HOW TO MAKE SUCCESSFUL PRESENTATIONS
The following are some of the most common mistakes we tend to make in professional presentations: 1. NO AGENDA SLIDE A professional presentation should start with an agenda slide, which serves as a roadmap for the audience. It shows where the presentation will be heading. It will be even better if we can incorporate objectives of the presentation in the next slide. 2. TECHNICAL PROBLEMS Most presenters are well-prepared with their content but less so when it comes to technology and equipment. One may spend a few minutes connecting a computer to the LCD projector. However, if a technical problem arises at the beginning, go straight to the content. Act as if nothing has happened. You might start by talking about the agenda, objectives or background while someone is fixing the technical problem. Many presenters make the mistake of attempting to help the technician even if they have limited technical knowledge and end up embarrassing themselves as well as the audience. 3. NOT QUOTING REFERENCES In business presentations, we always quote information from different sources. The professional way is to quote the source of the information to make it more credible. For example, “GDP growth in 2003 is projected at x.x% [Source: ABC Report, December 2002]”. If you don’t quote it, the audience may have doubts in their minds and this might later lead to unnecessary questions about the sources. 4. TOO MUCH PAPER Many business students try to impress judging panels by the thickness of their reports. Usually, panel members, mostly businessmen, want to see meaningful information, not a lot of data or numbers. They want a quality report that analyses the data and its implications. 5. NOT REPEATING QUESTIONS WHEN AUDIENCE ASK A professional presenter should always repeat the question prior to providing the answer. The benefit of this is that you can check whether the person who asked the question and the presenter are talking about the same thing. You can also
share the question with everyone in the audience and, most of all, buy some time to think. It’s also very useful in team presentations, as other members can have time to consider the answer. 6. NOT PLANNING OR ANTICIPATING QUESTIONS A successful presentation lies not just in the presentation itself but also in the Q & A session that follows afterwards. Imagine the presenter being stumped by questions that he cannot provide satisfactory answers! A prize-winning team member said his team planned questions with the support of 100 slides for the 20slide presentation. They practiced almost 20 times. 7. BODY LANGUAGE In a business presentation, we want to get maximum attention. If we speak too softly, with little body language, we will lose the audience’s attention after 5 minutes. Standing is much better than sitting. It draws more attention and makes it easier to use one’s hands to increase impact. 8. TOO MUCH TEXT Powerpoint is designed for a bullet point format. Each bullet guides the presenter through the speech. Unfortunately, some presenters tend to put all the words that they want to speak on the slides for fear of forgetting what to say next. Bombarding the audience with too much text will lead to nowhere. The presenter will always be looking at the slides and basically reading them to the audience. If you think there is a lot of information that the audience needs, put it in handouts. 9. FONT SIZE & COLORS The ideal text size should be around 5 or 6 lines per slide, or quite large. If the fonts are too small, the audience will not be able to follow the presentation or will have to squint at the slides. Don’t use more than 3 or 4 font colors and keep the slides easy to read, such as having a contrasting background. 10. NOT LOOKING AT AUDIENCE Some people are nervous and scared to look at the audience. Lots of practice can minimize this problem. Some look at slides and read them since they have all the words on the slides as mentioned before. Don’t forget that reading is not the same as presentation and that the audience can read too.