Doing better presentations: What's your story?

I just finished a conference for my client GE-MiddleEast this month which marked the last of our scheduled events for the season. Event Season? Yes! January to June –Well, particularly in Dubai, July and August are considered dead for the events industry as majority of expats leave the country for vacations and remaining just run away from the heat. Anyways, this last conference by GE was sort of their annual gathering where GE employees from around GCC and MENA region got together to share ideas and discuss new projects.

I heard some really interesting ideas at this conference, made some good connections, and had some excellent ideas for my own work. So, overall, time well spent and a project well delivered. Well for me the project was to make this whole conference an interactive one –by means of audience interaction system (What do we do to make your events interactive? –Well I’ll explain that in some other post). But in some respects I also found the presentations made in this conference to be enormously frustrating.

In the course of watching quite a few conference presentations, among other things I saw:

• Several speakers showed up with 60+ densely-packed slides for either a 15 or a 20 minute talk. Yes several..!
• Most presenters had to skip telling us about their interesting findings because they wasted over half their time telling us pointless background information.
• An even larger number of presenters who seemed to believe that putting a complex regression table on a slide is somehow a useful thing to do.

In other words, I saw a lot of terrible presentations. Out of the 20+ presentations that I saw, nearly all of them sounded like they were based on sound research. But all but a handful were awful talks.

Why is this? Most academics teach. In other words, to some extent, all of them were professional presenters. So why couldn’t they tell a good story in 15 minutes?

But it’s not just academics. Back in January, we coordinated World Future Energy Summit 2010 in Abu Dhabi. There I saw several company heads from energy sector pitching their ‘green energy’ ideas, and most of them didn’t leave enough time to tell us why their idea was cool because they blew more than half of their presentation on background.

In my observation, so many of those presentations were lousy because of two main reasons.

The first is that people don’t understand the purpose of these presentations. The whole point of presenting a case or pitching your great idea is to make audience interested enough that they want to learn more.

Secondly, you can’t possibly explain every point in a presentation in your allotted 15 minutes. Your presentation is an advertisement for your idea. Failing to realize this leads to horrible presentations.

So here is my three-point prescription for better presentations:

1. Figure out what action you want people to take at the end of your presentation. Then ask them to do that. If you want them to sign up on your website for more details about your product or research, ask them to do so, and tell them what they’ll gain if they sign up. If you want them to fund your start-up, ask them to do that, and then tell them how they can get more information. Always link your presentations to action.
    
2. The second problem with such presentations is that presenters don’t know what their ‘story’ is. If the presentation is a ‘call to action’, you need to have a compelling story. What is it? What is the main idea that you want people to take away from your talk, even if they don’t take the action you ask them to?
   
   What are the critical parts of the story? Usually, you need to explain what problem you’re trying to solve, and then show how your great idea solves it.
   
   If you understand these two parts, you should be able to tell your story in 90 seconds i.e. prepare the ‘elevator pitch’ (“How?” I’ll cover this part as a separate post soon), give a slightly different version in 5 minutes, give a really compelling presentation with some supporting evidence in 15-20 minutes –and remember, you don’t have the whole one hour to give people all the details that they don’t need anyways.
    
3. That’s it. To do a great conference presentation, you just need to answer three questions:

• What action do you want your audience to take after hearing you?
• What problem are you trying to solve?
• How do you solve it?

It actually doesn’t take that long to do these three things. Be as clear as you possibly can be on these three points to make your presentations better.