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