5 surefire tips to get what you want in presentations

Years of ranting about it has made no difference whatsoever..... I continue to be stunned and amazed at the abysmal standard of management and sales presentations. Technology continues to improve but poor management presentations continue to thrive!

The stupid thing is that if you do a good a presentation, you do actually get what you want...

So here are 5 surefire tips to help you get more of what you want...

1. Work out which 3 things would you like your listener to remember
2. Use the „Summary-Tell-Summary“ structure
3. Use less data!
4. Ask yourself „so what?“ at each slide
5. Don´t overrun!

by way of explanation:

1 = People don't really listen for long, so focus on getting a few points over
2 = Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them and tell them what you told them
3 = less is more!
4 = if it is not critical to your top 3 points, leave it out (or stick it in the appendix)
5 = finish early and they`ll love you even more for saving them time!


My 2 favourite books for further reading...

Barbara Minto - The Pyramid Principle : legendary stuff and, ironically, quite difficult to read. A must tho!

Edward Tufte: The Graphical Representation of Data. Wonderful stuff!