Presentation hell   |  January 26, 2009  

10 tips to ensure your next presentation doesn’t suck

By Trevor Marshall

“New torments and new tormented souls I see around me wherever I move, and howsoever I turn, and wherever I gaze.”

In Inferno, the Medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri took readers on a harrowing journey through hell. The route included nine circles, but if Dante had been writing in the current century, he might have added a tenth: an over-heated, under-ventilated dark room filled with uncomfortable chairs facing a screen on which gibberish rendered in micro-type is projected while a disembodied voice drones and mumbles for eternity. Those thrown into this terrible place would be forced, beforehand, to consume vast quantities of carbohydrate-rich food, then warned that they must stay awake no matter what.

Sound familiar? It should: anybody who has worked in an office has attended (endured) many presentations—from internal meetings to conference keynotes.

Of course, it is possible for business presentations to be delightfully crafted and brilliantly delivered. Unfortunately, most aren’t, and range from dull to deadly. Honest readers may even admit that they have been guilty of delivering a few of these.

But there’s help. Backbone asked experienced public speakers and those who train others in the art of giving presentations to offer some advice on what to do and what to avoid, from the moment the speaking opportunity presents itself to well after the lights have come up and the audience is heading for the coffee and donuts. From this, we’ve come up with 10 good ways to avoid presentation hell. Most of these come down to common sense, and it’s no surprise that everybody interviewed had essentially the same advice. What is surprising is how common sense is ignored.

1. Say “Yes”
Michelle Warren, a Toronto-area business and leadership coach and long-time member of the public speaking organization Toastmasters, said when offered a chance to speak, people should always take it. “It’s going to take you out of your comfort zone and it’s going to help you…to become a better communicator,” she points out. “That will serve you well as you push forward in your career.”

As president and CEO of Keating Technologies, Larry Keating is often asked to speak. He said these opportunities are always valuable. “You should grab them. They help us sort out our thinking and try our ideas in the real world.”

2. Know the audience
Understanding the audience is incredibly important, said Suzanne Stevens, president of Ignite Excellence, a Toronto company that specializes in communications training. “This is often said, but made (to sound) very simple. It’s actually extremely complicated. People need to understand there’s often a lot of emotion in various audiences: there are reasons people will be with you and reasons people will be against you. Speakers often don’t know all of the issues of the people in the room. These can be landmines.”

3. Know the story
Chris Winsor, account director, corporate practice at the Toronto office of communications consultancy Hill & Knowlton, urges his clients to step away from the slide-building software and ask, “What’s the story?” It starts by nailing down the narrative. “And I don’t mean, ‘Here’s Q4: here’s what happened,’” he said. “I mean, what are the key messages that you’re trying to impart to your audience?”

“When they’re building a presentation, very few people actually sit down and assemble their thoughts,” added Michael O’Connor Clarke, vice-president at Thornley Fallis Communications in Toronto. “People should work from an outline. It’s one of those features that’s been buried deep in the way presentation software works, and very few people use it. But as a way of organizing our thoughts I think it’s the single best thing people can do.”

4. Tell the story
Stories have beginnings, middles and ends. “Everybody knows this,” Stevens said, but they tend to forget it when it’s presentation time. For example, she said it’s a good idea to let people know how long you’ll need their attention. “If I don’t know how long you’re going to be I may actually leave during the most important part of your presentation. That’s really dangerous when you’re trying to get buy-in and influence people.”

O’Connor Clarke likes to put the payoff right up front. “Whatever the single most important thing you have to say is, you should lead with that or at least put it as early as possible in the presentation,” he said. This is what the audience has come to hear. “When you stand up in front of an audience there’s a contract in place. You’re expected to deliver something of value.”

Iain Grant, managing director of Montreal-based telecom consultancy SeaBoard Group, is an experienced presenter. He said he has never been let down by the “tell-tell-tell” approach. “Tell them what you’re going to say. Say it. Then remind them what you said. Then wrap it all up with a conclusion: something the audience can take away as an action item, or something that makes people understand why they were in the audience.”

5. Don’t bury them in data
Keep it simple, Warren said, and avoid piling on too much supporting material. Like a good meal, a presentation does just a few things well. “You’ll remember that wonderful steak or lobster dinner when you go home, or the following month,” she said, “but you might not necessarily remember all of those spring rolls you had.”

