I Studied Great Presenters and They All Do These 3 Things

[00:00:00]If you want to become a great presenter, you have to focus on three things. And that's going to be your story, your slides, and your delivery. And if you miss either one of these three, your presentation won't have the impact that it deserves. And yes, I'm also talking about your weekly meetings presentations. Hey, my name is Henry.

[00:00:14]I'm a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP, and I help people all around the world improve their presentations. Of course, you might know me from the presentation in the PowerPoint skill itself, but the main most important part is actually what happens before you make your first slide. And that is thinking about the story that you're going to bring. Yes, also for your business presentations or your weekly meetings. So to do that, I've made a little bit of an overview that we can go through so we know exactly what to do in which of these steps. So that helps you create better presentations in the end. So first of all, I want to start with this little overview. So the most important thing that we have to know, great presenters always focus on three things. Their story, what are they going to say? The slides, what you see on the screen behind you and how it supports you. And number three is the delivery. Once everything is done, you want to deliver it and you want to sort of amplify that message. So to do those things and I just mentioned it here again, yes, it also involves your weekly meetings, your small meetings that you do maybe with a few people all the way to maybe boardroom presentations. You can apply those techniques. So let's start with the first part which is going to be the story. Now when I talk about the story, we're not going to go for that once upon a time and start telling an entire story. No, we're talking about business stories here. So how can we in a business context still bring a story in place? First thing we need to do for that is we have to very clearly understand the audience. So we have to know exactly who we're talking to. And the reason for that is that people from different departments or different teams might totally have different expectations. If you're talking to your peers, they expect something different than a senior manager for example. So we have to know exactly who the audience is, what they want to know, what they already know and how we can sort of give our information to them. And then once we have clearly defined the audience and we know exactly who we are talking to, then we're moving on to the second part which is the goal. We're going to set up the exact goal of our presentation. And this is very important that we know it because there's different goals of presentations. On the one side, the presentation could serve as something which is informative. So you want to inform the people about something. You want to train them on something. Another goal of the presentation could for example be that you want to persuade them. You want to maybe get a budget approval. You want to maybe convince them to have a new hire or convince them about your product. And each of those goals of presentation require a different framework. For example, if you want to persuade someone, you want to start with a problem first and then dive into the solution. You don't want to just push the solution to the audience.

[00:02:34]And if you want to inform, you maybe want to bring the context in first before you dive deeper into the details.

[00:02:40]That's where a lot of people lose the connection with the audience very quickly. And then once we have the audience and the goal mapped out, that's where we want to move on to the message.

[00:02:47]And that message, I mean, is the key message? What is that? And I'll write it down here. What is the key message that you want to have your audience remember?

[00:02:56]And of course, when it comes to the key message, the very popular examples that we always see is the Barack Obama, yes, we can or we see the Martin Luther King speech, I have a dream. Now, those things, they're very nice on a big stage, but in a meeting room, they don't really make sense. And I always feel a little bit of a of a a weird part when someone says like, "Hey, you have to do these things in your meetings." It doesn't make sense if you do that in the meeting itself. What we want to do is we want to come up with these one or two sentences that clearly define what we want to get out of the meeting. And maybe that sentence for you is to increase revenue by 15% we have to invest in XYZ otherwise we will not get there. And that if you repeat that throughout your presentation in the beginning, the middle and the end and that is for me very crucial that you have this figured out yourself and you can clearly state it multiple times in your presentation. You don't expect the audience to come up with that key ID themselves by just dumping all of your content in your slides. You want to sort of prepare that for the audience and you want to set that right so they understand it and they don't have to do the thinking for you. You do the thinking for them and then you present it. And then once we have defined it so we know exactly who we're talking to. We know the goal of the presentation and we also know the key message that we want to bring. Then it's time for us to build a structure. And depending on the goal that structure might be a little bit different as I said if you want to persuade you start with the problem first and then you guide them towards the solution. This is a very very commonly known problem and then the arc the bridge to the solution part or if you want to inform you start with the broad context and then you narrow it down into the details and if you know these points that's how you can really come up with a story and it's not this once upon a time and we try to fit in a story and emotional angles from every different side. No, we really look at what is the purpose of this presentation, what is the goal that I want to achieve, the key message and then we bring in that structure that we want to add to come up with a really nice story for your presentation. Now that of course brings us to the next part which is going to be our slides. So as soon as we know the story, we know exactly what we want to say. Then we come up with the part where we start to create our slides. So we don't start in our presentation, we first come up with a message and then we go to the slides.

[00:05:02]First thing here is you want to apply some principles for that. And the most important principle that I can give you here is that you want to have one idea per slide. You don't want to extend and you don't want to push all of the information into your slides. You want to stick to one idea per slide. And if you have more ideas, fine, but then split them up. This is not your key idea, but every slide has an idea or has a key message. You want to put one per slide each. And if you have more, just split them up. There's many nice ways to connect them with push transitions, with more transitions doesn't really matter.

[00:05:35]Keep it simple for the audience. So the simplicity and one idea per slide for me is the main principle that you want to apply. And it's only at that stage when we have these simple information that we want to convey on our slides that we start to look at design. And I know a lot of people look for tutorials online, especially on on on channels. I mean, I have a PowerPoint channel myself, but that is not your starting point. And your presentation is not made with your slides. Design is only a secondary aspect of it. And it might look nice, but if your content, if your story isn't nice, if that key idea isn't there and the simplicity isn't on your sides, no matter how many design elements you're going to add, it's not going to matter.

[00:06:13]So the design only happens afterwards.

