Good Presentation Skills: A Step-by-Step Guide
Use our simple roadmap for delivering a great presentation
The Opportunity to Present – Good Presentation Skills
Good presentation skills are essential for the modern workplace, and giving a presentation is an opportunity to shine. It can help you achieve something meaningful for your organisation while showcasing your ability to communicate in a positive and professional manner.
Even if you fear or loathe speaking in front of others, you can easily put yourself on track to delivering a great presentation with some practical steps. The objective is to be so prepared that you feel as though you have already delivered it.
Get Into the Presenter Mindset
Communicating information is only part of your role as a presenter. The primary purpose of presenting is to bring that information to life, which means delivering it in a way that captures your audience’s interest. If you need them to take an action, then it also means finding ways to inspire and motivate them. Put simply, you are the vital ingredient of your presentation.
As you think about what you need to communicate, consider how to use your unique personality and speaking style to deliver it effectively. Beyond that, presenting is simply a matter of capitalising on some good presentation skills, such as our seven laws of presentation success.
Gather and Structure Your Material
Start by bringing together the information you need to convey. It helps to set yourself a time limit for the presentation so you know how much material to gather. For example, TED Talks are limited to 18 minutes of speaking time. You can find out why in our article on how to talk like TED.
As you gather your material, structure it into primary and supporting messages. For a loose guide, try to restrict the presentation to between five and seven primary messages, and around three to five supporting messages for each. This will make it easier for the audience to absorb and remember them.
Bring Out the Benefits
Most advanced presentations are about purposeful change, whether you are reporting on the progress of a project, introducing a new internal process, or selling to a customer. The most common structure for doing this is ‘challenge and solution’.
Ideally, begin by presenting the overall challenge and its overall solution. Once you have established this, move on to the specifics of the challenge and how they are solved.
Most importantly, think about how to make it relevant for the audience. Presentations should be benefits-led throughout, so always try to phrase messages in terms of the value to the organisation and its individuals. For customer presentations, you can achieve this using the ‘matching’ technique. Knowing you have the right product or service for a customer is essential for presenting with confidence.
Change the Audience’s Perspective
One of the secrets of good presentation skills is to find something that the audience finds fresh and interesting. For example, look at your subject from a different perspective, such as taking a helicopter view of how the challenge impacts other areas of the business.
Don’t miss out on the power of storytelling to engage and inspire. Your entire presentation should be a story about the challenge and solution, and you can also use smaller stories such as examples and metaphors to illustrate key points.
Bear in mind that people sometimes need to be challenged into thinking differently, but that doesn’t mean you have to be confrontational. The Story Factor by Annette Simmons has some valuable advice on how to do this.
Create Compelling Speaker Support
This usually means PowerPoint slides, but never lose sight of the fact that speaker support should do just that – support your verbal delivery. No one comes to a presentation specifically to read a screen.
The purpose of speaker support is to enhance the way you communicate messages and help your audience follow the progression of ideas. But you don’t need text to do it. Why not omit words in favour of an image or graphic? You could even use a prop or two.
If you feel you need to use text to help the audience, then include a few short phrases per slide that they can follow as you speak. We have many other good presentation skills that will help you create compelling speaker support. Check out our article on writing PowerPoint presentations.
Rehearse
Naturally, you want to practice your presentation until you can deliver it smoothly and engagingly. For important presentations, why not ask some colleagues to be a test audience, which gives you an opportunity for feedback? You might even seek out a good presentation skills coach for expert help.
Make sure your presentation has a powerful opening and closing. We have some advice on how to create the ideal ending for effective presentations. However, try not to over-rehearse or you may be too restrained on the day. Ideally, you want the audience to feel this is coming from the heart.
Finally, don’t neglect the Q&A. There are many question-and-answer presentation techniques to help you craft an effective Q&A session that reinforces the formal part of your presentation.
Preparing to Present
If possible, arrive early to set up. Check that your presentation slides and display equipment are working. For important business presentations, consider having a technician standing by in case anything goes wrong.
A certain amount of nervousness is vital for an authentic presentation as it keeps you sharp. Good presentation skills include slow, deep breaths to help you relax and even holding something in your hand such as a pen. Often the nerves will lessen or disappear once you start your delivery.
Good Presentation Skills as Conversation
A key element of good presentation skills is to focus on the audience. They may be attending the presentation to see you, but the presentation is for their benefit. Concentrate on making sure they understand the information and are changed by it. That means engaging with the audience sitting in front of you rather than the one you prepared for.
Speak slowly and clearly so the audience can follow you, pause regularly so they can absorb what you are saying, and use eye contact to enhance engagement. Where possible, try to create a sense of a conversation. Help them feel consulted, questioned, and challenged, even if they are not actually saying anything.
Monitor their reactions and adapt your presentation to get the best possible outcome, which may mean improvising from time to time. If they don’t understand a message, think of another way to explain it. If they don’t see a benefit, tell them a different story to illustrate the cause and effect.
Judge Yourself on the Results
We all want to know how we did but don’t assess your performance on how you feel. You can ask colleagues for feedback, but the greatest measure of success is what happens next. Do colleagues implement the new process? Does the customer choose you? If they do, then you clearly have some good presentation skills.
But why stop there? Imagine what else you can do to inspire action from others. Most business presenters and public speakers spend their whole careers developing good presentation skills that enable them to bring about even greater positive change in people and organisations.
Good Presentation Skills
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