Dependent on where you are in the “lockdown cycle”, people are itching to get out for both business and pleasure, so it may be time to hold a seminar or information night. I’ve just jotted down a few points that may help you make your presentations worthwhile for the audience.
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- Don’t write on a white board in colours or in a print size that people can’t read.
- Don’t keep your power point slides up all the time; have them go off when you want people to focus back on you (hit the key ‘b’ for blank).
- Don’t have umpteen points on your slide; put them up one at a time.
- Don’t turn around and look at your slides, because every time you do that you lose eye contact with the audience.
- Don’t skip slides because you’re running out of time, leave them out. (In other words don’t flip through them so everybody sees them quickly, but doesn’t understand them).
- Don’t say, “We’ll come back to that,” because, guess what, most times you’ll never return to it.
- Remember LESS is MORE. The secret of being a great presenter is having something interesting to say and saying it in an interesting way. Brevity is beautiful, as Mark Twain once said when he wrote a long letter: “If I had had more time this letter would have been shorter.” It’s easy to burden people with information… the trick is to limit it and make sure that you retain their interest.
- Put some humour in your presentation. Don’t tell a joke but rather talk about something humorous that happened to you or a member of your family. Then practice delivering it. Proper Preparation Prevents Pretty Poor Performance. It’s practice.
- At the end of your presentation tell them what they have to do. Do they have to call you, do you call them, will you call them, do they have to fill out a form, or do they have to ask for information? Leave them in no doubt what the next step is.
- Put some light and shade into your delivery and don’t look constantly amazed at your beaut power point slides. After all the slides aren’t the hero, you are.
- Unless it’s a workshop don’t ask for questions as you go through your presentation. They’ll be interruptions and they’ll disturb the flow of your delivery. My advice is that, unless you’re really good at presenting, don’t allow questions at all. You’re sure as hell to get a question from somebody that is both intensely interesting to them and boring to everybody else or stumps you. And, if it stumps you, you’ll wreck the whole effect of a great presentation.
- Don’t rabbit on with irrelevant information. Juts give them the plain and simple facts.
- People expect you to keep to time so… keep to time! They want it to start punctually, they want it precise and they want it to end on time. You see other people might be following you and you’ll put the whole program out. It’s okay to look at your watch from time to time, to see how you’re going. People will respect that you respect their time.
- Don’t answer one on one interruptions. Just say to the questioner, “Look I’ll catch up with you later.” If you don’t know the answer to the question, you can spend the rest of the time avoiding them.
- Practice, rehearse and drill as my much missed mate, Doug Malouf, would say. “Before you inflict your words on an unsuspecting audience, get good in the privacy of your bathroom, deliver it there, rehearse it, practice it, and drill it until it becomes natural.”
- Get ready to humbly accept the wild applause of a well-informed delighted audience… people who have learnt from listening to you.
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