Editor's Note: Claudyne offers Point, Click & Wow! free when you purchase her CD: Slides That Win showing over 200 before and after PowerPoint slide examples (put in promotional code: pmaster). Find out more at wilderpresentations.com.
Because laptop presentations are so easy to create, people frequently forget the step before actually making the slides. They forget to consider their presentation's objective, and thus they create a haphazard, disorganized file of data slides. An effective presentation has a flow to it. Regardless of content, the audience connects to the information at the beginning, processes the content through the middle of the speech, and feels ready to hear the conclusion at the end. To create this flow, a presenter must organize the material around a central objective and story line, use a logical format to make the information understandable, integrate the electronic presentation into the whole speech, and make the presentation lively and vital by changing its pace.
Organize Around an Objective
Although the focus of this book is not on organizing a presentation, we are including a small section here because so few presenters organize their material around one key objective and story line. A logical flow is invaluable for audience comprehension. If you skip from one unrelated point to another, the audience will wonder in frustration, "How does this fit together?" Sophisticated technology loses its value when the presentation slide content is not organized in a logical sequence.
The Presentation Overview Checklist below will help you to organize your data. Once you fill out this information, then you can create a focused presentation.
You should have only one clear, concise objective for a presentation. You may have other underlying goals you wish to accomplish, but you need to specify one overall objective before you start making the presentation. This objective answers these two questions: "What does my audience want from my speech?" and "What do I want from my audience?" By analyzing the answers to these questions, you can write down your talk's objective.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Here's an example that highlights the need to focus on only one objective. Tan is an expert in water filtration. He has studied it for years. He has been asked by a salesperson to give a technical talk to a customer. Tan starts to prepare his speech. He makes fancy graphs and charts to show the filtration system. He has worked on this system for years and prides himself on being a technical expert. He builds a water filtration system on the screen, and the slides are impressive. He has included all the small technical details he personally considers important.
His objective, one would think from looking at all his slides, is to share all the nitty-gritty details of the water filtration system. Unfortunately, that is not the objective the salesperson has in mind. The salesperson's objective for Tan's speech is to sell the benefits with a little bit of technical information included to support the benefits. Tan would have made a very different presentation if he had spent some time discussing the objective with the salesperson. This type of situation happens all the time between salespeople and technical experts. It is solvable when they agree on the objective and the presentation is then created around that objective. Much of the drill-down technical information can be placed on a notes page so that the speaker has it to refer to, if necessary, and the attendees can read it in the handouts.
Sharing too much technical information also occurs when salespeople are brought in from the field to learn about new products. They usually hear all the technical information about the product, with very little emphasis on benefits for the customer. The real objective of a product update or release presentation to salespeople should be to prepare them to sell the product, not to tell them every bit of product knowledge that exists. Again, some of the details can be put in speaker notes so that if technical questions arise from the audience, the speaker will be able to access the answers. The presentation should be created and built around the true objective, with secondary material included in the handouts.
Below is a sequence of five slides for a company sales conference in which new products are introduced. When the product development and technical people fill in these slides, the salespeople will actually be able to use them during customer visits. There is no reason that new product slides for customers should have to be created by the salespeople after the conference. That would be a waste of time.
The presentation objective becomes even more obscure when it is surrounded by incredible and exciting technology. For example, let's say a mutual fund company is asked to give a speech on its funds to employees of a company who are deciding how to invest their 40l(k) money. The presentation is stunning, with lots of colors flowing on the screen. The speech is full of lots of jargon and statistics. But the point of the presentation is lost in an overabundance of details. These are employees who might not be familiar with mutual funds. They might want to invest but wonder whether the process is too complicated. At the end of the talk they are no more clear about what to do than at the beginning. If the objective of the mutual fund company was to get the employees to invest in their mutual funds, it wasn't met.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
