Content

• Analyzing before the presentation

MGS 1103 • Composing the presentation
Effective Presentation Skills • Delivering the presentation
• Handling questions
Anushka Hewa Heenipellage (PhD)
Lecturer
Department of Management Studies
Faculty of Management

What do you analyze when planning a Analyze your purpose and desired
business presentation? outcome: Why are you presenting?
• Analyze your purpose and desired outcome: Begin with the end in mind.
Why are you presenting?
• Analyze your audience: Who will be listening,
and what do they care about? Why am I delivering this presentation, and what
do I want to have happen as a result?
• Analyze your message: What will you say to
achieve your desired outcome?
• Analyze your setting: Where will you present?
• Analyze your medium options: How will you
deliver your message?
 Analyze your audience: Who will be
listening, and what do they care
about?
Analyze your setting: Where will you
present?
The setting of your presentation will affect the
material you prepare and your presentation style.
For some presentations, you may be standing in
front of a screen with an audience arranged in rows
or tables throughout the room. For other
presentations, you may be sitting at a conference
table with a few key decision makers. And in other
situations, you may be delivering the presentation
to a remote audience by videoconference, web
conference, or teleconference.
Analyze your medium options: How
will you deliver your message?
As you plan your presentation, consider what tools you
want to use and what materials you can provide to help
your audience understand your message. Do not restrict
yourself to using only slides. You can take advantage of a
range of options and combine them in effective ways. For
example, many people choose to project slides and also
provide the audience with a hardcopy handout. You can
embed video or audio files within your slides, or use a
document camera to project a paper document while
making notes about it on a flipchart. The best options
depend on your purpose, audience, content, and setting.
Analyze your message: What will you
say to achieve your desired outcome?
For most business presentations, the main message should do all four of
these things:
1. Take the audience’s point of view (often using the words you, we, and
us) and include other key players, such as the board of directors,
employees, investors, customers, or partners, if they are involved.
2. Address a problem, concern, or need that your audience cares about—
for example, growing the business, saving money, increasing return on
investment, or enhancing employee satisfaction.
3. Present your solution and highlight what the audience will gain from
that solution.
4. Explicitly or implicitly lead your audience to the outcome you intend.
Before you prepare slides or select other visual aids to use, analyze your
setting by asking yourself these questions:
• Will you be standing to present slides, or will you be sitting with others
around a table or a computer looking at small screens or printouts? If the
room is very big, you may need a microphone. Will you use a podium
microphone, which will limit your movement? Or will you have a wireless
microphone so you can move around the room more freely? If your
audience will be looking at your slides from a distance, your fonts and
images will need to be larger than if you are in a small room or are
presenting around a table.
• Will you be using your own computer to present slides and other visuals,
or will you need to use equipment that is already in the room? If you are
using other equipment, be sure that it projects your material correctly and
that all fonts, images, video, and audio work as planned.
• Will your audience be looking at your presentation on a computer screen
at a remote location and listening via computer or telephone? If so, plan
to design slides that are easy to follow and that do not require you to use
your hands or a laser pointer to direct your audience’s attention to key
points. If you design your slides effectively, you will be able to direct the
audience by pointing with your voice—for example, “the picture on the
left illustrates” or “the numbers in red represent.
 How do you compose the
presentation?
• Organize the content
• Identify the role that slides will play
• Create a storyboard
• Develop a template
• Design individual slides
• Evaluate your slides in a practice session
• Create effective handouts

Organize the content The opening of a presentation has four main

Extensive research has shown that the common
saying, “You never get a second chance to make
a first impression,” is largely correct.4 The
primacy effect, or the fact that your audience is
more likely to remember the first things they
hear, makes it all the more important to plan
carefully how you begin your presentation.
goals:
• Establish rapport with your audience
• Capture the audience’s attention
• Motivate your audience to care about your
presentation and your goal
• Provide a map or framework for the rest of
the presentation

