Presentation consultations

Who needs presentation consultations?

Professionals who are required to make presentations and do not feel completely satisfied with their results or with the amount of time it takes to prepare and practice their presentations.

What are the benefits of presentation consultations?

Saving time on preparation and practice
Gaining confidence in delivering your message
Improving your and your organization’s image
Obtaining the skills necessary to create and deliver outstanding presentations every time

How does it work?

You are guided through every stage of preparation for your presentation, given strategies for practice and the opportunity to receive constructive feedback on your presentation before you deliver it to a real audience. Assistance is also offered on slide design.

Steps in this process include:

Assessment

Speaker and audience objectives, the speaking environment, audience analysis, core message definition

Preparation

Content creation and elimination of unnecessary information, connecting content to your core message, opening strategies, tactics for keeping attention, leaving a strong impression, slide creation

Practice

Opportunity to rehearse presentations with constructive guidance and tips for delivering a dynamic talk that will set you apart from the rest

Video Training

The chance to see yourself speaking as others see you and to learn strategies for greater impact

Feedback and Future Steps

When possible, I will attend your live presentation and offer you feedback and tips for future improvement


© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

Five Reasons Why Presentations Matter

Why should we be so concerned about presentations? Does it really matter how we present? Is it worth spending time and energy to get it right?

I think presentations are vitally important. Here are just five reasons why.

1. Your image

When you speak in front of a group of people, fair or not, you are being judged by that group. If you present well, you automatically project an image of confidence, credibility and competence. This kind of impression sticks in people's minds. You're taking a gamble if you don't consider the weight of this impression when you are preparing for and delivering your presentation.

2. Your organization's image

Not only are you representing yourself when you speak publicly, but you are giving the audience a face to your organization. Whether you work for a well-known multinational or a small NGO, the image you project when you present will compel the audience to make a judgement regarding your organization.

3. Your message

When you present, you obviously have a message that you want to convey to the audience. If you make a clear, powerful and memorable presentation, your audience will understand, remember and believe in that message.

4. Creating a buzz

You want to get people talking about you, your organization and your message well after your presentation. You want to be asked to speak again at a conference or to be chosen to handle that big account next time. How you present your ideas and motivate your audience can make all the difference.

5. Your future

You never know who is in the audience and what they can mean to your future. What people see when you give a presentation can have an effect on your future prospects. Take advantage of this opportunity to really shine!

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

The Seven Deadly Sins of Presenting

Commit just one of these sins and you will have less chance of getting the results you want when you present. Avoid these at all costs!

1. Reading your slides

If you have so much text on your slides and you don't know your presentation well enough to speak naturally, you may be tempted to read your slides to your audience. First of all, if your slides are full of text, your audience has to make a decision - read your slides or listen to you. They will almost always choose the first option. And, they can read much faster than you can speak so they will be waiting for you to catch up and will be wondering why you didn't just send them your slides instead of delivering a value-added presentation.

2. Not doing your homework on your audience

If you don't take the time to find out who your audience is and what they want from your presentation, it is clear to the audience in the first five minutes. Doing an audience analysis is a crucial step in your preparation process.

3. Not knowing what your core message is and being able to communicate it

You should know exactly what you want your audience to remember about your presentation and be able to communicate this in a simple and succinct way. When your presentation is finished what should your audience remember?

4. Putting too much non-essential information in your presentation

Every piece of information you include should be directly related to your core message. If it's not important for your audience to know this information, leave it out or you will lose your audience's attention! Keep asking yourself, 'Does my audience really need to know this? Is it important for them?'

5. Not grabbing your audience's attention from the very beginning

If you are tempted to start your presentation with some bland facts about yourself or your company or if you start right in with information without giving your audience a reason to listen, you will lose your audience before you even get started. Remember the structure of an opening: an attention-getting statement or question, the objective of your presentation and then an outline. Make it easy for your audience to pay attention!

