More and more, it is becoming necessary to make a presentation to sell your products, to make a presentation to your colleagues or family…
Powerpoint, video projector and your PC then become your best friends… or your worst enemies if you are not used to speaking in public…
However, making an oral presentation is not so complicated, as long as you know a few simple tips and tricks, but they prove to be devilishly effective…
Because public speaking is not something you can improvise, and it is often by practicing or repeating that you really improve.
To avoid you this long and sometimes painful learning, I have summarized in this article 18 essential tips for a successful powerpoint presentation, plus the 11 most common mistakes made during powerpoint presentations, and as a bonus how to make good Web Seminars.
These tips come from more than 10 years spent making Powerpoint presentations both in rooms of 10 people (e.g. Tour de France to present products to prospects & customers) and in front of nearly 1000 people (e.g. a Sage Expo at CNIT in La Défense), not to mention Live Web Seminars with hundreds of people connected.
Yet at first I was a little like you: I was a little stressed about making a presentation in public, I spent time memorizing a speech…
But after making presentations, and especially by learning a few tricks and tricks, I ended up being comfortable, and even enjoying talking in front of an audience!
I have listed below 18 tips that will help you to make your oral presentations a success, both in terms of the form of your presentations and the attitudes and postures to avoid.
You will also see at the end of the article the mistakes not to make and how to avoid them, as well as a 1 hour video with examples and additional advice to this article.
Marketing Tip 1: Start by recalling the presentation agenda and what it will be said.
During this part you must announce the color: the purpose of this presentation, the process, when the listeners will be able to ask their questions…
This is essential in order to avoid any misunderstanding or to be heard at the end that people wanted to see something else or to explore a particular subject in greater depth….
This allows you to “lock” your speech: if everyone agrees on what will be said, then you will avoid people who leave frustrated or worse, those who tell you “I expected us to talk about XXX and XXX” during this presentation.
A little extra tip: before starting or during a round table in a small group (training, web seminar…), ask the participants what they expect from the speech via either a quick round table or a chat…
Note: if you do training, meetings… this locking technique is almost essential.
Creating an agenda also allows you to time your speech (e.g. X minutes for the introduction, X minutes for the demo…), and to validate that the process is logical and fluid.
For example, when I have to make a presentation to a prospect, I minute the different interventions, which makes it possible to check what I can say or not, to delete unimportant elements… This macro timing with the duration estimates allows you to make the right choices.
Marketing tip 2: Define a maximum of 2 or 3 messages to be delivered throughout the presentation.
This is often one of the reasons for the failure of a presentation: wanting to get too many messages across…
On the contrary, it is important to know that the fewer messages you put in your presentation, the more they will be understood and assimilated.
To avoid this problem, define BEFORE you make your presentation which is the essential message(s) to convey.
All you have to do is say, “If there is only one message to be conveyed during this presentation, what would it be? »
Once these 2 or 3 messages have been defined (maximum!), you will have to hammer these ideas during the presentation, and especially on the concluding slide.
Note: I tend to say that you have to think in terms of “small steps” or steps techniques. That is to say, your presentation must have only one objective, which is the first step in a process (e.g., making a presentation to encourage people to order, to get a second appointment…). You don’t want to do it right away (unless it’s an emotional sale and a crush), but rather proceed in stages.
This concluding slide should include everything you need to remember.
If there is only one slide to work on, it is the concluding slide because it is on this idea that your interlocutors will stay.
Read more or pop over to this website for more techniques explain that the brain has limited attention time: you can’t stay attentive and attentive for 45 minutes non-stop… That’s why it’s essential to treat its introduction and end, because it has been proven that this is what the brain retains the most.
