Chris Anderson is a curator for TED talks and so far there have been a billion views of TED talks since they started forty years ago. He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled “How To Give A Killer Presentation” which was published back in June 2013 and it still stands up well today. I have given a TED talk myself and so have had some exposure to the process and the rules they have around giving presentations. Let’s look at the 5 key points from Chris’s article. I will add my take though, because the original article can easily be accessed for his advice in detail.
The story requires a meeting of the audience, their mind’s eye and our tale. We want to get them to the spot where it happened, when it occurred, who was involved, what transpired and what was the result. We have to explain things in a way in which the audience can see the scene we are describing in their own mind. That makes it so much more real for them.
The key secret here is simple. Only you know what you are going to say, so if you mess up the order or leave a bit out, only you know that and please, do us all a favour and keep such a piece of intelligence to yourself. I had rehearsed a talk for a Convention audience as the closing speaker and despite all of that effort, I was suddenly and inexplicably going from my point three to my point five, while I was delivering it. It was like an out-of-body experience, observing myself departing from what I had rehearsed. Only I knew the order though, so I just plonked point four down after point five and carried on shamelessly, as if this was all part of the grand plan.
Chris makes the point that jiggling the body around when speaking is distracting for an audience. Quite true, but some speakers can’t help themselves. The adrenalin being pumped into the body by the brain which was sensing fear, is such a strong chemical reaction they cannot control themselves very easily.
The solution is stand on the one spot and don't move. Also do tons and tons of repetition in rehearsal, so that you are so confident in your material, that you can order all the butterflies zapping around in your tummy to fly in formation. Look at the people in the audience who are nodding their heads or smiling in approval of what you are saying and avoid all eye contact with those who look grumpy, adversarial or negative. This will boost your confidence and help you to control the nerves
4. Plan the multimedia - whatever you do, don’t read from PowerPoint slides.
Yes, please don’t read to us. Using photos is a bit of a favourite of mine, because the audience can understand the photo in 2 seconds and then I can add my spin to what this photo represents. When I did my own TED talk, this was the technique I used.
Being natural and conversational rather than pontificating, lecturing or sermonising is a good idea, as the audience can absorb the message more easily. None of us need a wannabe thespian or a baroque orator for our next speaker. Using pauses is a good idea too, because it is a natural phenomenon and it helps to direct your mind to what needs to come next. If the nerves are driving the speaking speed up too much, then a short pause gives you the break you need to redirect to the right speed.
When presenting some things work better than others. The good news is there are tons of resources to guide us on our quest. Using trial and error is an extremely bad idea because remember this is your personal and professional brand which you are exposing to the world every time you get up to talk.
When I was preparing for my TED talk, the thought that this talk of mine could potentially be accessed and assessed by millions of people, scared the hell out of me and made me rehearse like a demon on speed. I suggest we all do that for every talk, TED or otherwise and when we do, we will do a much better job of it.
In the sales world, it is well known that as buyers the first purchase we make is the salesperson serving us. We decide we like and trust this person and therefore allow them to extract our money in return for a service or product. It is the same in the world of presenting. We buy the presenter first and then we absorb their message. Given this is fairly obvious, why aren’t all presenters doing their best to sell themselves to their audiences?
In some cases, this leads to failed attempts at straight up humour or self-depreciating remarks faintly disguised as humour. Interestingly, recently I was asked about humour when I was giving a talk on how to be persuasive when delivering presentations. It was actually an ambush question. The questioner had in fact taken lessons on doing standup comedy and was testing me on what I knew about the subject and what I might be recommending. I didn’t know his background of course, so I just made my standard point that we should leave humour to the professionals, unless you are remarkably naturally gifted. He told me later how hard he found it to try and be a comic, which was in fact a reinforcement of my advice – leave it to the pros.
So if we remove failed attempts at humour as a way of ingratiating ourselves with our audience what else is left for us? One thing to make sure of is consolidating your existing fan or potential fan base before the talk. Make sure to let your business contacts know that you are giving this talk and when and where it will be held and encourage them to attend. There is nothing more relaxing for a speaker than to look into an audience and see a lot of positive, friendly faces who the speaker already knows. Magically, their supportive vibe surreptitiously spreads to others in the room.
Another ploy is to get there early and go through the guest list or check the name badges for people you know, but whose name and face combination may be a challenge for you to put together. Seeing a familiar name makes it easier for you greet them as they arrive by using their name and it gives the impression that they are an important person for you. It is flattering and it creates a bond of familiarity which again helps with the speaker’s connect vibe with the audience before you even start.
