Secrets of a successful presentation

1. Practice makes you perfect. If you want to improve your presentation skills, keep practicing, and do more presentations.

2. Your main objective of most presentations is to motivate the audience or convey the message/content you have created clearly. For this, you need to understand what the audience wants and deliver the content nicely to create an impression.

3. It is important to understand your audience and then deliver the content. Don’t deliver the content based on what you know, understand the audience, and prepare/tune/customize the content.

4. If you are meeting the executives, you should be ready with the elevator pitch. Every executive is different and you need to understand what they like, what they don’t like, and their priorities. Tune your content to meet the executive personality and needs.

5. When you structure the presentation, opening, messaging, and closing are the 3 phases. When you open the presentation, try and convey to the audience what is in it for them or why is this important to gather their attention. Keep the opening interesting all the time as it is important to grab the attention of the audience very early in the presentation.

6. There are different types of presentations. For all the different presentations you make, you need to have a clear agenda and a clear summary/call for action.

7. Even the greatest speakers get nervous. So, it is fine to be nervous. Channel your nervousness to prepare and just give your best. If you are honest in your presentation and have done your homework to understand the audience to prepare the content, the audience will see your honesty and appreciate your presentation. Accent, little hiccups during the presentation, minor English mistakes etc. does not matter if you are honest in your effort and give the audience what they want during your presentation.  The last sentence is important to understand considering that India is a diverse country and English is not our mother tongue.

8. Give your best and don’t worry about the rest. If you have followed all the basics before a presentation, you will never fail and will almost all the time pass with distinction. There is nothing like get 100% marks in presentation as there will always be something to improve.

9. Great presenters also create an impact by presenting with slides that look great, telling stories that resonate, showing emotions and voice modulation as required, use effectively the tools available for them to present (e.g. pointers, using whiteboards etc.), using metaphors to catch attention, eye contact, using pause, pitch and pace effectively, using the dias properly (physical presentations) are all important. But all these things make presentations better but there is no substitute for having the right content to meet the audience's needs. If you can design the presentation to meet all the audience objectives and if you can deliver it to make it interesting and exciting, you will create a lasting impression as you impact positively both the right and left brains of your audience.

• Interacting with the audience and engaging is important. Ask questions get feedback so that you can tune the presentation as you go.  

• Manage the time and handle questions/distractions effectively. Use “Let us take it offline or I will get back to you” are 2 ways of managing questions that may not be relevant to the presentation objective or that can hinder you from finishing the presentation within the allotted time.

• Set expectations on when you will take/answer questions. Listening actively and paraphrasing the question and then answering is a good technique as it can help when addressing a large audience where the question may not be heard by all. The time you are paraphrasing also gives you some time to internalize and prepare your answer for the question.

• There may/will be disruptions to presentations in the form of questions from some hecklers during your presentation. You need to know how to deal with these disruptions and not allow these distractions to affect your delivery. See the slides for more tips

• Every person is unique. Don’t fake during a presentation or copy someone’s style unless you are comfortable pulling off without losing your personality. If you like some style of a great presenter, customize it for your own style and your personality. For example, just because somebody looks good walking around the dias, don’t copy it if you are not comfortable. You can start moving around little bit or occasionally and if you don’t see it impact your personality or presentation, embrace the change.

Continue to cover the most key aspects in short catchphrases that capture the audience's imagination.

Courtesy: My sessions with senior technologists @HPE.