Capture attention
Establish rapport
At the beginning of a presentation, your audience wants
to connect with you. They want to know who you are and
feel confident that you have designed the presentation
with their needs in mind. To make that connection,
introduce yourself and identify common ground that you
share with your audience. Have you had similar
experiences, are you worried about the same problem,
do you share the same goals? Start with something
familiar that your audience already knows. This technique
communicates to the audience that you can see things
from their point of view. The goal is to capture their
attention and build their interest before you introduce
new ideas.
 Motivate your audience to care
An audience will care about your presentation if
they believe it is valuable to them. Does your
audience have a problem that you will solve? Is
there a need for change? Are you identifying an
opportunity that they can take advantage of? Is
there a specific way that your audience will
benefit?
Organize the middle of the
presentation to be easy to understand
A presentation is easiest to follow when it has a
clear and simple organization. Within that
organization, you can provide as much data as you
need to accomplish your goal, as long as you also
do these three things:
• Focus on points that are meaningful to the
audience
• Limit the number of key points you include
• Make the relationship between points clear by
using recognizable patterns
Limit the number of key points
Your audience will remember your content better if you do not
overload them with information. Presentation experts often
recommend that you limit your number of key points in a presentation
(or bullet points on a slide) to a maximum of seven, Miller’s Magical
Number, based on influential research by George Miller.6 However,
more recent research has cut that estimate in half, and it is now
generally accepted that people can keep four or five unrelated chunks
of information in their short-term memory before forgetting important
information.7, 8 By keeping your presentation to a small number of
points, your audience will be able to remember them better when the
presentation is over. If you do have more than four or five points,
group related items. For example, if you have seven recommendations
to present, your audience will process the information and remember
the recommendations better if you present it in two “chunks”—for
example, three recommendations for saving costs and four
recommendations for saving time.
Provide a framework or map
An audience easily gets lost and bored if they
cannot anticipate the twists and turns the
presentation may take. Providing specific
directions about the content at the beginning of
the presentation helps them stay on course and
follow your logic.
Focus on points that are meaningful to
the audience
Presenters sometimes take the easy way out and let the
information dictate the organization: two types of
requirements, five training courses, three products, or six
product features. For a more effective organization, think
about what is meaningful to the audience. Instead of
focusing on the features of a product, focus on how those
features benefit the audience. Instead of explaining how
a system works, highlight the problems the system solves.
To identify the points most meaningful to the audience,
return to the audience analysis questions you answered
during the planning phase and identify what the audience
wants to know during the presentation. Let that analysis
be your guide.
Present your information using a
recognizable pattern
• Categorization - Group the content under key
categories, such as four reasons, five steps, or three
options
• Chronological order - Chronology works well if you are
presenting the timeline for a project or phases to
implement a new computer system—any topic in
which time is particularly important and meaningful
• Conceptual order
• Problem/ Solution
• Opportunity/Action
• Questions/Answers

Compose a memorable conclusion
The end of a presentation is as important as the
beginning. Because the conclusion is the last
thing the audience hears, it may be the first
thing the audience remembers days or weeks
after your presentation. This is called the
recency effect.10 Compose a powerful
conclusion to your presentation by using at least
one of the following strategies. The best endings
typically use all four.
• Summarize your main message. All presentation guidelines recommend
summarizing at the end. In other words, “Tell them what you told them.”
However, a good summary does more than just say “I’ve talked about our
turnover problem and a proposed solution.” Remind the audience why
you talked about those topics. What makes the topics important to you
and to the audience? What impact will the topics have? What are the
benefits? How should the audience use the information or respond to it?
Audiences need to hear again “What’s in this for me?”
• Ask for what you want. What do you want the audience to do? Send you
information? Schedule a meeting with a decision maker? Approve your
proposal? Act on your recommendations? You’ll need to create a call to
action with specific, clear, and tangible tasks. As salespeople say, “Make
the ask!”
• Visualize the outcome for the audience. Paint a picture of the audience’s
world when your plans, product, or recommendations are in place. What
will be more efficient, less costly, more comfortable, or more competitive?
What kind of satisfaction will they experience?
• Make next steps clear. If your presentation leads to future action, outline
the next steps and identify who is responsible for what. A simple checklist
or timeline can effectively display the content and provide a visual
reference

Stand-alone presentations

Many business presentations require that your slide decks—the set of

slides you prepare for the presentation—serve as reference
documents after the presentation and communicate the content
effectively to people who didn’t attend the presentation. These slide
decks need to make “stand-alone sense,"a term coined by managerial
communication expert Mary Munter. Stand-alone sense does not
mean that the deck needs to be comprehensive or include every word
you plan to say. Instead, it means the presentation material needs to
make sense to anyone who reads it without the benefit of the
presenter to explain the information. In addition, each slide needs to
make sense to someone who enters the room during the presentation,
without hearing your introduction. A stand-alone presentation is
distinguished by three key features:
• An agenda slide that communicates the main ideas and logic of the
presentation
• Sentence-style message headlines that summarize the key point, or
message, of each slide
• Support material in the body of the slide that develops and explains
the headline

Visual aid presentations

In presentations where the speaker’s words
carry the main story of the presentation, the
slides primarily provide illustration and backup.
These visual aid presentations ideally devote
much more space to various forms of illustration
that focus the discussion and demonstrate the
points. The slide in Figure 11.10 on page 408 is
from a presentation promoting a culinary tour of
France. The slide is visually appealing, but a
presenter needs to explain the main point orally.
 Create a storyboard
Once you know the organization of your content and the
type of slides you will develop, you can begin outlining
the presentation by creating a storyboard. The concept of
a storyboard comes from the film industry. Traditionally, a
filmmaker will plan the film, scene by scene, sketching
the vision for each scene and including notes for direction
and filming. Applied to a presentation, a storyboard is a
slide-by-slide sketch that helps create a story flow based
on the organization you developed. The storyboard also
helps you see the big picture of the presentation before
you get too involved in creating individual slides.

