TJ Walker says most presentations fail because they're structured around slides instead of audience questions. Start by identifying five questions your listeners actually want answered, then build your talk as a conversation that addresses each one with stories and examples rather than data dumps.
Chapters
So what do you do? If you've written a speech, rewritten it, practiced it, rehearsed it, you've even watched it, and you look at it and your reaction is, oh, my God, it's a boring data dump. I beg you, I plead with you, don't tell yourself, well, it's too late to change anything. I'm handcuffed because the slides have been approved and we've worked on it. The train has left the station. No, it's never too late to change your presentation if it's going to be an improvement for the benefit of your audience. Everything you do when you speak has to be looked at through the lens of, is this helping my audience understand the messages that are important to me? If you can't say yes to that, then stop. Stop what you're doing. Do not continue. You don't keep digging a ditch. If you're in the wrong place and it's getting you nowhere, that is foolish. Well, unfortunately, that's what too many people do with their speech. So, first of all, I'm happy that you planned your speech, that you prepared, that you even rehearsed. But if you listen to it or watched it on video and you realize, wow, it's kind of boring, it's a little bit dense, too much stuff here, kind of a data dump, then you're smart for realizing there's a problem. But then it does raise the question, what do you do about it? Now, the suggestion I'm going to give you is you're not going to like, but it's going to help you and more important, your audience immensely. I want you to take the speech you've prepared, Tear it up, throw it in the garbage can, or hit delete. Let's just get a clean slate. Here's what I want you to think of. If you're preparing this speech and you're talking to 40 clients or 40 prospects on Thursday, just sit down a minute and think. If I could sit down with one of these clients or prospects, no speech at all, and just said to them, hey, today I want to talk to you about. And you throw out the topic. What questions do you have? What are the five questions that this one person would ask you? Try to figure that out. Write it down on a piece of paper, type it up on a screen. Really figure out from their perspective on the topic you want to talk about. If you want to be more successful, then improve your communication skills. The best way to do that, smash the subscribe button. Right now. The subject you're really trying to convey what questions would they have? Write those down. Now, I want you to practice your speech again. This time let's forget the slides for now. Let's just look at that single sheet of paper with five questions. Start off your presentation and let people know what you're going to talk about. Glance down at the first question and just say you may be thinking and then ask that question. Now answer the question as if you were sitting down, one on one, with a cup of coffee in your hand, talking to that person. Be conversational. Be interesting. Be expressive. Give examples, Give case studies. Do all the things you do when you're having an interesting conversation with a client or a colleague or a prospect. I know you have them. With so many of my clients, they're really great. One on one. They stand up and now all of a sudden they're frozen and boring and stiff and doing data dumps. It doesn't have to be that way. If you prepare your presentation the right way again, the easiest, fastest fix is throw away the presentation, come up with those five questions, and then just ask yourself the questions in the presentation, whether it's 5, 10, 20, 30 minutes, even an hour. This is a structure that works because it mimics natural conversational flow. We've all had interesting meetings with people over lunch, over dinner, over coffee. We lost track of time. Could have been 40 minutes, could have been an hour, could have been two hours. And we had fun. We learned something. And it wasn't just because there was good wine or a good meal. It was, it was interesting conversation. Now I understand. A pitch presentation, a speech, a formal talk in front of 40 people or 400 people isn't exactly the same thing as a one on one conversation. But you can mimic the most interesting elements of an interesting conversation when preparing your presentation. Now, at some level, it seems scary to do this. What do you mean? Of course I have to go through all these slides and I have to go through all the data and I have to look at bullet points, right? Well, no, you don't have to do that. Your job, first and foremost when you're presenting is to make an idea from your head understandable to someone in your audience, interesting to someone in your audience, and memorable to someone in your audience so that they can take an action based on your idea. Whether it's buy from you, hire you, vote for you, whatever it is you're trying to do. So please keep that in mind. Now, if you've got a bunch of slides or you feel like you have to use, okay, but the slides shouldn't be the starting point. The starting point should be your ideas, the outline which now consists of these five most common questions your client customer prospect would ask you if they could just sit down and talk to you over coffee. In the process of answering one of these questions, you may have a particular visual that comes to mind. Then by all means, create a slide and show it at that point. But what's driving your presentation should be the questions your customers have, your clients, your prospects, not a slide with a nice logo and a nice complicated graph of all the quarterly data that's come in for the last 10 years. Your ideas, questions, your messages, conversation. You have the examples, the stories. That's what will breathe light into your presentation. Do that before it's too late. If you practice, you've rehearsed and you realize yourself this speech is boring. It's not too late. Change it.
