presentation skills

How to Change the World: Slideshare Announces “World’s Best Presentation Contest”

Calling a slide deck “a presentation” is a big pet peeve, but I REALLY enjoyed the results of this contest last year. It brought the excellent work of Scott Schwertly and Ethos3 to my attention.

Seen (or have) a deck you think absolutely rocks? Enter it before July 31st.

These have been rumbling around my head all morning:

1. Present your ideas, NOT your slides.
‘Nuff said.

2. Speak. To people.
Of presenting or speaking, always choose (in your own mind) to speak. Engage humans in your “audience” almost precisely the way you would engage them at a wonderful dinner party. Tell them your best stories. With love, and with interest in their interests.

3. “Which Means That.”
Live by this. Explain your concept/idea/plan/business/offering, and then append the words “which means that ___________,” and fill in the blank. Apply this repeatedly until you get to the core significance of the message and the reason that your ____ needs to exist. There is something meaningful and universally relevant at the core of anything worth doing. Tease it out and then lead with it.

(Though I forward this as a technique to make presentations better, it’s really a way to make whole organizations better. Find the significance. Share it. Always.)

Regular readers of this blog may understand pretty well just what it is that I do, and how I can make them more effective and profitable by expressing their ideas and value offerings more clearly. I, however, do not always lay out my own value-added as clearly as I’d like. Oh, the irony. Cobbler’s children, and all that.

I help you achieve more when you present. I make presentations easier to prepare, less stressful to deliver and more closely tied to ROI for your business and career. I provide tools, ideas, consulting and support that lets you and your team convey ideas more effectively and memorably.

For some clients, this means training or coaching. I help re-write and re-script the messages themselves, and more specifically target them to the audience. We can work on things you would like to change or I can run diagnostics (I know. like you’re a car) on your existing presentations and suggest areas to strengthen.

But how do you know if this is for you? Try me. Contact me to discuss an introductory analysis of your situation, opportunities and strengths.

One big, brief thought while reading: Psychology | Inside a deal | Economist.com

Can you see the world, or at least *your* message, from the “audience” point of view?

The same perspective-taking and empathy skills that make people more effective in negotiations also make presentations much stronger and more persuasive. After all, a presentation is often the stepping off point towards engaging in negotiation.

Perspective-taking, “the cognitive power to consider the world from someone else’s viewpoint,” is probably the most important part of presenting more effectively.

(Via SigmaXi’s Science in the News.)

Client: “Should I have a PowerPoint?”

Pistachio: “Why?”

Client: “I don’t want them to be bored.”

Pistachio: “Then don’t.”

Pistachio: “Is there anything you need to tell them that you cannot do with your body or your voice?”

Client: “No.”

Pistachio: “There you go.”

Pistachio: “Uh, do you mind if I write this down for a blog post?”

Next week 2,000 marketers at SAP will convene to learn and share marketing innovations. The Marketing Community Kickoff Meeting will feature:

• Seth Godin
• Ze Frank
• Dennis Howlett
• Zoli Erdos
• Ross Mayfield
• David Armano
• David Meerman Scott
• Laura “Pistachio” Fitton

www.Unisfair.com’s virtual environment will 2,000 SAP marketers for the Marketing Community Kickoff

I’m ecstatic to be in such good company, sharing my ideas about how to communicate and present more effectively. Blogging, answering questions and digging in to share ideas with the other bloggers and interact with the SAP community has already been fun and inspiring.

How SAP is running the event is exciting too. All internal blogging and discussions are on Clearspace collaborative software, and attendees will “meet” in the Unisfair virtual environment, from wherever in the world they work. I love how the event both models and teaches new ways of communication, collaboration and marketing. Can’t wait to see how it goes.

Why aren’t presentations becoming generally better despite so much great thinking on how to fix them? Is it because many come together at the last minute?

Presentation Zen (which is awesome) got me thinking. What can you fix if you only have a few moments? Say you don’t have time to master the concepts in Garr’s book, you haven’t been reading presentations blogs, your company didn’t invest in training or coaching, and you’re on the spot. What then?

