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What goes into making an effective Business Presentation?
Home » Training » Business Presentations » What goes into making an effective Business Presentation?Define your audience. Who you’re speaking to helps shape your entire delivery. To help determine your audience, answer these questions:
How large is your audience? This determines your delivery style, type of handouts, and level of interaction.
How old is your audience? Use frames of reference that your audience will understand.
What gender is your audience?
Are you speaking to people of the same business rank as you, your superiors, or your direct reports? Make sure to speak to them appropriately.
Why are people attending your presentation? Are they forced to be there, or have they chosen or even paid to be there?
Are audience members familiar with your topic already? This helps you determine a starting point and set the level of detail.
Define your message. What, exactly, is the point of your presentation? From the list above, decide what type of presentation you’re giving first, then determine what you hope to accomplish with your message. For example, if you want to motivate your audience, decide what you hope to motivate them to do. Then list steps it would take, or obstacles you’d need to overcome, before your audience would buy into your message.
Make sure to include plenty of invitations, if you will, for your audience to do what you’re asking them to do. If you’re selling something, don’t just give a general presentation on the product. Ask your audience to try the product, to buy the product, to give you a chance to meet their needs in that arena—anything that asks them to act.
Knowing your message. We’ve all attended seminars, workshops, or presentations in which the speaker just clearly didn’t prepare. The speaker stumbled through the opening, kept rearranging notes looking for his or her place in the speech, kept saying “um, uh” and clearing his throat, and even looked to others to help with statistics or finding the right word. It’s painful for the audience to sit through, and it’s even more painful to be caught with the spotlight on you and nothing to say. The bottom line: Be prepared. Know your stuff, practice your stuff, and do it with confidence.
Hook your audience. Without an interesting opening—or a clear reason up front for your audience to listen—you’ll lose them quickly. Don’t leave their attention to chance. Carefully select an interesting story, a quote, startling statistics, a catchy song, anything to get them interested. Then sprinkle more of those throughout your presentation to keep them listening till the very end.
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