This week I was speaking at Surrey Chamber of Commerce Business Breakfast all about presentation skills. I started by asking three questions:
How many people here have given a presentation in the last five years?
How many people here have sat through a bad presentation in the last five years?
How many people here have had any training in how to deliver a great presentation in the last five years?
The responses were not desperately surprising. They were:
Everyone
Everyone
One person
This implies a huge problem. We are all making presentations and we are all sitting through bad presentations but no one is trying to get any better.
I imagine that lots of people have had presentation skills training over the years but like all skills, we do not maintain them unless we regularly practise them and continue to invest in improving them. A few times in my life I have had golf lessons and my game has dramatically improved immediately after them but then slowly declined afterwards. Professional athletes continually train and get coached to improve their performance yet few professional business people get coached, particularly in skills like presenting.
Presenting is all about communication. We want to get some message across to our audience, whether this a sales pitch, a plea for investment, instructions on how to manage a task or anything else. If the message is poorly presented, then no one is going to listen to it and we are wasting our time. Think about what you stand to benefit from a great presentation and then think about how much you might want to invest in ensuring that it is a great presentation.
I grew up in a time when there were few opportunities given to us to be able to present anything. My children have been given lots of opportunities. The first time I spoke in public, I was 18; the first time my son spoke in public, he was 5. However, it seems that managers think that because people have had the opportunity to present before, they are therefore capable of doing it and do not need training in it. This is not a great assumption.
A few weeks ago, I was coaching a business owner for a “Dragon’s Den” type pitch at a business show. I was delighted to learn that she won the Best Pitch award at the show, despite being up against a professional actor who coached people in video making for their business! You can read more about this here: https://www.hoolock-consulting.com/news
It does not take a lot to create a great presentation. There is a simple ABC structure that you can use to build it:
Attention – make sure that your audience is paying attention to you
Benefit – tell them the most important thing that you want them to remember
Content – give them the content.
With this simple structure, you can build great presentations, practise them and ensure that your audience listens to you and remembers what you want them to remember.