Aim

Most presentations that fail, do so from the very start by not having a clear and realistic aim. Presenters often launch headlong into the process of gathering material and preparing slides without asking the hard question: what do I want my audience to be able to do after listening to me, that they couldn’t do before?

This may sound like a tall order, but it’s not. If nothing changes for the audience, then what is the point of speaking to them? And the bland delivery of bullet-point information, slide after slide, for 20 or 30 minutes – or sometimes a lot longer – may not be fulfilling your role, most usefully, as presenter

A presentation should be as focused and as engaging as a doctor-patient consultation. The doctor has knowledge, but he or she doesn’t just issue large tracts of this knowledge blandly (a twenty minute discourse on viral infections, for example) in the hope that it may be useful to the patient. Rather, relevant elements of the knowledge are packaged so that they fulfill a specific need of the patient. As a presenter, you should always try and identify the needs of your audience and target these directly, and clearly.

A large part of the training centres on outlining a realistic need for your presentation, for a given audience, and setting out your content so as to deliver on this need. Quite often you have to take a step back from what you are doing in order to do this properly. You have to ask what does a presentation do that no other communication medium does as effectively, and focus on these elements. This can lead you to decide that a document, or a meeting, or a Q&A session would do the job more effectively, but in a business world of endless PowerPoint presentations, people rarely think like this.