6. Not knowing your subject well enough before you speak

If you are giving a presentation, you should really know what you're talking about! Once you have structured your presentation, practice it enough so that you need only an outline to remember your main points and the examples/stories that you've included to make it real for your audience.

7. Not having any enthusiasm for your topic

If you're not enthusiastic about your topic, it's impossible for your audience to have any enthusiasm for it. Show your audience how important this information is for them to know and keep their interest by your own enthusiasm!

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

What Seth Godin does right

Seth Godin is a great example of an outstanding speaker. His latest talk at TED is one of my favorites. Take a look at it and I'll highlight some things he does exceptionally well:

http://www.leadershipnow.com/leadingblog/2009/05/seth_godin_at_ted.html

1. He immediately gets our attention. He opens his presentation with some attention-getting examples of people 'who know what they do for a living'. He compliments these stories with some eye-catching visuals. He gets our attention and leads us directly into the objective of his talk - 'what do we do for a living? I think we try to change everything'. That's gets us listening and curious about what we are going to hear.

2. He then clearly tells us what to expect from his talk - 'What is the process of making important change? I've been studying this for a couple years and I want to share a couple stories with you today.'

3. He gives us some very clear examples of people who are making these kinds of changes and how we can 'change the status quo and make big, permanent, important change' and the process we should go through when trying to do this. These stories are real, interesting and supported by some great visuals that keep our attention.

4. He makes his core message extremely simple, easy to remember and he moves us to his message with something we can understand - the factory stage, the advertising stage and now we are in the leadership stage. If he had simply started talking about the leadership stage, we may not have had something to compare it to and he may have lost some of his audience.

5. He relates his message to his original statement - 'What we do for a living now is find something worth changing and then assemble tribes that spread the idea and it becomes a movement'. Everything is connected in his talk - there is no information that is NOT connected to his core message - this is KEY!

6. He supports his message towards the end with even more examples. This reinforces his message after we have completely understood what he is promoting.

7. He gives us something tangible to think about towards the end with his three questions. The aim is to make your audience think about your talk after the presentation is over and this is a great way to do it

8. He gives us a wonderful summary of his talk. He doesn't say 'I talked about this... blah blah blah'. He tells us what we should remember - ' Challenge, Culture, Commit'. This kind of stuff stays with an audience.

9. He finishes with a call to action. He tells us to do something! 'What I want you to do is create a movement. Start. Do it. We need it.' Nothing could be more motivating than a direct call to action.

10. Above all, Seth is contagiously enthusiastic throughout his talk. He believes in what he's saying and he wants his audience to believe in it. Follow his example and you might even create a movement of your own!

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

Advocating Intolerance

I find myself becoming less and less tolerant of speakers who appear to have no consideration for their audience's needs and expectations. Yesterday, I walked out of a presentation halfway through. I'd never done that before and I know that we are supposed to sit quietly, pretend that we're interested and clap enthusiastically when a speaker has finished, but I just can't do it anymore.

Here are the reasons I left early yesterday:

1. The entire event was something quite different than what had been advertised and was a disappointment itself.

2. The main speaker didn't even bother to create PowerPoint slides, but instead put up an Excel screen that most people couldn't decipher and proceeded to go through it point by point. No one knew why we were being subjected to all this information or what possible benefit knowing this data had for us.

3. One brave audience member suggested that we could be sent this Excel sheet and go through it on our own (i.e. please, skip this boring part and get on with what we came to hear!). This hint was ignored and the speaker plodded on through the numbers...

And, then I left. As I was leaving, I could see others looking on with envy and I felt a bit guilty. Should I have continued sitting until the end? My answer remains NO!

And, I think that no one should be forced to sit through a presentation that adds absolutely no value and is simply a waste of time. Of course, you can’t do this when the speaker is your boss, but if it’s a public event and especially one that charged a fee to get into, walk out and make sure the organizers know why you did.

What if we all voted with our feet this way? Would speakers begin to get the point and start making their presentations more audience-focused and beneficial for the listeners? I think so.

