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Regardless, if your goal is to make a sale or educate. You don’t want to fall prey to the mistakes that many presenters make — loading us down with piles and piles of information and communication hodgepodge. Excellent presentations are designed to anchor in the key points that are relevant for influencing the listeners to take some kind of action.

When you make a presentation to a committee, corporate board of directors or presenting an all day seminar, your aim is to accomplish two very important goals. First, it is crucial that your audience walk away with a “Top of the Mind” memorable experience. Second, you want to influence your audience to take an immediate or future action. Every, presentation should have an outcome and action steps for your audience to take.

For us to accomplish those two goals we need to help the audience focus-in on our presentation so that we touch and communicate with the head and heart of our audience. Effectively, we want to mesmerize, hold their attention and filter out any outside distractions that would compete with our presentation and desired outcome.

We are visual beings by nature. Our eyes, being the most powerful information conduit to the brain, are always in motion feeding us images and disrupting our thought processes. People have limited attention spans and information processing capabilities. Therefore, we as presenters need to simplify the communications to hold attention for influencing the thinking of our audience.

I use a very powerful communication technique that anyone can apply with their very next presentation to accomplish extraordinary results. Your presentation and visuals will communicate faster, clearer, better and be more congruent — eliminating the communication hodgepodge that so many presenters use.

First, reduce all you visuals to pictures and either eliminate words and numbers altogether or reduce them to three or less per visual. Visuals should be used as anchors to support your key points that you want your audience to remember.

Second, your visuals must be associated in some ridiculous and/or illogical way for transferring key points and word phases for your audience to remember and retain your information.

A simple example is: You are giving a financial report showing an increase in earnings for your division. You could use a rising balloon lifting a building block, showing the percentage of increase stenciled in the block, giving your audience and image of growth and profits. Visuals that are your typical bar charts, graphs, and lines of words are boring and have a lesser impact connecting with your audience. Whereas, ridiculous and/or illogical visuals add retention, entertainment, and can illustrate with greater impact the benefits, not just facts and figures of your presentation.

Third, support your key points and visuals with a story.

Here’s how it works:

In delivering a presentation, recently to a group of sales people, one of my key points was that we have to understand our customers buying strategies and buying incentives for us to influence them to make a purchase from us. The visual that I used (now visualize this in your mind) was a man peering over a chessboard with his chin snuggled on his tightly clutched hands with a very pensive look in his eyes. The picture was stretched and elongated to exaggerate the image to influence the inner thinking process that our customers go though in their decision-making.

I then illustrated the point with a story of how one of my clients went about uncovering his clients’ strategies, buying incentives and how this same presentation process helped him get the sales and acquire a major key account for his company. Most importantly during the story I explained how my client was able to fine out what would create a win situation for his client. That gave way, for transitioning, to the next key point and slide in the presentation.

The visual was dynamic in that it supported the key points and anchored the story in the mind of the audience. The story used was linked back to the visual and was congruent with the key points.

This presentation process reinforces your points and makes them easy to understand. You can take any subject from a ten-minute annual report presentation to an all-day training session and use this approach of structuring your presentations. When you substitute lines of words, boring bar charts and graphs, with key points, supportive stories anchored with ridiculous visuals, you make it easy for your audience to assimilate, focus, remember and become engage and mesmerized with your material.

This is the moment most presenters dread – you ask if anyone has any questions and pretty much everyone puts their hands up. On one hand you’re flattered because obviously people are interested but on the other hand you’re scared stiff because you don’t know what people are going to ask, whether you’ll know the answer or if you’ll look incompetent and lose the sale.

Here are some simple tips to follow that can get you through the tough situations:

Handling Questions

• Take control of the process and tell the Customers when they can ask questions – at the end of the presentation or at particular points during the presentation. Decide what will work best for you.

• Prepare in advance – think of the questions that will probably come up and prepare your answers in advance. Having analysed the Customer, you should have some idea now what the typical objections will be so have answers ready to tackle these

• Listen to the full question – do not interrupt half way through and assume you know what they’re going to ask

• ‘Listen’ to the body language – is it defensive, what cues can you pick up from how they are asking the question or the gestures they are making?

• Think about your own body language – whilst you may feel defensive when someone asks a question, keep your gestures open – arms at your side, direct eye contact, smile, lean forward

Answering Questions

• Repeat the question back to ensure you have understood

• If you don’t know the answer….. TELL THEM. Do not try and muddle your way through the answer or make something up, your body language will give you away and someone else may know the actual answer and you will lose all credibility.

• If you don’t know the answer, open it up to the group and see if anyone else knows. This is known as Boomerang – where you boomerang the question back to the group. If you’re not good at ‘thinking on your feet’ this can also give you a chance to think about the answer. Answer it by saying, “Great question! What do the rest of the group think? Would anyone like to share their thoughts?”

• If you don’t know and no one else knows either, have a ‘Parking Lot’ for the questions (could be a flipchart on the wall or just your notepad) and commit to finding out the answer for them.

• When replying to a question, involve the whole audience – begin eye contact with the questioner, then the other audience members and back to the questioner at the end of the answer.

Dealing with Objections

• Keep calm – you can handle this!

• If things do start to become difficult to handle then politely suggest that the conversation be taken offline. Depending on the objection, some of your answers could be:

o “You have made a very valid point and I want to discuss this further. Can I suggest we take this offline and have a more focused conversation after the presentation?”

o “Thank you, that is a great point/question and I’d like to involve my colleague / Manager of that department / my CEO in answering your concern. Let me take that away and I’ll arrange a separate meeting later this week where we can discuss further. What’s your availability?”

• If you feel someone is deliberately trying to challenge you, then you could use humour. BE VERY CAREFUL though as it can come across as sarcasm and you may appear defensive

• Do not deflect the criticism or blame another colleague – it will seem your Company is not working as a team or communicating well. Even if an objection is not based on anything you have done, accept the feedback on behalf of your Company in an appropriate manner.

• Do not agree with or join in any maligning of the Company – your job is to represent the business and you must safeguard its name and reputation – be professional at all times.

• Be conscious of your body language and facial expressions – keep your gestures open and your face neutral. Avoid eye-rolling, frowns and smirking, this will only antagonise the objectioner!

• Be attentive whilst the objection is being made – actively listen with head nods and direct eye contact. If the other audience members become restless, manage them and ask them to be quiet (respectfully, of course!). Do be conscious of the group through and if the objection is taking a lot of time or the person is being argumentative then take control and suggest taking it off-line (see previous examples).

Some other things to consider if you’re put on the spot:

• Nonverbal cues can help restore order and make you appear calm…. Even if you’re not!

o Strong eye contact

o Upright posture

o Unwavering focus

• The more animated your ‘opponent’ becomes, the calmer you should be

• Keep vocal inflection to a minimum, talk neutrally

• Keep focused on the key messages you want to deliver – if you get a difficult question, repeat your main point and do not waffle, keep to the areas you are comfortable talking about.