Starting strong is important and the start kicks off from the time you arrive at the venue. Get there early and check the tech is working, because that allows you to have peace of mind and remain cool, calm and collected about giving this talk. If there are issues with the computer or the monitor or the projector, this can take years off your life if it occurs just before you are due to go on. We don’t want that.
When you are called to the stage to give your talk, don’t fuss around with the slide deck and getting things up on screen. These first few seconds are critical to creating a positive first impression and we need to really work on getting it right. Go straight into your well designed opening, which will immediately deliver the audience into the palm of your hand and have them eager for more. Only after that, introduce yourself and thank the organisers and all of that standard, good stuff. If possible, have someone assist you to get the slides up on screen, so you can skip that distraction and remain fully focused on your audience.
Don’t imagine you have to recite your resume to have credibility with the audience, because that should have been done for you by the MC. Trying to sell the audience on how great we are isn’t going to be a winner. It is a tightrope, but we have to be confident yet humble. Our job is to make sure we supply the MC with what we want them to say about us. We may need to stiff arm them about delivering it exactly as we have written it. Some unprofessional MCs imagine that they are soaring eagles, unbound by the earthly laws and can do a better job than we can. They will decide to wing it, by coming up with their own version of our introduction, which invariably in my experience is a pale shadow of what we have written. We have to maintain 100% editorial control of our brand and insist they follow the script. If they resist that idea, then we should take that task off them and do it ourselves – it is definitely not ideal, but it is better than someone else butchering our introduction, first impression and brand.
The first words out of our mouth have to evoke massive levels of inner confidence, because audiences buy confidence. They reject doubt, insecurity, gratuitous pleading and weakness, so don’t start with an apology or an excuse. No one cares about your problems anyway, because they are totally preoccupied with their own.
Get your most valuable insight, data, statistics, narrative right up the front. Don’t imagine you can warm this audience up by slowly releasing all the gold in dribs and drabs, as you move through the talk. Give them the best you have from the start and they will stick with you to the end. If you start slow and average, trying to gradually warm them up, they will immediately be on their phones, plugging into the internet, before you can say “trainwreck”.
The key is to plan the start meticulously. If we get this right, then we will carry the audience with us and be in a position to deliver our key messages, thereby enhancing our personal and professional brands.
I attended an online presentation recently and the presenter was from one of the HUGE social media companies and the presentation was very different from the norm. He was using his company’s internal platform to deliver the presentation, rather than using standard tools like PowerPoint or its equivalent. He could conduct comprehension tests of his content using a sophisticated timing mechanism, which would rank people in terms of who were the fastest to complete the test and do it the most accurately. It was quite snazzy and there were other little flourishes which were quite cool.
It was all going pretty hummingly, until he introduced his colleague who was going to add to the conversation with her experiences and views. This is when things came crashing down. Her delivery was done in a monotone, which had the effect of making me suddenly feel drowsy during the session. Her lifeless presentation was in complete contrast with the all the bells and whistles this company had been putting on display, before she was introduced.
This made me think about was that high tech presentation actually effective in terms of communicating the core messages? When I thought back to the guys talk, I realised that I had been distracted by the tech and hadn’t fully absorbed the points he was making. This is a distinct danger when presenting using “cool” tools.
I am not a fan of anything distracting from the speaker. Online presentations in particular are the refuge of scoundrels. While we are talking there are members of the audience who are completely distracted by doing their email or some other task and are not really taking in what we are saying. The first hint is when they won’t turn on their camera. This is a sign they don’t want to be involved fully in the meeting and are there, but not really.
Usually online, there is big screen real estate taken up mainly with the slides and a tiny little box, with a postage stamp sized image of the presenter. In this situation, it is super hard for the speaker to connect with their audience. If you decide to torture your audience by speaking in a monotone as well, then expect trouble. All we really have is our vocal modulation because they usually cannot see our gestures or much body language, including our facial expressions. We have to be working hard to make that vocal range compensate for all the other parts of the presentation tool box which are missing.
If we are online, we should try to turn off the “share screen” function as much as possible. Yes, it is a bit of fiddling around to get the slide deck back up, but on balance we are better to appear in a larger format on screen, rather than being trapped in that little postage stamp. The same applies when we are presenting in person. Most people start with the slide deck and keep it up throughout the whole presentation. Yes, we can do that, but why not hit the “B” button on the keyboard sometimes and send the screen into blackness, so that the only thing to focus on now is us. We just hit the space bar and the screen is back up again and this is so much easier that trying to do the same thing when online and operating in Zoom or whatever.
