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Business presentations are a frequent part of the CEO’s life. Do you make a speech and make a difference? When you incorporate these 7 tips for highly effective CEO presentations, you can be sure that your speaking is making a difference.

Tip #1: Put the audience first.

Ask yourself what the audience wants you to talk about, rather than thinking about what you want to talk about. Asking yourself “What is on the minds of the people who will be in my audience?” will lead you to a highly effective presentation.

Options: what they are worried about, what troubles they are having or how they feel about things that are going on within the company.

Tip #2: Articulate a clear and specific call-to-action to deliver at the end of the speech or presentation.

Information is widely and easily available, so you must go beyond giving information. What do you want the audience do after they listen to you?

Some options:

• Take a particular action that can be measured and evaluated
• Change their thinking about something
• Renew their enthusiasm and commitment for a specific outcome or result

Tip #3: Surprise them with the first words out of your mouth. Avoid the standard “Thank you for being here” or “Thank you for coming to hear me” or “Today we’re going to talk about…”

Grab them with a story, a provocative question or a challenge. Some options:

• “What would you do if you were in charge of meeting next quarter’s financial goals?”
• “Imagine you are meeting with the auditors tomorrow. What would be on your mind?”
• “‘Your company has great products but terrible customer service. ‘ That harsh comment came from a dozen of our best customers. It’s hard to accept what many people think about us. What can we do to change this view?”

Tip #4: Be real

People like people who are genuine. Genuineness is easy to understand and decipher. The perfectly written speech read word for word is not genuine. It slides right out of the minds of the audience.

Tip #5: Be sure your speech is perfect for listening to

As a well-educated professional, you have great writing skills. You write with excellent sentence structure, word choices and perfect grammar. Your long sentences are constructed with just the right words connecting phrases and clauses. Your writing is literary and a pleasure to read.

Audiences do not have the leisure that readers have to go back, read something again, pause and think, and make notes. Audiences have only one chance to get your message as it moves past their ears at a steady pace.

Keep the limitations of listening in mind when writing the notes or text for your speech. Make your notes with the same fits and starts of spoken conversation. Use familiar words and keep sentences short and in the active voice.

Tip #6: Get out from behind a lectern.

Do not ask for nor accept a lectern or podium. These separate you from the audience when you should be doing everything possible to get close to them.

Require a hand held wireless microphone or a lavaliere microphone, rather than one that is fixed to a podium.

If you’re nervous without a lectern, practice enough to reduce your nervousness. If you need to have notes, prepare neat note cards and hold them in your hand.

Tip #7: Be scintillating every time on every subject for every audience.

Even though you’re the CEO and command attention due to your position, you will gain immeasurable respect through great speaking and presentations.

Time to prepare is always an issue. Shorten your preparation time by using a speech development system for every speech or presentation. My speech development system has 5 simple steps:

1. Describe the audience’s mindset in 10 words
2. Write your call-to-action close
3. In a few words each, articulate three key points that drive to the call-to-action
4. Select some leading materials to make your key points attractive and interesting
5. Write an attention-getting opening that ties to the call-to-action.

Avoid power point slides. The audience will be glad and you’ll be able to devote the time you do have to your content and your preparation.

You are facing the decision-makers who can put a lucrative contract in your pocket. You are about to get your PowerPoint presentation rolling. It’s a make-or-break moment. They have been pitched to with PowerPoint from other companies with big reputations and experienced sales departments but they are interested in you and your company. Will the weeks you have put into your preparation pay off?

Let’s rewind a few days and look over your shoulder…

While we watch, you fire up PowerPoint and head for your previous best presentation. Skip to slide 2. It is headed: ‘We have the best solution for your needs’. Great start! But then you begin to think…they don’t know us yet, so I’d better tell them who we are and what we have done for other clients. You delete the out-of-date bullets and start typing. Bullet 1… Bullet 2… Ah! You hit Bullet 8, and the text shrinks so that it is too small to read. Easily solved! You start a new PowerPoint slide and carry on.

Three slides later and you’ve completed the list. What’s next? A diagram! You set to work on slide five…

Lets press ‘Stop’ on that scene and consider the slippery slope you are on.

PowerPoint’s slippery slope

You moved off down the slope by making the assumption that because bullet points are the default slide mode in PowerPoint, they are the way to go. A quick web search will find you lots of reasons for not using bullet lists (or PowerPoint at all) but the most important is that audiences have become ‘blind’ to bullet lists and switch off when they see one. Its not called ‘Death by PowerPoint’ for nothing!

You picked up speed with the second assumption, that PowerPoint is easy. It’s a common trap when people have had little or no training. And most of us haven’t.

You rushed towards the PowerPoint abyss when you went off the point of the objective and turned it into information about your company; not about your potential client’s needs.

