The campaign against audience abuse/Killer presentations don’t shoot with bullet points

I pride myself on finding speakers who really inspire and provoke the members of MD2MD to do something different to improve their business performance.

I was therefore delighted to find that Nick Oulton of M62, our speaker at the MD2MD meeting last week was extremely well received scoring 9.1 out of 10. I’d been nervous about how he’d go down because his topic of creating great PowerPoint presentations sounds pretty boring, but I’d decided to go for it on the basis that in today’s economy we all need to win more business, and if the stuff he presented led to a member winning just one more pitch in the next few months, then that would more than justify their membership for the rest of the year! And I’m sure his input will help achieve that!

Anyway in the spirit of good blogging, I share below some of the key points I noted down from his presentation below.

A good design involves an interesting layout

Don’t use lists.  If you have to use words, just use key words and use a variety of font sizes.

Use Visual Cognitive Dissonance – Present an incomplete diagram and then explain it. The presenter is the labeller! Use animations to illustrate and label, but keep them to less than 3 secs.

A good presentation adds to the slides

Remember the 4 dimensions – 2D slide + Time + presenter

Put up and shut up.  Give audience time to read the slide. Optimum time to read a slide is 3-6 secs

Use the B & W keys so that people look to you

Don’t force face contact.  Allow people to look away.

A good presenter keeps the audience’s brain active

Chunking – Use 5 chunks of related info

Repetition – Repeat key point / imagery (Pink Knickers)

Relevance – Address the ‘So what’

Visualisation & Association – Link facts in a story to make them more memorable

And is prepared for questions

Be prepared to answer questions with hidden slides or a pack at the end.

Use [Slidenumber] [return] to jump to a slide elsewhere in the pack

Use H to jump to next hidden slide

If you are interested in finding out more about how to put together a really good presentation there are loads of ideas on the M62 website – m62.net and if you have a really critical pitch, I suspect you could find Nick’s services useful!