Presentation Skills & Being A Slave To Your Slides

Some speakers or presenters can just be plain lazy. Their idea of giving a presentation is to simply ‘throw up’ the jumbled mess of ideas in their head onto a bunch of slides and expect the listening audience to decipher it at their own trauma. It completely negates the point of giving a presentation – efficiently communicating one’s thoughts and agenda in an easy to understand manner. In this article we will look at some simple tips on how NOT to make your slides gives your presentation instead of you

·      If you’re going to use slides at all, at least make them easy to look at. Some slides can be so crammed with information that it gives the viewer a headache just looking at it and trying to make head or tail of the content. Cleaning up the home page is what made Google so popular in the early days of their entry into the Internet business. Hint: There is a lesson there!

·      The trick to a good presentation is leaving the audience with something that they can take home with them and ponder over. Long complicated sentences with technical jargon can be hard to remember. Focus on keywords or short concise statements that epitomize the concept or agenda of the presentation. At the iPhone launch, Steve Jobs’ slide simply said, “Today Apple Reinvents The Phone”. The short phrase stuck in everybody’s heads and the media droned out the same tagline over the next many weeks.

·      Sometimes illustrations or graphics can communicate a lot better than words or text. This zeroes on the notion that humans are visual beings and we respond more intuitively to what we can simply see and not what we have to see and compute in our head. So instead of stating this year’s output was 52,300 units compared to last year’s 49,800 units, a simple coloured graph chart showing the incredible hike in production instantly communicates the progress without having to mention the actual numbers.

Presentation Skills Training is an important aspect of giving employees the rudimentary skills necessary to communicate effectively with their audience in an efficient and persuasive manner. 

MMM Training Solutions conducts soft skills training, executive coaching and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad. Please visit our website http://www.mmmts.com to know more about our programs and our trainers.

How Communication Defines Human Progress

From time immemorial what has set humans apart from other life forms has always been our cognitive abilities and our depth of communication skill. Like the beasts we too have the rudimentary senses but we have something extra – self-consciousness that enables us to communicate.

TV commercials exploit this ability and play to its strengths. All one has to do is watch a commercial of Versace or Armani or Apple. In the Versace/Armani commercials you will immediately notice that the product itself is rarely shown. Instead the commercial emphasizes a ‘mood’ or ‘attitude’. Both these brand giants understand intuitively that what a product makes you feel is more magnetic than the image of the product itself. Similarly Apple commercials rarely bore the audience with technical specs of their products. Instead they show you a series of video clips of how diversely their products impact people’s lives. From a twenty year old on a college campus to a sixty-year-old retiree, from the aeronautic labs of NASA to a village in rural Vietnam, Apple commercials show how their products bring joy to people all over the world. They’re not selling you a product; they’re offering you a ‘life-style’. This is the epitome of business communication skill!

Even in the business world, programs that work on how to improve communication skills are the life-blood of a company. From casting the vision, to drawing out an execution plan, to orchestrating a methodology, it is communication that drives the entire corporate engine. Efficient communication intuitively takes into account the following:

Practical Effect

Often in an official presentation, it is assumed that mere presentation of the data will give a clear snapshot of the product/service status. But actually depicting how those graphs and charts depict real-time scenarios of the company and an employee will have a more personal and powerful effect on the audience.

Game Plan

With the introduction of media-oriented presentations, decision effects can be shown in a more graphically appealing manner that enhances business communication. For example showing a graph chart or table of how the net profit can surge past the previous year by implementing the current methodology can be more persuasive than just showing the adjusted numbers.

 Communication Skills Training is an important aspect of corporate business and management. Even Fortune 500 companies constantly work on improving this facet

MMM Training Solutions conducts soft skills training, executive coaching and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad. Please visit our website http://www.mmmts.com to know more about our programs and our trainers.