How To Prepare A Business Presentation

Hi. I'm Simon Bucknall, and in 2008, I won the European Championship for Public Speaking. At the Art of Connection, we help ambitious professionals to connect with their audience, and we do it by bringing world-class communications expertise into the training room, to enable our clients to persuade, influence, and inspire others.

Earlier in my career, I used to work in the corporate consulting world, and I remember this one occasion where myself and my colleagues went to present to the senior executive team of a health care company. Chief executive, plus all the key people were there. I'll be honest with you, the presentation didn't go very well.

It wasn't because we hadn't prepared the material, it wasn't because we forgot what we were going to say. It was delivered professionally, and we felt, effectively. The problem was we hadn't talked to any of the people in the room beforehand.

In other words, we went into that presentation cold, and that meant that we misread the audience when we were in the room. As a business executive, you might think that it's really important to get the information ready, have the slides ready, the deck, and ensure that you present professionally. Well, all those things are important, but actually, one of the most important things you can ever do in preparing for a business presentation is talk to as many audience members as you can in advance, especially if they're senior.

You need to understand where they're at, and so the next time we went in front of that audience, it was about 3 months later, we made sure that we talked to all the key people one to one, either on the phone, or face to face, in advance. That meant we were able to gauge where they were at and get their buy-in to some of the ideas we were looking to present. Now, of course, that's only part of the preparation process because the material and the ideas you're seeking to communicate are of course important.

One useful technique that you can use to add impact when you're preparing a presentation is to story-board the flow. Literally, it's worth setting all the slides out in an open space, maybe it's a big table, or even on the floor, to ensure that the logic, the flow of logic, makes sense. Once you've done that, once you've got the flow of your presentation ready, test it.

Test it with colleagues, or with friends if necessary, or with a loved one. This is not about delivery, it's not about the tone of voice and the way you move around the room. Forget that for the moment.

This is about business logic. Does it make sense? Does one thought follow logically from the other? Ask those people, again, whether it's friends or colleagues, to put themselves in the mindset of the people that you'll be talking to. That way, you'll ensure that the logic you create is bullet-proof, and makes sense to somebody who hasn't heard it before.

Because that's one of the biggest challenges we face when preparing a business presentation: you spend so long on it, it all starts to become common sense to you, because you've been working on it for so long. So, test it with someone who hears it for the very first time. So, those are the tips.

Talk to audience members in advance if you can. That way you'll get an inside track on what's going through their minds. Story board your presentation to make sure that you have a flow, and then finally, test that flow of logic.

If you do those things, you'll go a long way to ensuring that the presentation you've prepared works a treat. .