Regardless, if your goal is to make a sale or educate. You don’t want to fall prey to
mistakes that many presenters make -- loading us down with piles and piles of information and communication hodgepodge. Excellent presentations are designed to anchor in key points that are relevant for influencing listeners to take some kind of action. When you make a presentation to a committee, corporate board of directors or presenting an all day seminar, your aim is to accomplish two very important goals. First, it is crucial that your audience walk away with a “Top of Mind” memorable experience. Second, you want to influence your audience to take an immediate or future action. Every, presentation should have an outcome and action steps for your audience to take. For us to accomplish those two goals we need to help audience focus-in on our presentation so that we touch and communicate with head and heart of our audience. Effectively, we want to mesmerize, hold their attention and filter out any outside distractions that would compete with our presentation and desired outcome.
We are visual beings by nature. Our eyes, being most powerful information conduit to brain, are always in motions feeding us images and disrupting our thought processes. People have limited attention spans and information processing capabilities. Therefore, we as presenters need to simplify communications to hold attention for influencing thinking of our audience.
I use a very powerful communication technique that anyone can apply with their very next presentation to accomplish extraordinary results. Your presentation and visuals will communicate faster, clearer, better and be more congruent -- eliminating communication hodgepodge that so many presenters use.
First, reduce all you visuals to pictures and either eliminate words and numbers altogether or reduce them to three or less per visual. Visuals should be used as anchors to support your key points that you want your audience to remember.
Second, your visuals must be associated in some ridiculous and/or illogical way for transferring key points and word phases for your audience to remember and retain your information.
A simple example is: You are giving a financial report showing an increase in earnings for your division. You could use a rising balloon lifting a building block, showing percentage of increase stenciled in block, giving your audience and image of growth and profits. Visuals that are your typical bar charts, graphs, and lines of words are boring and have a lesser impact connecting with your audience. Whereas, ridiculous and/or illogical visuals add retention, entertainment, and can illustrate with greater impact benefits, not just facts and figures of your presentation.
