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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!
Bob Bradley
Bob is a specialist in running high value added service businesses, having run five such businesses as General Manager, Managing Director or Chief Executive. His last employed role was as Chief Executive of a £16M, 200 person family owned business having previously been Chief Executive of an AIM listed company for which he raised £5M funding and which he grew from £4M to £12M in three years through two acquisitions and organic growth, and a corporate PLC subsidiary where he was Managing Director responsible for delivering £10M profit on £45M turnover through 450 staff.
Bob is now following a portfolio career providing entrepreneurial business leaders with mentoring and coaching around business leadership, business growth, merger integration and exit planning.
Core to his portfolio is MD2MD. Having experienced for himself the value of having a strong sounding board of fellow Managing Directors he founded MD2MD in 2004 to provide groups of business leaders with a confidential environment within which they can support and challenge each other to raise their game as leaders and by doing so improve the success of their organisation.
More about BobMD2MD membership
- You meet your peer group privately for structured confidential conversations about real business challenges. You meet online for 90 minutes every 3 weeks.
- You attend one of a selection of open workshops led by top professional speakers sharing best practice on a wide range of leadership topics.
- You join our annual conference LeaderFest and our annual ‘Retreat to advance’.