This situation calls for a revolutionary act that won’t make everyone happy but will begin to change the current state of presentations today.

Shall we start to be a little less tolerant as audience members? Yes. But, remember, that we are also speakers at times. This means we have the responsibility to create presentations that people don't want to walk out on in anger. We need to put everything we have into making presentations that people WANT to listen to. Let's do it!!

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

Form or Substance?

Has anyone heard of Albert Mehrabian's Communication Model? You probably haven't heard the name, but anyone who has taken a training course in communications or presentations has probably heard these findings being quoted by the trainer:

7% of meaning is in the words that are spoken.
38% of meaning is in the way that the words are said.
55% of meaning is in facial expression and body language.

But do these findings really apply to business presentations? I asked this question because it just didn't seem right to me. Only 7% of meaning is in WHAT you say to the audience?!

So, I looked around a bit and found Dr. Mehrabian’s website. He states very clearly that his model has been used for situations that really DON'T apply!

This Communication Model was meant to apply only to ‘face-to-face, one-to-one communications, containing an emotional or attitudinal element’. Dr. Mehrabian goes on to state that 'unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.'

So, what does that mean to business presentations? Is it unimportant HOW you deliver a presentation - of course not! But, even if you have beautiful body language, meaningful gestures and wonderful facial expressions, if WHAT you are saying to your audience isn't focused on their needs or isn’t important to them, they won't listen to you!

So, start spending much more time on the core message of your presentation and choosing the words that will motivate your audiences to listen and less time deciding on the right gestures and facial expressions!

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

Observations from an audience member

Recently I attended a couple of conferences and had the chance to see a lot of presentations. There are an enormous amount of lessons to be learned when you look critically at what is going on. Here are just five lessons from the presentations I saw.

1. Use photos on your slides. And, I don't mean a little photo box next to some text. I mean a slide-sized photo with a few words on top of the photo. And, make sure it's high-quality (try http://www.flickr.com/ or http://www.istockphoto.com/). There was only one presenter at one conference that used these types of slides and the difference in impact was clear.

2. Don't read your slides - EVER! Please remember that the audience can read much faster than you can speak and we are waiting for you to catch up (and to say something that we can't read ourselves).

3. Don't start your presentation with the history, profile, strategy etc of your organization unless it's the point of your talk. This kind of information is not important to your audience and if you start with it, they will stop listening to you before you get to the objective of your presentation.

4. Please spell-check your slides! It's a real sign of laziness or an attitude that you don't care what your audience thinks when you don't take the time to make sure the words you put on a slide are spelled correctly.

5. Keep your audience involved (and awake!) by asking them questions. Audiences are really bold (or rude, depending on how you see it) now and have no problems sending messages on their phones or even getting out their laptops and getting some work done when a speaker doesn't interest them. First, make sure that you have prepared an audience-focused presentation and then keep them listening by making it as interactive as possible.

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

What do you expect?

I recently attended a talk by a speaker who was speaking about a potentially very interesting topic. Unfortunately, the one thing that I remember most about her presentation is the way she started it (not an unusual thing for audiences to remember the most, by the way). The first thing she said after she was introduced was 'I know that there are a lot of expectations about this talk and I hope I don't disappoint you.'

Do you know what this first statement caused me to do? I was EXPECTING to be disappointed! I was also wondering why she had thought that there were so many high expectations. Had there been some kind of audience questionnaire that I didn't get? Was I somehow different from the rest of the audience because I didn't have really high expectations of this speech?

The point is that apologizing or admitting that you might not live up to expectations at the very beginning is NOT the way to start your presentation. Even if English isn't your first language and you don't have much confidence in your English speaking skills, don't apologize at the beginning for mistakes that you might make later. If you do, your audience will be expecting you to make mistakes and they might not truly be concentrating on your topic.

Start your presentation strong and confident and your audience will expect great things from you. And why shouldn't they?!

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

What about the audience?

Who are these people anyway?