PowerPoint success factors

Lets rewind to a different scenario…

Long before firing up PowerPoint you consulted colleagues. Together, you constructed a shortlist of reasons why the company you will be pitching to may be letting the contract. You’ve identified how your company can meet their objectives in a unique and advantageous way. Based on this, you’ve mapped out the structure of your PowerPoint presentation. Its also what you did to put your successful proposal together.

Yes! Your first PowerPoint success factor was the realization that your presentation does not need to tell them anything new. Its purpose is to remind them why they were interested enough in your proposal to ask to see you. Watching you manage your PowerPoint gives them an opportunity to assess you and to prepare questions. It’s a test masquerading as an information-giving session!

Your second PowerPoint success factor comes when you recognize that the people you are presenting to are not interested in what your company has done for other clients. They only care about whether you will solve their problem better than anyone else. So put your company information in a handout, not in your presentation.

Your third PowerPoint success factor is that your presentation is going to keep your audiences attention and focus them on your message with more impact than your competitors. To do this you have invested in some good PowerPoint training. It is not difficult to find, but be aware that the learning curve has only just started when you are taught how to apply PowerPoint animations!

Eight stages of personal PowerPoint development

There are at least eight stages of development people go through if they are persistent with PowerPoint:

1) Using Microsoft wizards and templates.

2) Introducing animations and graphic elements, such as clip art.

3) Discarding clip art in favor of photos.

4) Experimenting with PowerPoint’s more advanced features, such as multiple template masters.

5) Going minimalist or rejecting PowerPoint altogether for fear of getting it wrong.

6) Introducing storytelling techniques to structure presentations.

7) Developing new graphic approaches to the expression of ideas.

Getting right the balance between 5, 6 and 7.

If you can get to the sixth stage your confidence will be greatly increased and so will your chances of having ‘make’ rather than ‘break’ PowerPoint moments.

Get to the eighth stage and you will be head and shoulders above your competitors!

Students master and retain learning more effectively (than many other methods) when they present their work to others. Essentially all of us (no matter our age) can remember details of a school presentation we made long ago. Regardless of the discipline area, your students will likely benefit from making presentations also – that is, as long as you follow sound practices.

First, remember that the number one fear of adults is public speaking, so your students, regardless of whether they are 18-year-old freshmen or 68-year-old graduate students, are likely to need a fair amount of reassurance. One key form of the reassurance that will support them (but that many professors overlook) is providing students with an adequate overview of the assignment. When students don’t have the ‘big picture” they need, they are likely to make unfocused, disjointed presentations – which contribute to their feelings of inadequacy the next time around. Therefore, students should be provided – in writing and well in advance – the goals and objectives of the presentation, as well as a detailed scoring rubric.

In a large course or when building teamwork is an especially desirable goal, you might consider having students make presentations in a group setting, for example, as a member of a forum or panel discussion. Presenting to a small group is less frightening than presenting to a large group, particularly if the chosen subset of the class has been working together on various projects through the semester.

If yours is an introductory course and/or students voice considerable anxiety, provide individual coaching or model presentation skills, showing students how to gain viewers’ attention, use visual aids, form a powerful conclusion, and so on. You can also have a student with a proven track record in another professor’s class demonstrate effective presentation skills. Videos (off or on-line) on how to develop an excellent presentation are another possibility. A final, but far less desirable, option is to deliver a full presentation yourself, emphasizing in advance the key techniques students should look for. Some students are likely to have difficulty separating such a presentation from regular lecture or demonstration, while others might view such a presentation as *the* model and work so hard to duplicate it that they appear unnatural. Note: This is, of course, assuming that you are a model presenter.

Viewers and speakers can derive full value from presentations only when feedback is plentiful, objective, and consistent. We recommend allowing viewers to contribute to the evaluation of their peers. One frequently used method is to give viewers index cards on which they are asked to do a “three by three”; that is, they are to write down three strong points and three suggested improvements for each presentation. These are turned in at the end of the presentation and then attached to the evaluation form completed by the instructor.

The student who makes the presentation is not the only one who is learning. Therefore, you should measure the learning that occurs among the audience. This helps to indicate to the student presenters that the effectiveness of their efforts matters – not only to them but to their classmates. It is sometimes worthwhile to base at least a portion of the presenter’s grade on how much the other students learned. Remember, what gets measured gets done, and students value those measurements (i.e., grades) highly.

Deliver specific praise for student presentations in public, and give constructive criticism in private. This way of delivering feedback is part of creating a supportive environment. Keep in mind that such an environment increases students’ retention of the material that they have already presented, as well as what they have heard their fellow students present. It also contributes to the enhancement of student efficacy and self-esteem.

Finally, remember that nearly any good idea can be overdone. Unless yours is a public speaking course, resist the increasingly common tendency, especially in graduate courses, to have students learn the majority of the course content through various types of presentations. Consumer-oriented students are likely to perceive that such an arrangement denies them access to the expertise of a professor for whom they invested considerable financial resources.