I am not a fan of using video in presentations. It is extremely rare that the video actually adds any value to the talk. It is often “filler” for speakers who don’t like speaking and want to reduce their bit as much as possible. They think that a glossy PR Department “high production values” corporate video will make up for their lack of delivery ability. It won’t. We as presenters have so much more high octane potential than a corporate video. If the video is too slick, we come off as second best and our messaging capacity is damaged. If the corporate video is rather ho hum (and that is usually the case), we have lost the audience and now we have to work so much harder to get them back with us.
Simplicity in terms of what we show on screen is good for us as speakers, because we are the star, not the slide deck and we need to keep it that way. Too much information, too many fonts, too many colours, too much animation, is a nightmare for us to break through with our message. Yet, we see presenters doing this to themselves, making their job as a communicator so much tougher than it already is.
“Go light on the bells and whistles gimmicks and be the bells and whistles yourself”, would be my advice if you want to get your message through. If you just want to project a high tech image and don’t care about getting your points registered with the audience, then knock yourself out and go for it. The only problem with this approach is it is so transitory and ephemeral, you have to wonder why you bothered in the first place. We go to all of this effort preparing our talk, so why not make sure our key messages are resonating with our audience, be that delivered online or in person.
“Urgent – we need help” is the type of text message you love as a training company. It means the “why now?”, part of the question has a train wreck answer that you can fix. In this case and in many similar cases, it is not the big bosses getting difficult or disgruntled clients acting up. It is a grass roots rebellion against colleagues who are clueless when presenting. At a certain point, the lack of professionalism becomes a restraint on the forward momentum of the organisation.
The road is rocky though for the presenter. There may be resistance from guerrilla groups who feel threatened if others start to make progress leaving them forlorn and exposed. I remember going on stage after one of my colleagues, who had given his presentation to the entire firm. It was a dud and he knew it. There was no excitement and his messaging fell on stony ground. I was an experienced speaker and presenter by that stage and I knew how to rock an audience. I heard later that my persuasion free zone colleague was telling anyone who would listen after my presentation, that I was “all style and no substance”. It was a clever putdown, because it sort of sounds smart. This is the type of nonsense you may have to put up with from nobodies who are threatened by your professionalism. It is better to suffer this invective though, than to stay hopeless and be just like them - a dud when it comes to persuasion power.
The message I received was a case of rebellion. With many retail operations there are seasonal changes of the product line-up and the marketing department have to infect the salespeople with passion for the brand’s latest offerings. When the marketing department presentations are as a dull as dishwater and are failing in the persuasion stakes, then sales suffer. The salespeople go on silent strike. They are not motivated to move sales, because they don’t believe in the selections. The marketing department presenters didn’t engage their internal audience. They didn’t use storytelling to fire up content for the salespeople to use with buyer. They didn’t persuade their listeners to trust their marketing expertise.
Bosses have an uncanny ability to spot trouble early and realise that the next season’s results are not going to make the targets, because the enthusiasm for the seasonal selections isn’t inspiring much confidence in those who have to move the merchandise. Hence the panic message to come and fix this issue.
Marketing departments, R&D centers, and middle management are the groups most often required to have persuasion power. When they are not trained they are under powered for the task. This has a flow on effect and the full potentiality of the organisation’s messaging capability isn’t being maximised.
When presentation training is invested in, it has the immediate impact of fixing the problem at hand, but it has other effects as well. If we are all watching skilled presentations by our internal colleagues, it says a lot about the professionism of the organisation, boosts our esprit de corps and builds our pride in ourselves, to belong to such an organisation. These skills spill outside the firm and show up when we meet clients and give them presentations which persuade and lead to increased sales. When we representing the organisation in a public setting at say an industry event, other groups note that we are doing a professional job and then they extend kudos to the rest of the entire organisation. If we see you are a dud, we assume everyone is a dud. If you are a star, we think they are all stars over there.
Salespeople are like water – they are always looking for the path of least resistance. If the firm relies on them to sell the range of goods selected by someone else, then that internal presentation has to be professional and convincing. In the case of this client, we have known them for a number of years and could have done the training much earlier, but there was no appetite for it. Often the time and money combination conspire to stop bosses taking action until it is almost too late. This is the tension between the “urgent and important” time management quadrant and the “not urgent, but important” quadrant.
These types of fundamental skills are not urgent but important and need to be raised up the hierarchy of priorities for the firm in order to head off trouble before it can ever arise. Who wouldn’t want to work in an organisation where everyone was professional and persuasive when making their report or recommendations.