Develop a template Design individual slides

In business communication, a presentation’s slide design should always
be secondary to its message. You don’t want your audience to focus
more on the template’s images, colors, and borders than on the
message itself. The best approach is to keep your slide design simple
so your audience can concentrate on the content. Fortunately, slide
programs such as PowerPoint and Keynote allow you to create your
own slide templates (PowerPoint templates are saved in the Microsoft
template folder as .pot files). You can use a slide master to design your
template. A slide master is a presentation-editing tool that allows you
to apply design features to all of your slides in that file. This tool will
enforce consistency in your visual elements: colors, fonts and font
sizes, bullet styles, headers, footers, and margins will be consistent
from slide to slide. Using this tool also saves you time because you
won’t need to make these changes on every slide you add
After you finalize your template, you can begin
designing and composing individual slides. Use the
guiding principle of “less is more.” Too many people
use slides as their speaking script, crowding out all
blank space with detailed text. With so much
content on the slide, your audience can’t focus on
anything. Ironically, if the slide contains less
information, your audience will absorb more of the
content. This “less is more” principle applies both to
text slides and data slides.
 How do you deliver and evaluate the
presentation?
• Set the stage
• Control your body
• Use your voice effectively
• Present your visuals effectively
• Coordinate with your team
• Evaluate the audience’s response
Dress for the part - For formal presentations,
wear business-formal clothing, similar to what
you would wear to a job interview. Even in less
formal presentations, dress with care. Wear
clothing that looks neat and allows you to move
comfortably. You want people to pay attention
to you, not your clothing. Empty your pockets of
keys or loose change that can jingle when you
move. Avoid distracting jewelry—and, of course,
turn off cell phones.
Set up all equipment and props - If you plan to
use presentation slides, turn on the projector or
electronic data display and have the title slide in
place when the presentation begins. If you
prefer to begin with a dark screen and display
the title slide later, you can strike the letter “B”
in PowerPoint to blacken the screen. Striking “B”
again will make your slide appear. If you’re using
flipcharts, a whiteboard, or props, make sure
they are positioned to be easy to reach during
your presentation.
Set the stage
Practice (aloud) - It’s easy to feel nervous when
you are not well prepared. Presenting is similar
to an athletic performance. A presenter needs
to get ready—just as an athlete would practice
regularly and then stretch to warm up. Practice
means saying the words aloud, not merely going
over them in your head, to create a “sound
memory” to recall during your actual
presentation
Arrive early and warm up - Warming up can take
several forms. To feel comfortable with the
audience, greet people individually, introduce
yourself, get used to talking with them, and make a
good first impression even before you begin to
present. To focus your mind and relieve stress, use
relaxation techniques. Breathe deeply from your
diaphragm to control the adrenaline and relax the
neck and jaw muscles. These techniques will also
help you project your voice. To refresh your
memory about your content, take a quick look at
your notes, and review your opening and closing
remarks. Finally, double-check handouts and
equipment to ensure everything is ready
Decide where you will stand - Whenever possible,
avoid standing behind lecterns and large desks or
tables because they create a barrier between you
and the audience. If you are using a projector,
position yourself on one side of the screen so that
you do not have to walk between the screen and
the projector’s light. Clear space around the
projector and other equipment so that you have
plenty of room to move around comfortably and
approach the audience. Using a remote control to
change slides can help you navigate your
presentation space.
Keep the lights up and attention on you - If you Have water available - If you are speaking for a
choose a technology that requires low light, plan long time, you will need to drink water to
to begin speaking with the lights on. This prevent your mouth from drying out and your
guarantees that attention will be where you vocal cords from being constricted.
want it—on you and your message. It can be
very effective to begin speaking before
projecting any visuals. Connect with the
audience and then move to the slides.

Control your body

Use your voice effectively
• Speak to the back of the room
• Speak slowly, especially at the beginning of
the presentation
• Modulate your voice
• Minimize verbal tics
• Use pauses—a remedy for the “ers” and
“ums.”
• Do not apologize for nervousness or mistakes

Present your visuals effectively

When presenting with visual aids, take cues
from your visuals and avoid note cards or a
script. Reading from notes or a script does not
build rapport with your audience. In addition,
holding on to cards or paper prevents natural
gestures and makes you look like a student in a
speech class rather than a professional in a
business setting.

Coordinate with your team
• Take advantage of everyone’s strengths
• Decide how you will handle introductions
• Practice transitions from person to person
• Let your teammates speak
• Correct a teammate only when necessary
• Be prepared to present other teammates’
slides
How do you handle questions and
answers?
• Decide how and when you will handle Q&A
• Anticipate questions and plan short answers
• Decide how your team will handle questions
– Answer questions skillfully
– Give a three-part answer
– Break complex questions into parts
– Be honest
– Avoid being defensive or dismissive