Delivering technical presentations

Technical presentation

I have been delivering presentation skills training over the past few months, in particular on technical presentations. There were interesting questions posed by my delegates that I would like to share:

·      How do you present boring information in an exciting way?

·      How do I bring content to life?

·      How do I present ‘information heavy’ graphs and tables?

This blog will run through three of my top tips in making technical presentations engaging and informative.

Initially there is no such thing as boring information, only boring ways of presenting it. Secondly it is up to the presenter to inject life into the presentation. It is important to go into any presentation in the right mindset – a Growth Mindset that only YOU can make your presentation exciting, informative and keep your delegates interested in what you say.

Top Tip 1 - Start With Why

Remember your audience will be coming into the room asking themselves the following questions:

·      “Why am I here?”

·      “Why is this important to me?”

·      “What can I gain from this presentation?”

It is vital that you are able to answer the questions your audience will have in their heads as they come into the room. Your audience has one main focus - WIFM – What is In it For Me, they need to know how they will benefit and learn from your presentation that is going to make a difference to them personally. You need to tell them why. If you don’t quickly tell them why they should care about the topic, the audience are likely to lose interest and focus their attention to something they deem more important, like their mobile phone!

Often in presentations we spend a lot of time informing our clients what we want to do or how we do certain things. Let me give you a quick example of this – think about your last sales pitch/presentation – did you start by talking about what you and your company do or did you tell them why you do what you do?

Telling them why will build an instant rapport with your audience and it also helps them relax and open their mind up to wanting to listen to you.

Top Tip 2 - Persuade Don’t Inform

Presentations are not simply about giving your audience information. It is key that you figure out exactly what you are trying to persuade your audience of. Think about the end outcome, what do you want your audience to leave the presentation believing, thinking and what do you want them to learn? This will help you bring some of the more boring or technical information to life.

Think about how the content would be relevant to the audience and bring that into the presentation.

Top Tip 3 - Bring It to Life

Quite often we put together very technical slides with a lot of information, numbers and graphs, which sometimes can be a little overwhelming. If the slides are decided for you at the outset and you need to present all the detailed information then how do you bring the technical information to life?

One of the most important things to be aware of here is that if you put a lot of information on a slide, you are likely to lose your audience engagement. They fall into reading your detailed slide rather than listening to what you are saying. So how do we grab their attention? How do we get their focus back onto you? If they are simply going to read the presentation then you might as well email it over and no need to present.

Give your opinions and explanations of the slide, this will bring their attention back to yourself. Tell them something that isn’t on the slide. Talk through the key points of the slide and give your thoughts and opinions on it.

Don’t Forget…

If you want others to believe what you believe, you need to first think about how to engage with your audience. Asking questions during a presentation is likely to keep your audience engage and feel more involved throughout. Give your opinion and get their thoughts on your opinions – a really powerful tool to engage an audience.

People will detect your lack of passion, disinterest, and insecurities about the topic. Emotions breed emotions amongst your audience – they start to realise and very quickly switch off from the presentation if the presenter shows a lack of enthusiasm and passion.