No doubt presentation skills are some of the most important skills at work. Excellent presentation skills allow you to communicate with others, sharing your thoughts, convincing customers, negotiating deals and selling proposals. It is one of the most sought after skill among candidates when it comes to hiring, as this tells how proficient a candidate can convey the message and organize thoughts effectively.
Unfortunately, presentation skills in many many companies are pretty plain and ineffective. A typical set of presentation slides are full of bulleted descriptions and contain a lot of text. Charts, diagrams are used in appropriately, resulting in more confusion and harder to convey. Such presentation slides doesn’t really help the organizations very much, perhaps only 50% of the message is clearly conveyed if using such conventional, ineffective way and guess what? Most managers actually like such presentations! They think that this is the standard way and this is the best way to do a presentation. In short 99% of the people out there are using such presentations.
So if we can be different, and convey messages more effectively, we can easily become the top 1% of the people around! That makes us more valuable and important in the organization. So today, I shall share my presentation tips and tricks which have been really successful to me. My gardening talks are always full and my organization presentations always attracted someone to give me a pat on my back. You can really feel the difference if you use a different way to convey messages. Below are the three points that I strongly recommend:
Less is more. Simplicity makes your focus clearer and straight to the point. Avoid including items that allow others to digress and stray away from your objectives. Use single and strong words to convey your message and describe from there verbally, instead of showing “Jan – Mar, we have sold 100 items ” which sounds plain and boring, try something like showing “100” and you verbally describe it “We sold 100 products in 3 months!”. This is much more clearer when you try to emphasize on 100 products sold. Avoid meaningless images / cliparts that doesnt add any value to your slides. Plain and lots of white space are preferable. In short, use a minimalist approach, “Less is More”. Simplicity is an art, and trust me it is not easy to achieve that level of simplicity!
Give meanings to words and numbers. This is the BEST way to convey useful information to others. Presenting numbers, charts or statistics without giving a meaning to it is almost useless. Numbers are numbers and they are plain data. Try to give meaning to your data, instead of telling everyone “We have a total of 5 million subscribers now”, sounds impressive but it will sound even more better like this “We have a total of 5 million subscribers, its one and half times more than the entire population of Singapore!”. See the difference? Numbers can be powerful, if we give meanings to them.
Plan, Develop and Rehearse. Three essentials steps to good presentation. Presentation is not only about doing great slides, you will need to be a good storyteller too! Generally, top presentators spent more time in planning their story than actual developing the slides. I took 5 hours to draft out a flow and a good storyboard for my 30 mins gardening talk. Presentation is like a show, you need to plan every detail of it, how the slides will look like, how your scripts going to work together with the slides, etc. So I recommend you to spend more time in this, than jumping into doing the slides. Also, rehearse and rehearse! I know many of us can present almost immediately without and preparations, but most of the time you will find it ineffective, you are not familiar with the slides, what are the coming slides, how to create anticipation, and how to execute transition from point to point.
After understanding these three points, have you notice that these are lacking in many presentations today? In fact, I have never seen any of these in my organization presentations. And when I tried them out, everyone were overwhelmed and applauded for my great presentation! You should try them out too! If you need more ideas and how to go about applying these 3 points, watch some of these great presentations online. Steve Jobs is one of the greatest presentators of all, you can watch those he presented in Apple Events. Al Gore presenting global warming, see how he brings meaning to numbers. There are also books that give you a good analysis of how Steve Jobs did his presentations from the very beginning to the end, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience
You might also be interested in the following:
- How To Deliver A TED Talk: Secrets Of The World's Most Inspiring Presentations
- slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
- HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations (Harvard Business Reveiw Guides)
- Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences
- Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal
No comments:
Post a Comment