But what about all that great extra stuff you know? Put it in a handout for people to take away. Extra information is valuable, but the audience wants the speaker to deliver the key messages, not a novel.

6. Don’t be ruled by props
Slide decks can be dangerous. “We live in an era in which we regularly inflict grievous wounds on each other via presentation software, and it’s completely unnecessary,” said Winsor, adding that slides are not always the best way to deliver a speech. “Content should dictate what the creative execution is.”

If slides are the best choice, O’Connor Clarke recommends the 10-20-30 rule advocated by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki. “Every presentation should consist of no more than 10 slides, you should be able to do the entire presentation in 20 minutes, and no text should be in a font size smaller than 30 point,” O’Connor Clarke explains. “People should edit without mercy—to throw away as much stuff as possible.”

And remember, technology is there to support the presenter, not the other way around. “People hide behind their technology,” Warren said. “They’ll use slides, a projector, a laser pointer or even the lights as a barrier so they never actually connect to the audience.”

Keating said a podium is a crutch that should usually be avoided. “If I was going to speak at the United Nations I might stand and grasp my podium because it looks good in that environment,” he said. “But when I’m speaking to a business audience I like to get the lapel microphone and get away from the podium.”

7. Make it interesting
The stuff that’s left should be interesting, not just informative. That means getting creative with how material is presented. “Get the audience engaged by starting off with a few questions,” Grant said. “I’ve also broken off in the middle of a presentation and gone back to those questions. I think it wakes up the audience.”

8. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse
Inadequate rehearsal is one of the biggest traps for presenters. “Everybody believes in their own mind that they’re a genius. Nobody stumbles when they run through a presentation in their head,” Winsor points out. “But presentations are, by their nature, theatrical…and we need to rehearse for theatre.”

9. Get feedback
After presenting, find out how you did. Stevens is very specific when seeking feedback from colleagues, asking for two good points and two points for improvement regarding both content and delivery. “If you ask people, ‘How did I do?’ they’ll say, ‘Fine’,” she said. “But if you give them permission to be specific then you’re going to get an honest answer.”

10. Give it your best shot
Whatever happens, always treat a speaking opportunity like it’s the most important of your career—because it just might be. Keating said even if the audience is 15 people, and you were expecting 150, “you don’t know who is sitting among those 15 people. It might be somebody from the press. It might be your next customer. And a professional puts on the whole show.”

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SIDEBAR


Angels and devils

Good presentations inspire. Bad presentations punish. Here are examples of both


The good

“In a previous life I worked in an advertising agency and we went in to present a very expensive campaign and the creative director came in and presented the campaign using a bunch of cork boards and stick figures. I’ve never forgotten that because he could have made a beautiful, elaborate presentation with lots of bells and whistles, but as a communicator he was all about content.”
–Chris Winsor

“Questions were being raised by [this telecom company’s] use of 30-second spots on television and radio. People said you couldn’t explain long distance messages in 30 seconds. In the middle of a speech [by the company’s president] at the Empire Club, a waiter began staggering across the stage, balancing a big pile of plates. It got so ridiculous that the presenter stopped his speech and everybody watched the waiter, and then the presenter said, ‘That was 30 seconds, by the way.’ It had seemed like forever, which means he really got the message through to the audience quickly and effectively.”
–Iain Grant


The bad 

“I own a company, and somebody was applying for a job once. He looked at all of my colleagues. He never once looked at me.”
–Suzanne Stevens

“I saw one person recently who had 45 slides for a 45-minute presentation. I don’t know what he was thinking because there was no way he was going to get through all those slides in that time.”
–Michelle Warren

“Several years ago in the U.K., I was on a speaking tour with a group of senior software industry executives. One guy was not only a horribly bad presenter, he also had an early version of a laser pointer. This was about the size of a clunky old cellphone. He’d bring up a slide, read through the bullets, then he’d look at the audience and press the button on this thing, point to the screen and then turn back to give the audience a kind of ‘Hey, isn’t this cool?’ look. He was so pleased with himself. It was brutal.”
–Michael O’Connor Clarke

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