During my consultations, one of the first questions I ask is, ‘Who will be in the audience?’ I am constantly amazed at how many times I get the answer, ‘I’m not really sure who will be there. Does it really matter that much?’

Let’s make something really clear. One of the only things that really matters when you are creating a presentation is who the audience is! These people who will be sitting in front of you should shape the entire focus and structure of your presentation so you really should find out who they are.

The first question you should ask yourself is, ‘Who are the decision makers?’ These are the people that you should focus your presentation on. You hope that the other people in the audience are interested in what you’re saying, but they are peripheral. The decision makers are the focus here.

Some questions you should ask about your decision makers:

- Why are they attending the meeting/conference?
- What do they want to learn from you?
- What are they worried about?
- What kind of information will excite them?
- What decision are they expecting to make?
- What do they need to know in order to make that decision?

This should get you started in the right direction. Don’t be afraid to do some investigation before you start creating your presentation. If you’re speaking at a conference, call the organizers and get the information you need about the audience. If you’re speaking to the Board, talk with the people who know them best.

And, depending on the situation, it might be possible to ask your audience directly some questions before you prepare your presentation. Speakers are not expected to be mind readers! Ask them what they want to hear from you – they will be refreshingly surprised to know that you are creating your presentation based on their needs and not yours. And, isn’t that how it should be anyway?

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

Information overload

How does this happen?

The best way to illustrate how speakers end up with presentations that are too long and too full of information is to give you a real example.

Not long ago, one of my clients asked me to help him with his presentation. He was scheduled to speak at a conference in order to share his experience with a new technology. The main objective of his talk was to show the audience how this technology had helped his organization reach more clients and make their experience with his organization more user-friendly and efficient.

In our first meeting, my client showed me the slides that he had created and he wanted my feedback.

His first eight slides included detailed information about his organization: history, structure, its latest marketing campaign, recent changes in strategy etc. In other words, the first part of his presentation had absolutely NOTHING to do with his presentation objective and there was no reason for the audience to listen to any of this information.

If we had kept the presentation as he had created it, he would have lost his audience's attention before he had even gotten to the point of his talk.

This is a very common mistake. We think that the audience MUST be interested in us as speakers or in our organizations so this is what we initially talk about. In reality, the audience is not interested in us or our organizations (unless we are celebrities, of course).

They have come to hear what you have to say about the topic and nothing more.

In this example, we ended up deleting all of the first eight slides and starting the presentation with what the audience came to learn about - this great technology and how it could be applied to help them gain the same benefit that the speaker did. In the end, the presentation was a success and the speaker gained credibility in his field.

So, the next time you‘re planning your presentation, ask yourself if the information you've included is absolutely necessary for the audience to hear. If it isn’t, take it out!

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

What are we doing wrong?

Top three mistakes

I think it’s important to first recognize that there is a problem with the way presentations are being made and then we need to try and define what we are doing wrong. Only then can we attempt to solve the problem and start making outstanding presentations.

You may have a different list, but I’ll give you the top three mistakes that I think people make when they create and deliver presentations.

Firstly, presentations are too long! Have you ever left a presentation and said to yourself, 'That was a great presentation, but it was just too short.' I didn't think so.

Is there a time limit for presentations? Of course not. But, we have a tendency to put way too much information into our presentations and make them much longer than necessary. We want to make sure we’re not leaving anything out and, in doing so, we bombard our audiences with loads of unnecessary information. And, the result is that we lose our audience’s attention.

Secondly, presentations are usually not audience-focused. If the audience is even considered in the preparation stage, it’s usually just an afterthought.

One of the most important questions you can ask yourself is what the audience expects from you. Why are they coming to see you speak? What do they expect to get out of this presentation? What do they want from you? Presentations are NOT about the speaker. They are all about the audience!

And, lastly, there’s a real problem with the way we think about slides. Please remember that your slides are NOT your presentation. Their only function is to support your presentation i.e. you and your message. Use them to get your audience‘s attention and make them curious about what you’re going to say. They should function as a way to get your audience to listen to you.

