When we stand in front of an audience, we are representing our personal brand and our firm’s brand. People evaluate us and our companies based on how we perform. Think back to the presentations you’ve seen and I’m sure you’ll agree that many speakers are missing passion and commitment to the topic. Don’t be like that.
Typically, we speakers enter a room full of pre-occupied people with microscopically short attention spans, distracted before we even start. Our job is to grab their attention away from whatever it was they were doing before we get up to the podium. Our opening needs to be well-planned and attention-grabbing. It must feature a powerful hook to get everyone’s attention.
We will have rehearsed our talk at least three times, to make sure it flows well and fits the time slot we have been allocated. The slides will be so clear that our audience can deduce the key point of each slide in two seconds, because of how we are presenting the information.
During our presentation, we are eyes-up and making eye contact with members of our audience. Each audience member gets about six seconds of total eye contact concentration each time, as we make our points. They feel we are speaking directly to them and this is a very powerful audience engagement tool.
We are backing up our eye contact with our gestures, voice modulation and pauses.
Building to a big finish is critical, because here we leave our audience with their final impressions. Rather than gradually fading out at the finish, our presentation should rise to a peak, delivering our call to action and encouraging our audience to metaphorically storm the barricades. We need to bring our energy to the finish and leave a positive memory of our talk.
