Improve Your Presentations and Get Your Boss To Do What You Want
Author: Lili Marocsik
Become a better public speaker with these 8 advanced hacks
When making a presentation, no matter the topic or goal, your primary mission is to grab people's attention. If your audience is scrolling through their phone (especially relevant during online meetings) while you present your idea, you've wasted their time and your own.
So, in this post, I'll tell you first how to make sure the crowd is listening and finally how to actually get them to do what YOU want. My tips for improving presentations go beyond the usual advice of making eye contact with the audience, hand gestures and effective pauses. The last hack I mentioned below, I've used many times in my marketing career because it makes a pitch irresistible and I hope you can benefit from it just like I did.
Why would you listen to me? As a former President of the 'International Toastmasters Lisbon', I've seen and evaluated countless presentations and slides and given feedback to Newbee presenters weekly. If you don't know Toastmasters, allow me to introduce the godmother of public speaking clubs to you: As of 2019, the organization boasted over 358,000 members across more than 16,800 clubs in 143 countries. It has been around for 100 years now, and if you seriously want to improve how you deliver speeches, this is the place for it.
Let's imagine you are the head of marketing in your organization, and you want to convince your boss to give you a budget to test TikTok as a marketing channel for the next quarter. Your boss is very skeptical, but you believe it's a good investment.
Alright, let's get that extra budget for you with effective presentation skills!
Use a hook in the beginning of your speech
If you don't grab people's attention in the beginning of your presentation, it's very unlikely you'll be able to grab it in the middle or end. Do this instead: Start off by asking an intriguing question or make a thought-provoking statement.
Example: 78% of our target audience are TikTok users. That's 24% more than on Facebook, and yet we spend XXX dollars on Facebook every year.
The biggest mistake you can make when you start presenting is to share something everyone knows already (e.g. introducing yourself despite your team members knowing you and your position, etc.). At this point, you will relish the most attention, do not waste it.
Consider the knowledge level of your audience when you're presenting
What does your boss know about TikTok as a marketing channel?
Are there terms or principles you should explain before diving too deep into the details of how you plan to acquire the new TikTok audience?
Generally, if you are an expert in your field, you might have to simplify your language and establish common ground. Add a sentence with an overview of the status quo and introduce your audience to anything that will help them follow your thought process. On the other hand, also leave parts away that are obvious and need no explaining and keep your audience engaged.
Show, don't tell
Your competitors have had great success with TikTok before? Sure, you could tell your boss, but it will not trigger them as much as if you introduced a real-life success story of brand X in your PowerPoint presentation.
Choosing a concrete competitor and campaign that outperformed expectations by Y% and also showing what this success translated is a great way to improve your speech is much more attractive than just mentioning numbers.
Example: Show the successful TikTok video of your competitor and back your story up with data.
Numbers make things tangible
In a world of KPIs, numbers are very important; nobody will give you an extra budget if your success isn't measurable. If showing the success of competitors is the Ying, then backing them up with stats is the Yang of great presentations. Adding data at the right places helps make things tangible and your audience grasp the scope of things.
Use storytelling to make your pitch relatable and interesting
How to make your presentation more interesting? Just make a story out of it, aka use storytelling as a vehicle. Humans connect to stories because they automatically see themselves as the main character and imagine their success and failure as their own. You will notice that most TED talks use a protagonist with some kind of relatable flaw in their story, simply because the viewers wouldn't be able to connect with them otherwise.
This is very close to the point before with 'show, don't tell', and in most cases, one will not work without the other. Just like I've used the anecdote with pitching TikTok budget as an outline, you can find something simple for your actual presentation.
To help improve your presentation and also make your story three-dimensional add pictures to it. AI presentation tools like Gamma can match pictures from their large stock-free library to your topic, preventing you from having to search, up, and download photos back and forth.
Some last basics, before we go for the win
When creating your presentation, keep in mind that your audience is supposed to listen to you; therefore, avoid using lengthy text because multitasking will make people feel overwhelmed. Instead, add bullet points that also help you memorize important parts.
Congratulations, you've made it so far: you grabbed your audience's attention, emotionalized them by showing, not telling, the effects of TikTok, and held the right balance between stories, imperfect protagonists, and numbers. Hopefully you delivered all of this with a body language that signals self-confidence.
Now it's about time to go for the final shot: transforming attention into your boss taking your desired action. Let's break my winning formula for improved presentations down into two parts.
Make your Call to action crystal clear
Of course to you it's crystal clear what you want to reach with your proposal, to your busy boss, it might not be. What action do you want your boss to take with all this new knowledge and insights? Formulate it so that there is no room for interpretation or possibility for your boss to put a decision off.
Explain the cost of missing out
Here is the ultimate hack: It's much more effective to tell your boss what they are going to lose out of if they don't grant you the budget for TikTok, instead of the possible gain. This is a simple human bias called loss aversion, a key concept in prospect theory developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
It suggests that the emotional impact of losing something is more intense than the pleasure of gaining something of equal value.
In practice, your improved presentation should end like this:
...A reasonable budget for testing TikTok for Q2 is XXX. For this amount we could produce and test 10 videos to gain first insights. If we don't invest this relatively small amount, we miss out on addressing a highly relevant audience, and with that, we miss the potential growth of YYY.
Lili Marocsik, former president of the ‘International Toastmasters Lisbon’ is not always stuck in her bubble.
Alright, I have a good feeling regarding that extra budget! No way your boss can resist all these pro hacks for improving presentations.
And if you still need help, feel free to hit me up for a consultation here. I review presentations for professionals and give actionable feedback on a regular basis. It’s hard to be objective for your own cause. But I can be for you!
Also, did you see our review of Best AI Presentation Makers? Some tools are really astonishing and can make a full presentation from a single prompt!
