Essential Presentation Skills

On the Presentation Magazine Forum we get asked the same question many times - "Help, I've got a presentation coming up next week and I don't know what to do." In this survival guide, we highlight the three skills that YOU MUST KNOW before your next presentation. They are tried and tested and make it easy to improve your performance.

Here we expose the three essential pieces of information that can make your presentation fly. Most of these are common sense, but you'd be surprised how often they are missed out.

• Use visual aids where you can
• Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse
• The audience will only remember three messages

Lesson One: Using visuals

One of the most powerful things you can do to your presentation is to add in visual aids. Research shows that if you use visual aids you are twice as likely to achieve your objectives. Ditch the bullet points - use pictures instead.

Professor Albert Mehrabian did a lot of research into how we take in information during a presentation. He concluded that 55% of the information we take in is visual and 7% is text. There are some important conclusions that we can take from this information.

• Use visuals (pictures, graphs, tables, props) whenever you can
• In a speech you are only using 38% of the communication medium
• Ditch the bullet points

In a study at the Wharton Research Center they showed that using visual slides had a dramatic effect on message retention. The effect of using visuals is truly staggering! 

• Message retention after 3 days - bullet points 10%, visual slides 50%

The old adage that "a picture is worth a thousand words" is as true today as it has always been.

If I said that I could double your chances of achieving your objectives in a presentation with just one piece of advice, you would probably be very skeptical. And yet if you use visual images that is just what happens.

• Chance of achieving objectives - bullet points 33%, visual slides 67%

Hopefully by now you have got the message loud and clear - use visuals in your next presentation!

Lesson Two: Rehearsal


We see no end of people who spend hours pouring over their bullet points but fail to rehearse properly for the presentation. The old adage is as true now as it has always has been. "If you fail to prepare, you are prepared to fail." Rehearse your presentation and it will get better. Sorry to sound like a bit of an old nag. It's obvious - rehearsing - isn't it? But it's also a bit of a drag and one that is easy to forget. It is probably the most common mistake of all presentations that I have seen.

You wouldn't dream of going to see a Shakespeare play at the RSC only to find that they hadn't properly learned the script. You wouldn't dream of going to the opera to hear the band play out of time because they hadn't got round to rehearsing properly. Yet in presentations and in speeches we see this happening all the time.

1. Plan to rehearse your presentation out loud at least 4 times. And if you can get word perfect so much the better. I know that you haven't got the time, but we have seen so many presentations that have been let down due to a lack of rehearsal. Make sure that one of your rehearsals is in front of a really scary audience - family, friends, partners, colleagues and children. They will tell you quite plainly where you are going wrong - as well as providing you with the support that you need.
2. Rehearse against the clock. If you have to give a presentation in a short period of time then try to practice your presentation against the clock. This is particularly true with something like the five minute job presentation. You can add in parts from the script or taken them out to fit the time. Allow extra time in your presentation for questions and watch out for nerves - this could mean that you talk faster on the day. In the actual presentation you take in a clock or take off your watch and put it on the podium. This way you can see how the timings develop.
3. Take a leaf out of Winston Churchill's book - memorize your script. He is widely attributed as being one of the great speakers. It took him six weeks to prepare his Maiden Speech in the House of Commons and he learned it word perfect.
4. Video or tape record yourself. A very simple trick that could help you with your performance. This will give you some immediate feedback and will enable you to fine tune your performance.

Rehearse and you will get better.

Lesson Three: The Rule of Three

The rule of three is one of the oldest in the book - Aristotle wrote about it in his book Rhetoric. Put simply it is that people tend to easily remember three thing. Remember as a kid when your mom sent you down to the shop to buy a number of things. But when you got to the shop all you could remember were three things. This is the rule of three.

1. The audience is likely to remember only three things from your presentation - plan in advance what these will be. Before you start writing your presentation, plan what your three key messages will be. Once you have these messages, structure the main part of your presentation around these three key themes and look how at how they could be better illustrated.
2. There are three parts to your presentation. The beginning, the middle and the end. Start to plan out what you will do in these three parts. The beginning is ideal for an attention grabber or an ice breaker. The end is great to wrap things up or to end with a grand finale.
3. Use lots of three wherever you can. This has been used by politicians and advertisers who know the value of using the rule of three to sell their ideas.
4. Less is more. If you have four points to get across - cut one out. They won't remember it anyway. In presentations less really is more. No one ever complained of a presentation being too short.

Good luck and happy presenting!

Taken from Presentation Magazine.com