Muddy to Motivating: 5 ways to Elevate your Presentations

When you’re presenting, there’s a tendency to use starchy language. You’re aiming for a ‘professional’ delivery but, instead, you’ve turned into a talking report.

Sounding professional and communicating in a way that’s more naturally conversational can feel like two extremes pulling against each other. If you add the need to steer people to action in a clear logical way, it’s like you’ve been asked to pull a rabbit out a hat.

Whether you’re presenting to your team, sceptical executives or customers here’s how to make your presentations, as well as business communication skills in general, more conversational, easier to follow and more direct all in one go, in a way that elevates your natural personality rather than diminishes it.

Five ways to elevate your presentation skills.

1. Use ‘You’: the word ‘you’ is an attention grabber. I witnessed drunken sales teams at watching after dinner speakers and the only one that could shush the chat out of them was the BBC Producer who used ‘You’ from the beginning to the end.

It evokes a conversation, feeling more natural than ‘giving a speech’.

Using ‘you’ within the first minute of your talk grabs the attention of your listeners. In fact 2020 research shows that the use of ‘you’ establishes a strong sense of connection between people and ideas so remember to pepper it throughout your talk. In fact, it can be so keenly felt, it comes with a warning.

2. Mention Names: The mere utterance of a the names of some of your listeners makes everyone more alert. Names, draw in your audience keeping them involved. Can’t get some people to ever turn their cameras on in a meeting? Say their name and you may well see what they finally look like. Here are four times names that will add potency to your communication. The transcipt is here.

3. Focus on a Succinct Central Message: Your key message needs to be relevant to your audience and of benefit to them. Whether it’s saving time in software processes or giving them updates that empower them to make better technical decisions, every bit of information revolves around this central message. And you know what you do with the verbiage that doesn’t support that message? Bin it. You don’t need it. Trim off the fat. I show you how to find your key message here.

4. Balance Emotion with Facts: You need a mixture of facts, emotion and the credibility of your own experience to motivate people to action The stats don’t always speak for themselves, especially with mixed audiences e.g. Commercial and Technical. You could use analogies and anecdotes to bolster the logic, for example. Go here for more ways to make your message hit home, regardless of who’s listening

5. Structure Logically: When you present, you take your audience on a journey, guiding them to rationale and benefits of making certain decisions. But you do need to build in contrasting actions and their own points of view to make your arguments more credible and demonstrate that you’ve considered other perspective. Here’s an outline to help you achieve that.

In short:

To transform your presentation skills from robotic to riveting:

• harness the power of direct language,
• crafting a succinct central message,
• balancing emotion with facts,
• and guide your audience through a logical structure.

Your Actions:

1. Start strong with the word ‘You’ to grab attention and make it personal.
2. Develop a clear, relevant key message and support it thoroughly.
3. Structure your content logically, considering alternative viewpoints.
4. Blend facts, emotions, and your own experience for maximum impact.

If you want to step up your presentation skills or your influencing skills,  – either one-to-one or for your teams – have a look at my pitching and presenting skills courses here and contact me, Frankie Kemp to discuss all my communication skills courses.