What is a great presentation?

Let’s start at the very beginning. What is a great presentation?

You know it when you see it, don’t you, but it can be very hard to pinpoint what you’re seeing. Usually we attribute a great presentation to the presenter’s personality, charisma or style. It seems that great presenters have some intangible quality that is just out of reach.

This is simply not true and once you examine what a great presenter is actually doing you realise it has very little to do with the individual presenting.

Let me tell you exactly what a great presenter does:

1. A great presenter begins the presentation with the first question the audience wants answered. They start with the audience’s needs, thoughts and feelings. This is what is called the point of engagement.
2. A great presenter then takes their audience by the hand (metaphorically of course) through their data by the most direct, easy, jargon-free, enjoyable and understandable route possible.
3. The end point of the presentation is the result. This means the audience are thinking and doing what the presenter planned for.

This is the point where:

• the audience understands the concept;
• the audience has bought into the idea;
• the audience recognises the messages of the presentation and how these messages relate to them.

A great presentation grabs the mind of the audience at the beginning, navigates them through all the various parts, themes and ideas easily, never letting go, and then gets them to the point of action or result.

Very few people do this. Most people take a path similar to that shown below.

Most presenters don’t consider the audience and their needs properly (doing so in your head doesn’t count) and start a presentation from their own point of view, their starting place. They start the presentation at the point they think is important and then they simply dump data in all directions. In other words they talk about their topic. Sure, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?

While they talk about their topic, among their data are their messages and some very important points. Unfortunately these messages get lost in a fog of facts.

The audience has to work very hard to unearth the point of the talk and understand the data being flung at them. In most cases an audience is not prepared to work this hard. In some presentation scenarios an audience may not even know why they should listen in the first place.

The sum of the parts

The skill of presenting involves two distinct, individual parts you must consider separately: communication and delivery.

This is a slide I use in my talks to convey the message that in order for a presentation to be great it must give equal weighting to both communication and delivery.

Most people when they think of a presentation tend to focus on the second circle – delivery skills. This is the part of the presentation where you have to stand in front of the audience. This is the scary part. This is the part where you don’t want to embarrass yourself.

There are hundreds of presentation skills courses out there offering absurd tips and tricks (no offence) to survive this part of a presentation. My personal favourites include but are not limited to:

1. Stare at the back of the room. (You will look crazy.)
2. Imagine everyone naked. (This is definitely a really fun game but I would save it for the Christmas party.)
3. Hold a pen. (You will fidget with it, drop it or click it.)

A presentation is not about self-survival … or is it?

Self-survival

Actually, a presentation is about self-survival and this is what you have to change if you are going to have any chance of having a positive impact on an audience.

We are all afraid

Every single human being on this planet who presents is afraid of the same thing, not being enough. Not being smart enough, confident enough or knowledgeable enough.

They are afraid of being found out. They are afraid they won’t look like they have done their research or job properly. They are afraid of being asked a question they don’t know the answer to.

This means they approach their presentation in self-survival mode. The problem with this mode is it is about you the presenter, surviving the experience of presenting rather than putting the audience first and creating a positive and engaging experience for them.

Presenting is scary, but in order to deliver a successful presentation you will have to get out of the self-survival mindset.

Ownership

The only way to be successful in a presentation is to take ownership of the experience you are creating for your audience.

Firstly you have to make a decision to take the focus off you and make your audience number one. You must make them the most important person in the room.

Secondly you must get to grips with your words and your message. Owning what you say is vital to being credible and authentic. If you don’t own what you are saying all you are doing is impersonally reading data.

It quite simply comes down to ownership of the experience you are creating for the audience.

The best approach

Win-win

Presentations are a vital component in building a business relationship with a client.

When you present there is the potential for one of three outcomes:

1. Win-Lose
2. Lose-Win
3. Win-Win

You can leave your presentation feeling like a winner but your audience may have lost out. They were not engaged or talked to. They were simply subjected to an hour of data overload and irrelevance. This is a win-lose situation.

There is a scenario where the audience feels they got what they wanted and needed but the presenter feels a loss of integrity because they didn’t present themselves the way they had hoped. For example, the audience may only care about cost but the presenter knows quality is a big issue but fails to get this point across and fears long-term consequences. This is a lose-win situation.

In presentations, as in life, both of these scenarios will breed long-term resentment and frustration for both the presenter and audience. This is not good business because this is not good relationship building.

The ending you want from any presentation is a win-win situation. Both the presenter and the audience must feel they have won while also meeting the needs of each party.

Can you convert the Unconvertible?

Can you always achieve a win-win outcome with every audience? No, you can’t. You can only create a win-win with an audience who has something to gain or lose from your presentation. Let me explain.

The members of any audience you find yourself in front of will always fall into one of three categories:

• The Converted
• The Unconvertible
• The Floater

The floaters

The group open to being influenced by your presentation. Your aim is to turn them into the Converted. The Floaters are open to listening to you. The reason they are not converted already is because they have a question, maybe many questions, that you have not addressed. The only way to move them from Floater to Converted is to identify the questions they need an answer to (the right questions) and address them to their satisfaction. This is not as easy as it sounds and many times the presenter will identify the wrong questions and fail in the presentation.

In the mind of the presenter

A company, let’s call them Company X, called me to work with them recently as they had lost a very big pitch to provide a health care scheme for staff in a large multinational company. We examined what happened. Company X assumed the potential client was concerned with price so they focused on this hoping it would influence the client, who was in the Floater position. Company X did make the best offer in terms of price so they were very taken aback when they did not win the business.

    After contacting the potential client for feedback it turned out cost was not the most important question this multinational had. Its main concern was how staff would cope with a new company taking over with a new scheme. Company X did not address this in any detail. It was covered in one bullet point on a slide in the middle of the presentation.

    Company X failed to win the business (turn the Floater into the Converted) because they didn’t answer the most important question for the potential client.

    Their presentation failed because Company X was talking about the wrong thing. They were answering the wrong questions.

    In order to turn the Floater into the Converted you must know why the Floater is still floating and make them understand why they should convert. This is the art of a great presentation.

This is where I come in

I know you probably have some idea of what makes a good presentation (you have sat through enough bad ones). However, I also believe you probably don’t completely know how to create a great presentation. For example, how do you turn your data into a series of engaging, impactful messages? How do you turn the Floater into the Converted?

This is where I come in. I will give you the tools and show you how to create a great presentation. I will give you a simple three-step approach that will structure and shape any data you have into an engaging and influential presentation.

But first we must start with the basics.

If great presentations are made up of two parts – communication and delivery – then we must look at both of these in detail. Let’s start with communication.