Not Another Presentation

“No one ever complains about a speech being too short!” Ira Hayes 

Presentations are a critical communication medium entrepreneurs need to be adept at. Good presentation techniques make it easier to get your point across to your team, investors and customers. However, to be able to present like Steve Jobs, requires a lot of hard work, creativity and passion. Without these three components, not only will your presentations suffer, lack of these qualities impact the overall quality of life. We have all been at presentations where we have seriously wanted to shoot the presenter, unfortunately sometimes this may have been us. I have a personal example when I was presenting the constitution of our entrepreneurship society to a new chapter we were inaugurating in China. I am pretty sure that within 5 minutes I had everyone in the room asleep. Looking back at that experience, I blamed the material, however, it really was my fault for not putting the material across in a manner that would have engaged the audience more. 

As entrepreneurs most of the time our presentations will revolve around pitching to investors, introducing a new product/service to a customer, or giving a quarterly sales report to the rest of our team. Most of these presentations have huge amounts of data that needs to be presented in graph forms, charts and numbers. What often happens is we tend to get lost in the detail and forget the overall message we want to leave the audience with. Other times, we just read off the slide, word for word, and that can be a most painful experience for the audience. The worst case  scenario is when the presenter is visibly unenthusiastic about what he/she is presenting. Unfortunately, many of us fall into these common pitfalls and that can have a detrimental impact on our ability to convince a team, get funding or close a sale. 

Over the course of the coming week I will talk about some key elements your presentation should comprise of. These should provide your presentations with that extra level of oomph which should excite, motivate or inspire your audience, whichever of these is your objective. However, to begin the process, we first have to break away from traditional “rules” we follow regarding how a presentation is supposed to be structured. We have to begin thinking creatively, with two objectives in mind, these are, what is the audience expecting of us and, what message do we want to leave them with. I hope this series will be of some help, I wish you all the very best in your future presentations.

Sample Presentation:

[slideshare id=85551&doc=death-by-powerpoint4344&w=425]

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