Get Some Meat In Your Presentation – Adding Content!

I had an executive I worked with for some time who used to tell me to never to do a content-free presentation.  This confused me, what could content-free mean?  After a little back and forth with the exec I finally figured out what she meant.  She meant to make sure to include real world, concrete proof that supported whatever points I was making in the presentation.

An example might be if I’m giving a sales pitch and I demonstrate the latest Features of the product.  Or maybe when I’m running a project team meeting and I use Data to back up my key points.

Regardless, whenever I make a point in a presentation, I always make sure I have content available to back it up.  In my experience, content falls into one of the following categories:

1. Case Studies And Real-World Examples: “Let me tell you a story about how this exact thing happened to John.  You see…”
2. Demonstrations:  “Here, let me show you how this product eliminates that problem by…”
3. Data:  “As you can see here, a possible cause for sales being down is that we cut the sales travel budget by X%.”
4. Picture Or Graphics:  “Here is an overview of the entire project workflow.  As you can see here, the reason Group A and Group B are not working well together is because of…”
5. Video:  “Here let me show you a little video of a customer telling us what they like and don’t like about our product.”
6. Handouts:  “Please open the document in front of you and on page X you will see…”
7. Props:  “Let’s hand this around so everyone can get a chance to see how this works.”

  

A good way to think about it is if you are going to make any kind of factual statement, make sure you can back it up with content.   At every step of the Modern Presentation Method you are sourcing, evaluating, and refining content. 

1. When you are Visualizing your presentation, you should be out gathering raw content and analyzing it to see how you can use it in your presentation. 
2. When you Storyboard, the content you have gathered often constrains what story you can tell.  For example, if the data only supports one outcome then that is the outcome you must present.  If the product does some things poorly, then that affects the story.  It goes on and on as you refine the content and incorporate it into your presentation.
3. When you Build & Refine, this researched and refined content then becomes the proof for whatever point you are trying to make. 

  

The cardinal rule is, if you are going to claim something to be true or factual, make sure you can prove it with concrete, bulletproof content.  You can bank on this best practice.

Thanks for tuning in.

 DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com