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You can also ask more interactive, open questions. They usually leave the answer open and let the responder frame a response. Here are some examples:
1. How do you see this solution fitting into your business?
2. You mentioned a problem with x during our discussion on the phone last week. Here’s some information about that problem. How does this information fit with your view of the situation?
3. What additions or changes do you have for this recommendation?
To be an effective presenter in the future, you will need to sharpen your question-asking abilities. If you’re stuck about what to ask, sometimes silence and a pause will get people talking.
Make the Graphics Inviting
Why is this information in the chapter on connecting to your audience? Poor graphics aggravate audiences and, more importantly, people stop listening to the talk. They may look attentive, but they are really no longer engaged. Most people have acted this way during a talk. You don’t want that to happen to your talks, so be judicious with your graphics. Presenters take pride in the fancy, colored, bells-and-whistles presentations they’ve put together. This is especially the case if they’ve spent much time making them. They want to show off their "baby." To some extent this is acceptable, but keep in mind that, whether or not you have a fancy presentation, you still have to back it up with your knowledge about the topic. You have to talk to your audience. Your audience is first. Keep your attention and enthusiasm directed toward them. You will read throughout this book that many audiences do not want sound within a presentation. They don’t want bullets and images flying in from all directions of the screens, and you don’t want to compete with your presentation for attention.
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To keep yourself mindful of the audience’s reaction to your talk, here are some do’s and don’ts. Know that you will never compete with the real world in terms of glitz and drama. According to Business Week, the average American is exposed to about three thousand ads a day. Your job is not to compete with those ads. Your job is to create slides that engage your audience in a conversation about your recommendations.
1. Don’t Use the Wildest Template You Can Find. Suppose you are bored with the templates you have been using, so you pick a lavender background with circular shapes on it for your presentation to convince the management committee to give you $50,000 more for your project. The management committee members can’t figure out how your subject fits with the bizarre template they see on the screen. There is dissonance among your project, the money you want, and the lavender and circular designs they are seeing. Maybe they can’t tie their resistance to the template, but they are becoming concerned about giving you the money.
2. Do Remember That the Best Screen Is Sometimes the Simplest. Use a template that will appeal to your audience and that is appropriate for your subject. Think about what style appeals to them. You may need to change your templates, not the presentation content, depending on the audience.
3. Don’t Become so Enthralled with the Beautiful Graphics and Special Effects That You Lose Sight of Your Message. You have made the slickest, most up-to-date presentation. You even paid someone to include video clips, and you’ve added fancy arrows moving all kinds of ways on the screen. It looks fantastic. You know no one will be bored with your talk. They will really have to keep their eyes open to see everything you have included. There is only one problem. The audience becomes so entranced with the special effects that they don’t get the message. They walk away saying to each other, "Wasn’t that exciting? I’ve got to get that graphics package." Not only has the message of your talk been lost, but also the audience never had an opportunity to experience you as a person. You took no time to let the audience get a sense of you as the presenter. The audience will remember the graphics, but you as a sincere presenter, focused on a key objective, never got across.
4. Do Keep Your Message Center Stage, Not the Presentation Slides. Keep reminding yourself to create the slides around your central objective. And, at least at the beginning and end of your talk, you should be center stage, with the lights on high and the screen blank.
5. Don’t Organize the Charts, Images, and Pictures in a Haphazard Manner. You may have beautiful slides, but they won’t have much meaning without structure. If the material is presented in a stream-of-consciousness style or if you have not organized the data in any logical sequence, your audience will feel frustrated that you did not take the time to present the information in such a way that they could easily follow it. Some audiences just give up. The information comes across so disorganized that they don’t waste their energy attempting to figure out how it all fits together.
6. Do Organize the Data! All forms of communication need to have some kind of structure to be effective. Over three-fourths of the presentations that we see are not organized, and even more are not organized to appeal to the audience—they are organized to appeal to the presenter! In the next section you’ll learn how to organize your data using the Communication Staircase.
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