come to think about it, I also had good and bad experiences in presentation within my career and I am still seeking new knowledge, new ways and continuous ways to improve how I present information.
These are few key points from my experience that helped me get to my current stage,
1) Know your stuff: If you are asked in some point of your career to present, then its quiet fair that you should understand what are you going to present before standing in front of your audience. You need to be ready to take them through it with confidence and be ready to answer questions when they come, and they will.
2) Plan your story: Whether it’s a new product you are launching, or results from analysis that you have conducted, or showcasing to your management what has been or not achieved, you need to have a good story line that the audience can follow and engage with as you go. You need to tell a story and get your audience to live it and interact.
3) Make it clear and understandable: Depending on the audience you need to know how to show what is important and to articulate when necessary. If you are showing growth, show the reason of such growth, the lessons learned, the next stage, expectations and forecasts ..etc. If you are showing a new product, make it clear what does the product do, how will it positively impact your customer’s business, what are the features that comes with it ..etc. This doesn’t mean that you have a newspaper slide J, I have seen this before when the presenter puts allllllllll the information in one slide in the hopes of me reading it !!!! if you had a report to share then you should have shared it before the presentation.
4) Steer the presentation: The moment you start the presentation you will have all eyes and ears focused at you. It’s your role to make sure that you steer the presentation towards the outcome you are looking for. That comes with practice and experience, if I know who is the key person I need to focus on the presentation, I will make sure that I will be looking at him from time to time to see if he is fully engaged in my presentation. I usually prepare some punchlines that will help me capture my audience back.
5) Avoid silly typos, or bad alignment, or bad theme utilization, colors, fonts: Be professional, it’s going to be hard for me as you audience to take you seriously when you can’t spell right J or not using the company theme, or 5 different boxes looking like the leaning tower of pizza or fonts so small that I can’t read or so big that I need to back off. You can find really great examples of well-done presentations online, just google it.
6) Keep eye contact: Very important, you need to know what you are presenting by heart as we mentioned in number 1, at the same time don’t look at the board unless there is something you want the audience to pay attention to. Its really unprofessional if you keep on looking at a notepad or looking at the board every 2 seconds trying to remember the words.
7) Don’t be afraid to say “I’m not sure”: This doesn’t mean that for every question you say I don’t know the answer or I am not sure about the answer or just stare at me with a serial killer look. You are expected to know 100% of what you are presenting but sometimes if you are not sure just be polite enough to say, I will come back to you on this as I am not sure.
8) Use different tones in your presentation: I have been in many monotones presentation that was soooooooooooooooo boring. Try to use different pitches of your voice, when it’s exciting be exciting when its frustrating show the frustration, it’s kind of like acting but you won’t receive an Oscar for it !! don’t over exaggerate it though then it looks too fake.
9) Explore different tools and ways to present information: there are many different tools on the internet that will help you bring your presentation to life and get the wow factor in your presentation. Always explore what is new out there and see if it is going to fit the presentation you are preparing.
10) Keep backup slides: For some presentation the audience may request more information about a certain topic, it is always good to prepare backup slides in case a question arises of a certain topic. It shows that you have been preparing well for your presentation.
11) Never stop learning: You will never hit the peak if you think you’re the best then you will never improve. Be humble, learn something new, accept criticism, build your skills, become better, join different groups that will enhance your stage skills, don’t be afraid to be creative and always learn from your mistakes.