[00:06:15]And one of the simple frameworks that you see on this one for design is very often the uh crap methodology, which is contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. So you want to have enough contrast with size with colors in your elements so things stand out that are important. You want to guide the eye, create a visual hierarchy. Repetition, we want to repeat that throughout the slide so we have a consistent slide deck that fits our brand. Alignment, we don't want to just randomly put things on our slides. We want to make sure that everything is nicely aligned and has a function on the slide. And then also we have that P proximity. If you put things closer together, they feel like they belong. Now once we have designed the slides we have to look at our data visualization. A lot of the business content contains a lot of data and a big mistake I see a lot of people make is they just put information on the slide and expect the audience to come up with the result themselves but also with data there's so much that we can do to steer the attention and that is what makes you a really great presenter. If you put a slide or a chart on the slide and you expect the audience to come up with a solution or come up with a conclusion that is not the best way forward. You want to put the information on the slide. You want to make it very clear with a title what you mean. And then you even with color, you want to sort of steer the attention. So data visualization isn't always these infographic looking things. You want to steer the attention to the part on your slide or on your chart that you highlight and you think is most important. And that is also a masterass on its own. If you how are you going to change that data? How are you going to steer that attention to the data?

[00:07:48]There's so many nice techniques and that we can use. Now another important part that I want to mention with the slides is that we master the tool and that is the next point that I want to add is that we want to yeah we want to understand the slide master. So we make a lot of presentation especially for meetings we waste so much time and people find it boring but that is mainly because they just don't know how to use the slidem they don't know how to use transitions animations they don't know how to make a slide properly and maybe make hundreds of slides in a week. I mean it happens if you're in a professional context. You have to make so many slides. You don't want to design everything. You want to build structures for yourself. So understand how you can make these slides and how to make them look nice. But then also understand how you can speed things up and how you can become an actual expert in them. That is going to take you so much further. And once we have that, we have tackled the story. We know what is important, what we have to put on the slide or how to come up with that story. We also know what we need to focus on our design.

[00:08:44]Don't go for the crazy things. Focus on the simple message. Design it nicely with that uh contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity. Keep it simple.

[00:08:52]Visualize your data. Make it clear for the audience and then master the tool.

[00:08:57]Make sure that you can repeat it, that you can scale it. That is super important. And then we come to the next part which is the delivery. And for the delivery, yeah, I want to highlight a little bit that last part here. So the transitions and animations that is sort of the connection from your slides to your delivery that can help you quite a lot. So delivery first thing, timing. If you can get those timings right and you have things appear at the right time, maybe you can organize things with an animation, maybe you can have something appear or disappear in a very nice way and you combine that with some good storytelling, that is when you truly start to shine. So that timing is going to be a very crucial important part in your presentation skill set. But besides timing, we also have our voice. I mean, it's an instrument that we've been given. is one of the only instruments that we can use throughout a presentation. We can vary our pace, we can vary our inonation, maybe we can leave a pause. That is going to be super crucial. I mean, if you say your statement and the most important sentence, that's when you leave a pause. So, we can play around with those things. And it's again, this is an yeah, a master class on its own. How are you going to use your voice? How are you going to speed up when it's super important? and then slow down when you want to emphasize. It's like underlining and putting things in bold with your voice, which I think is a very undervalued technique. And of course, besides the voice, we have our presence. How do you present yourself? How is your presence in the room? Are you physically there?

[00:10:26]Are you just reading it off or are you controlling the room? Are you filling the room? Are you making eye contact with the people? Are you walking around?

[00:10:33]Are you maybe coming closer to the people? Are you speaking louder? All of these things. What is your presence in the room? So that is something you want to rehearse as well. You want to train so that you can have the impact that you want. You've got your message, you've got your slides. Now you want to deliver them in a right way as well. Now besides present, there's also rehearsal which is crucial and this is something which I see a lot of people forget as well. They rehearse but maybe they just do it once behind their desk. Well, practice standing up, practice sitting down, practice on camera, practice off camera, practice with slides, practice without slides. There's so many techniques that you can do for that rehearsal. I mean, make variations. Do some variations. Do rehearsals with your slides, without your slides, with a clicker, with a mouse, with a keyboard. I mean, go crazy. Stand up, walk around. Try the different things that work for you. Try to find a rehearsal method that works for you. And that will just make it so much more comfortable when you're actually doing it in the real time. And the last one is the nerves. You have to control your nerves. You have to be able to be calm in the room. And a lot of important things for this is breath work. Know how to breathe. Take pauses.

[00:11:42]Don't be afraid of standing in front of an audience and leaving a silence. You have to control your nerves. Be present.

[00:11:50]Rehearse that. the better the ears, the less nerves you'll have, and the more professional you'll um you'll appear towards the the audience. So, these are all things that help you become a great presenter. And these are for me the most important focus areas that I try to help and coach people on. Now, of course, one video won't get you there, and it's not by watching this video that you'll be a fantastic presenter. You'll be a great presenter. But if you practice on those areas, that's how you get to be there.

[00:12:18]And that's how you grow into that great presenter with your rehearsals, with the repetition. Maybe focus on one part, but understand that you have to do the preparation, build that story, know exactly who you're talking to, what you want to know, what you want to say.

[00:12:32]Structure it nice, then you come up with a slide, key idea, make it look nice.

[00:12:37]Don't go over the top. Just make it clear for the audience first, and then practice your delivery. Make sure that you bring it in a nice way. So, if you're not feeling confident yet, that is perfectly fine. I have an entire master class that teaches you all of these topics in detail and that is my business presentation skills program. So if you're interested in that, I'll put the link in the description below.

[00:12:57]Thanks a lot for watching. Keep rehearsing.