By Mark Vickers

“Yeah, me too, I caught a bit of a nap during the all-employee meeting. . .another hour wasted.”

Sandra, the manager of a successful organization, was shocked when she heard this conversation over a cube wall just minutes after finishing a series of employee meetings. Her talks had generated applause and positive comments from those she visited with afterwards.

Three weeks earlier, Sandra had met with department directors to discuss the staff meeting. She knew that human resources had big news about the benefits plan and other opportunities for the staff. Team members followed their standard process for preparing for a meeting:

• They discussed the details to be shared.
• Staff prepared the necessary slides.
• The slides were reviewed and updated.
• Communications staff created a script.

A few days before the meeting, Sandra received the script and did a quick review, and she was relaxed and ready to make a good presentation. Sandra and her team followed a process similar to many organizations, making these same mistakes that new and experienced presenters can fall victim to.

Mistake #1: Failure to engage. Regardless of how much experience you have making presentations, engaging your audience is an intentional process. People have a short attention span, and it is your job to re-engage each member of your audience often throughout your talk. Some of the best ways to engage and re-engage your audience are to:

• Use compelling, well-crafted stories.
• Share just enough information to make your point, leaving the extra details for a report they can read later.
• Don’t be a “talking head” delivering a “presentation.” To connect with others, be a likeable and knowledgeable person talking to each member of your audience.
• Today, more than ever before, your audience wants to be entertained. Being a “verbal flatliner” with little variety in tone, volume, and speed will cause you to lose your audience quickly.

While these tips sound simple, they are not easy to implement.

The Solution: Preparation. To ensure success, make sure you use a robust presentation process and structure to address:

• Key intent.
• Maximum points for time allotted.
• Illustrative stories.
• Audience and content calibration.
• Power opening.
• Call to action.

Regardless of how many presentations you have made, a lack of a time spent preparing using a formal process will lead to diminished results because:

• Important points will not be made as clearly as required.
• You may talk beyond your audience.
• Speaking patterns and habits that distract your audience from the message will be more evident.
• Content overflow (too much content for time allowed) will overwhelm your audience and bury the core message.
• Verbal overflow (excess verbiage immediately after key points) will cause the most important information to become lost in the “babble.”

Mistake #2: Being a support to your slide presentation. You might have heard of death by PowerPoint, yet you don’t believe it happens to your audience. It is easy to slip into one of three traps that cause you to lose power and momentum:

• Slides should provide visual support. Unfortunately, many people let the slides take over the show. Your slides should not be a cue for what comes next in your presentation, making you appear like a trained executive who speaks every time the slide changes.
• You should be the “authority” and not the slide show. If you let your slides share the most important information, it might be better to e-mail everyone your slides because they don’t need to hear you.
• People respond better to other people, but slides are easier to deliver. No matter how effective your slides are, they will never compel an audience to take action as well as you can when you are clear and passionate in your delivery.

The Solution: More practice. Formally practicing your presentation is the only way to make sure that your carefully developed content is presented effectively. To get the most from your practice time use this process:

• Practice delivering your presentation (not silently reading it) while standing.
• Video (or at least audio) record it.
• Review the recording.
• Refine your presentation.
• Repeat.

Mistake #3: Failure to improve. Your presentations will ultimately define your success and when done properly will be remembered and acted on by your audience. While the ability to present information is critical to many professionals, most fail to improve over time, typically as a result of one factor: When it comes to determining the effectiveness of a presentation, most people rely on comments from unreliable sources and then use that unreliable feedback for future presentations. 

Do you rely on feedback from:

• Friends, family, and staff? These people are close to you, they like you, and have a relationship or dependency on you; they are not necessarily objective and honest with you.
• The people who come up after your presentation and tell you how great it was? These people might just want to get a few seconds with you for their own reasons or you may have connected well with them. What about all the people who didn’t come up? What did they think?

The Solution: Get strategic feedback. To determine the true effectiveness of your presentation, try these tips:

• When people say “great job,” instead of taking the accolades and saying thank you, ask them questions like:

                    Tell me something specific you learned?

                    What are you going to do different as a result of what you heard?

                    How do you feel about this subject?

By asking specific questions after you speak, you will discover what they really heard. Important: Ask the people who come up to you and the ones who don’t.

• Listen to a recording of what you did. It is important that you listen as a disinterested, disengaged audience member who believes they have better things to do than listen to you. Is there anything in your presentation that might get their attention? Were you dynamic and personable?

• Consider having a person trained in speaking, in connecting to an audience, and in critical strategic feedback provide an assessment.

Successful presentations do not happen by accident, they are carefully planned, crafted, and rehearsed. You have a responsibility to provide value to the people who give their time to listen to you. You will be rewarded when they leave highly motivated and take the action you recommended.