Tag Archive for ‘produce your message’ at The One Minute Presenter

Tag Archive for 'produce your message'

Speak with Executive Presence

Published

Warwick

on March 29, 2010

in Visual presentations and produce your message

. 3 Comments

Find the story from your numbers

Executive presence is essential to stand out in your organization. It frames your other credentials. If you had a beautiful painting, it would be a shame to use a cheap frame, detracting from the wonderful artwork. Executive presence is like the frame. It can enhance or diminish. When an executive with presence speaks, others listen. Every time you are in front of your senior management, they judge whether you have what it takes to step up to the next level. Not only your technical ability but also the very important aspect of projecting yourself confidently.

Paint stories from your data

One very common mistake seen in presentations is the data-dump. Executives, especially from finance or technical backgrounds, often cram charts and number-packed tables into their PowerPoint presentations. While there is no doubt that data is important, a key question is, “How relevant is it to the audience you are facing?” Senior management are usually pushed for time and want to get to the point, make a decision and move on. Instead of reciting this quarter’s financial data slide-by-slide in great depth, step back and ask yourself, “What is the story behind these numbers?” By all means show charts and tables on a slide or handout, but while you are in front of senior management elaborate on them. Use these questions to turn data into an anecdote: What are the implications of the numbers? What does this mean for the business in the next quarter or year ahead? What actions need to be taken? What decision needs to be made as a result? By then answering those questions you will move towards what the numbers mean for the business. Help senior management see the trends, the big picture and the direction emerging. They will appreciate the extra clarity of your presentation.

What can you do to move away from data-driven presentations? Take a look at your next presentation and find the story that the numbers are telling.

Are you an Executive? Learn how Warwick helps ambitious executives speak with executive presence here.

Tagline Your Messages

Published

Warwick

on December 8, 2009

in produce your message

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Tagline them

Have you ever been asked to prepare a 40 minute presentation and then just before you come in to deliver it, be asked to ’slim it down’ to 20 minutes?! I mean what are you meant to do? Speak twice as fast? Cut out the verbs?

A way to be always ready for this challenge is to properly message your presentation. I call this taglining. Consumer companies use taglines to create a memorable phrase that is linked with their brand. For example, since adidas introduced their “Impossible is Nothing” tagline, it has become part of their target audience’s vocabulary. I call this type of message a ‘meta-tagline’ which summarises a broad theme or direction. Your presentation should have a meta-tagline. You can think of it as your high concept or movie title. (eg It’s a Wonderful Life, Saving Private Ryan, Snakes on a Plane).

The main benefit of using this approach is that – together with framing – it helps you think more clearly about the key messages that you want to deliver. This is important as today’s audience are busy, overloaded with information and distracted by mobile devices. You need to be able to deliver your key messages in a short time and make them memorable.

This is quite a challenge. Especially when most presenters can’t even remember their own presentation! Reading off crib notes, turning around to speak off the screen or frequent looking up or down are signs that the presenter has not prepared adequately.

Once you have a meta-tagline, go down through your presentation section by section and ask “What is my key message here?” How could you summarise it into a short sentence or tagline. This requires some thinking and can be difficult when you first use this skill. Once you have completed this, you should have an overall message or concept (meta-tagline) and between three to five messages summarising the main section content.

Your messages can now be easily written on a card and memorised. With clear messages, you can tie your content together more naturally and then the content (data, statistics etc) are used to support your message. This approach makes you bulletproof to shorter presentation times and ensures you have clear messages throughout the entire presentation.

Examples of Meta Taglines:

Too broad – Quality Concerns

Too long – The most important quality concern we have today is in manufacturing

Good example – Three Essential Quality Changes

Examples of Taglines (for sections):

Too broad – Data insufficient

Good example – Two data gaps we must monitor

Frame Your Presentation

Published

Warwick

on December 4, 2009

in produce your message

. 0 Comments

Frame It

When facing an executive audience, such as a board of directors, you need to help them understand the scope of your presentation for two reasons.

Firstly, busy executives have so many issues swirling around their heads that you cannot assume that they know the scope of your topic.

Secondly, senior executives do not want to know all the details. That is why they hire you. You are the subject matter expert. So what this means is that at the start of your presentation, you must signal the depth of your content. By indicating to your audience that you will not dive straight into detailed charts and statistics you are showing that you understand their expectations. Later on while you are presenting you may be asked for extra details, but don’t assume that an executive audience wants to know every single statistic.

Example of framing 1: “Today, in the next 15 minutes I will cover the three main updates for Project X. I will not go into the data charts which I have provided as handouts. I will take a Q&A after each update. Shall we start?”

Example of framing 2: “The main purpose for this presentation is to highlight the options available to us following the discovery of Problem Y. Although this could take us into several related areas, we have decided to stay focused only on the short term solutions. This will take 30 minutes and I welcome comments throughout. If this works for everybody, I will start.”

Simplicity Sells

Published

Warwick

on November 12, 2009

in Create Your Connection and produce your message

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Simplicity Sells

With the rise of the over 50s as a demographic that marketers would like to target, finally we have computer makers designing a computer for people who are not comfortable negotiating a complex file management system or a desktop full of icons.

Simplicity Computers have introduced a computer with a simple navigation interface (Square One - couldn’t they have found a better name?) and built-in video tutorials that are clear and easy-to-understand.

This got me thinking that designing a good message for a presentation is all about simplicity. Being simple is not easy. And being concise can take a lot of preparation. The next time you prepare a presentation, ask yourself, “What is my message?” Is it concise? Could someone over 50 or under 10 years of age understand it?

Simplicity means cutting out the jargon, and acronyms. Simplicity is about reducing a concept to its simpliest terms (without being patronising). Simple messages are easy to transfer.

David Pogue - an advocate for simple design - also has a speech called “Simplicity Sells” delivered at TED Talks.

Do you hate rehearsing?

Published

Warwick

on November 6, 2009

in Finish on Time

. 0 Comments

Rehearsal or Repitition?

In my experience of coaching and training executives in multinational companies, the one major deficit that I find is the lack of proper rehearsal. People are just not interested in putting in the time to rehearse their material.

If you have been involved in a sports team or theater then you will know that most of your time is spent practicing drills. A sports team will spend most of the time working specific drills day-in, day-out before they get ready to work on their game practice.

More worryingly, I find that younger professionals are even more averse to rehearsal. Perhaps its the consumer, must-have the next new thing that influence this opinion. Most success is hard work. And most hard work is spent mastering mundane tasks.

In presenting, effective rehearsing needs as a foundation a mastery of the content to be delivered. Most presenters don’t even reach this level. This is one reason why they struggle to deliver with confidence. It’s hard to deliver with style while you are still trying to recall the next sentence you need to deliver.

So where do people spend their time? Mostly making PowerPoint slides. A completely inefficient use of time. A slidedeck is simply a tool to support your message and add visually memorable ways to recall your key messages. It is not the presentation.

A proven way to speed up the process of reaching a message is to “stand-and-deliver” the speech as soon as you have a basic outline. Record these early rehearsals five minutes at a time. Then immediately listen to the recording and note which areas sounded strong and flowed well. Make a note of them on your outline (or write it into a script if you prefer). Keep cycling through your presentation in this way until you have solid message that flows well through the presentation. Once you have got to this stage you can work on refining the transitions and think about adding visual aids and slidedecks.

When it comes to rehearsing a voice recorder is your best friend.