10-minute overhaul to improve any presentation:

Audience & Objective
Put your slides (or script/visuals/etc) away and get out a piece of paper. Imagine that you just gave the presentation. Now write down answers to:

1. Who was in the audience? What motivates them? (2 mins)
2. How did my presentation connect directly to their interests and motivations? (1 min)
3. What did I achieve? What is the audience going to repeat from my presentation? How will they answer “What did you just learn?” (1 min)

These answers determine your purpose. They show your “audience-specific objective.” Know who you’re talking to and how to connect their needs to your goals.

Get Darwinian
Back to your slides. Delete or hide any that do not support your audience-specific objective. (2 mins) (If you MUST, promise you will click swiftly through with little comment. If knowing it’s there makes you calmer, well, calmer is better.)

Reorder
Start and end the presentation with your big idea expressed as “what’s in it for them.” Tie it to your audience’s interests and motivations. At the end of the presentation, connect your big idea to what you want to achieve. Your presentation should start something. It should stimulate an active response from the audience. (2 mins)

Extra time? Arrange your entire deck to build up the case for your big idea. Illustrate with simple stories. Sort concepts and stories into coherent sections and use clear transitions between them. Find a sequence brings the audience to your conclusions.

Lightning Round
Race through your presentation using no more than one sentence to explain each slide. Take no more than five seconds per slide. State the point in just one short remark. If you can’t, kill the slide. If you can’t kill it, “maim” it until it has a point. (2 mins)

Extra time? Go through the presentation several times in “lightning round” mode, and do significant edits between rounds. Work in teams to collaborate on the best “main points” of the presentation.

Come see this in action. Join me on ooVoo (sign up at www.MyOovooDay.com/signup.php) at 4 PM on 2/12, 2/14, 2/19 or 2/21. We’ll experiment with the ooVoo videoconferencing software (download required) by discussing how to use this fire drill. The seminar is FREE and benefits the Frozen Pea Fund.

I use the word “slide” in this drill. Most formal presentations still use slideware. They DO NOT have to. If yours does not (YAY!), substitute “paragraph” “supporting point” “story” “example” to best suit your presentation.

Whether you’re DEMOing or watching, some links and key ideas for pitching.
***UPDATE: WebInno presenters and attendees, this means you too!***

Stay within the six minutes by focusing on what’s most exciting to THEM and by ending with what you want them to DO. Don’t try to show or tell all you possibly can. It’s never about tonnage. It’s about leverage. It’s the compelling core idea.

What is the point of being at DEMO? What is the ACTION you could stimulate? What do you want the audience (both there and remote) to actually DO when you finish? (stuff like: try out the product, tell someone else about it, blog that it’s a great thing, whatever…) Have a clear objective.

For those about to pitch, we salute you:

10 pitching rules to break
10 tips for pitching
Body language cheat sheet
Nail the “ah-ha moment”
Name who you help & how
Who & how part 2
Apply the “which means that” razor

• Think about the audience’s motivations, needs and interests. Connect and resonate with these needs when you demo.
• The pitch itself is never the ends (I did “great,” but so what?). It’s a business tool. To accomplish something.
• Focus on what you want to accomplish, and have a clean ending that leaves that thought in their heads, preferably 20-30 seconds BEFORE time is up, so your last words can settle in.
• Maybe the goal is to get them to come to you for a full product demo. Tell them that. Say “come to me for a full product demo.” If your 6 minute pitch touches a nerve with their interests and motivations, they will. But don’t leave it to chance.
• Don’t think that just by showing them “interesting” and “exciting” and “good enough,” they will figure out what they should do next to engage with the idea.

If you only have time to read one post, this one’s lightning fast and universally useful.

SCORECARD: Using the ideas above, tell us how DEMO pitches you saw stacked up. Who left money on the table? Who swatted it out of the park? What one thing would have made the most difference across many pitches? You can use the top 10 lists as “scorecards.”

(Inspired by Twittering with @loiclemeur this morning.)

You might think presentations answer “What is it?” Nope. The good ones answer “What does it do?” and “What does that matter?” (credit to @JNSwanson: and great ones answer “What does that matter to me?”)

What is emotionally moving and significant about your work? product? ideas? company? message?

Financial Aid Podcast Daily Free MP3 Internet Radio » Martin Luther King Jr. I Have A Dream Speech Complete audio and text of King’s famous speech, courtesy of Christopher Penn and the Financial Aid Podcast

Or, watch this full-length video from YouTube:

I hope you had a chance today to reflect on the power of what this man did, what he symbolized and what remains to be done.