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Overview

The audience is captured by the story, not the slides. The presenter should spend twice as much time planning their presentation on paper than they do creating the actual slides. Nancy Duarte, who wrote and designed Al Gore’s global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, says that presenters should create a storyline first before moving to the slides.

Start planning your presentation by deciding on a key message that you want to leave with the audience. It should be like a Tweet: short, memorable and attention-grabbing. If you are launching a new product or service, your key message should describe how it will benefit the customer. Repeat your key message multiple times during the presentation so that it sticks in their minds. If you’re giving a big presentation, people might well be searching for words to describe what they saw afterwards; give them something memorable with your own choice of phrase. For example, when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone he gave journalists ready-to-use headline: “Today Apple reinvents the phone”

Big Idea #1: To make your presentation great, you must practice relentlessly.

Practice Makes Perfect

Practice makes perfect. Steve Jobs practiced his presentations for hours and days to make them look effortless and smooth.

Winston Churchill’s speeches were not extemporaneous, but rather he practiced them extensively. Practice your presentation so much that you don’t need to use notes. If you absolutely must have notes (for step-by-step demonstrations), keep the number of bullet points per slide down to three or four and make the notes small enough for people to see without being distracting.

To make sure you’re ready to present your speech, record yourself practicing. Watch the video and see where you stumble or get nervous. Rehearse those parts until they sound natural. Ask a friend to watch the video with you for feedback on how good it is.

To make your presentation great, you must practice over and over.

Big Idea #2: Don’t let the unexpected ruin your presentation; be prepared for trouble.

Even the best presenters can run into problems. Maybe a demonstration doesn’t work, your computer crashes or you skip a slide.

If you do encounter a problem during your presentation, don’t panic. Let the audience know that it’s not a big deal and then move on. If there is an obvious problem, don’t draw attention to it or apologize; just keep going. Laugh off any mistakes if possible so you can continue with the story without losing credibility in front of your audience.

Questions asked during a presentation can be difficult to answer. It is better to prepare for them in advance and avoid being thrown off guard.

You can prepare for questions by using the bucket method. First, identify common questions you might be asked and break them into categories. Then write a generic response to each category of question that’s broad enough to cover all the different ways people ask those types of questions. If someone asks a question during your presentation that contains a trigger word from one of your buckets, then give the prepared answer for that bucket.

Hillary Clinton was a Senator and wanted to be the Secretary of State. She held a press conference, but she expected journalists would ask about her husband’s foundation.

Hillary Clinton’s prepared answer for the question about her husband and the Clinton foundation would have been satisfactory. She said, “I am very proud to be the president-elect’s nominee for Secretary of State, and I am very proud of what my husband and the Clinton foundation… have accomplished as well.” It would have worked if she had just answered one question during her presentation. However, she was asked a completely different question that caught her off guard.