So, this is a start. If we can take these three issues and start to make changes, it’s a good step on the way to making our presentations more focused, engaging and effective.

Next time we’ll look deeper into the problem of information overload and how to avoid it.

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

Why presentations?

Why do we make presentations?

This sounds like a pretty basic question, but one that I think deserves to be explored. Not many people enjoy giving presentations, do they? Some people are even terrified of it. Why do we put ourselves through this uncomfortable experience? With all the technology we have available today for communicating our ideas, why do we even bother with the painful process of creating and delivering presentations? Why don’t we just email our PowerPoint slides and be done with it?

Because presentations are not about communicating facts. All evidence to the contrary, giving people facts is not the point of presentations. So what is the point? Presentations give speakers the opportunity to persuade, motivate and impress their audiences. In a presentation, we have the chance to move our audiences emotionally, to illustrate our ideas with powerful stories and to inspire our audiences to believe in and act on what we are saying.

If your objective is simply to give your audience a lot of facts, please skip the presentation and send them a document with all the information they need.

But, if you want to do something more, then you’ll need to give them more than just facts and tell your audience why this information is important to them. Show them how they can benefit from knowing these facts. Illustrate how this information can help them. Motivate your audience to act on your proposals by connecting these facts to something tangible and important to them.

So, the next time you have a presentation to make, ask yourself what you really want to achieve. Do you want your audience to have a better impression of your organization? Do you want them to sign a contract? Do you want to motivate them to adopt and adhere to a new company policy? Do you want them to donate to your cause, start investing with you, become your clients?

Once you know why you’re making the presentation, you can forget about ‘just giving them some facts’. Help the audience fulfill your objective by moving beyond the facts and giving them a reason to listen to you!

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

What is outstanding?

30 million every day!

Presentations are an extremely popular form of communication. It's estimated that there are 30 million presentations being delivered every day around the world. How many of those are truly memorable and engaging?

As we said last time, most are frustratingly boring and a waste of time.

So, if our goal is an outstanding presentation, what do I mean by 'outstanding'?

I think that it all comes down to content. The main factor that separates a 'waste of time' presentation from one that is worth listening to is WHAT the speaker says. You can have beautiful body language and stunning eye contact, but if what you are saying isn't important to your audience they won't listen to you. Period.

Focusing on the content of your presentation takes a change in thinking from the very beginning. The speaker needs to start changing who they are making the presentation for – the audience!

It's all about the audience. Everything needs to focus on what the audience expects to learn and what the audience wants to know from the speaker. How many times have you sat through a presentation and thought, 'Why is he telling us this? Why is he giving us this useless information?'. It's frustrating for an audience when they can't connect what you are saying to something meaningful for them.

Therefore, before you open PowerPoint and before you write the first word of your presentation, ask yourself some questions - Why should the audience listen to me? What does the audience expect to learn? What do I want the audience to do with this information?

That should get you started in the right direction. Just these three basic questions will start to make a difference in your preparation and get you on the road to making an outstanding presentation.

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved

Let's Change It!

On the edge of their seats.

When was the last time you looked at your audience and saw them leaning toward you, genuinely interested in your presentation? When was the last time your audience acted as if what you were saying really mattered to them?

OK. Let's turn the tables. When was the last time you sat in the audience and felt compelled to give the speaker your undivided attention because what they were saying was clearly important to you? When was the last time you didn't feel like each presentation you saw was simply a waste of time?

I, as a fellow audience member, can fairly easily guess what the answers to those questions are.
The sad truth is that most of the time speakers are speaking to audiences that aren't listening.

What's happening here? What's the point of making presentations anyway? Why aren't we taking advantage of this great form of communication? What can we do about it?

The main objective of this blog is to address these questions and talk about what we can do to start thinking differently about presentations.

Let's change the way things are done! It's time to start making presentations that people WANT to listen to and that get the results that speakers set out to achieve.

Let's get audiences back to where they should be - on the edge of their seats!

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved