Preparing a presentation starts with a difficult question: what are you actually going to talk about? Especially when you have a lot of knowledge and experience, the possibilities are endless. So what does your audience actually want to hear? It sounds simple enough, but this is often where the challenge begins. Because when you know a lot, choosing can be harder than telling.
You know your subject inside out, have years of experience, and could easily come up with twenty interesting side topics. But what do you include? And more importantly, what do you leave out? A strong presentation doesn’t start with PowerPoint. It starts with a choice. What does your audience want to hear? Presentation coach Marco Pesch from Happy Good Talk shares three simple tips for deciding what to include in your presentation.
Tip 1: Choose
When there are so many topics to choose from, it can be tempting to cover a little bit of everything. After all, you want to give your audience the complete picture. Yet that’s often exactly where things go wrong.
Marco’s advice is simple: CHOOSE.
Be specific. Ultimately, it doesn’t even matter that much what you choose, as long as you make a choice. A presentation doesn’t become stronger by adding more and more information. By leaving information out, you create space for your story.
The question that helps you make that choice is: “What does my audience want to hear?”
Not: “What do I know?” Not: “What do I find interesting?” But: “What does my audience need?”
And that brings us directly to the next tip.
Tip 2: Put yourself in your audience’s shoes during your presentation
Your presentation may be about your expertise, but the presentation is for your audience.
So before you decide on your content, try to put yourself in their shoes. Who is sitting in front of you? What do they already know? What are they struggling with? What do they need? And what would be interesting, relevant or valuable to them?
The better you understand what your audience needs, the easier it becomes to make choices about your content.
Because you don’t need to tell them everything you know. You only need to tell them what will help them move forward.
Tip 3: Build your presentation around your choice
Once you’ve decided what your audience needs to hear, you can start building your presentation.
According to Marco, one of the tips that sticks most from the Overtuigen training is this: choose one clear main message and build your entire presentation around it.
Think of your main message as the thread running through your story. Everything you say should contribute to it. An example, an anecdote, a statistic or a slide: each element should strengthen your main message.
Does something not support it? Then there’s a good chance you should leave it out.
That can be painful. Especially when you have something interesting to say. But a good story isn’t about how much you can tell. It’s about what your audience remembers.
Kill your darlings
A strong presentation isn’t necessarily a complete presentation. It’s a presentation in which you’re willing to make choices.
Choose what your audience wants to hear. Put yourself in their shoes. And build your story around that.
Because when you’re clear about what you want to say and why your audience needs to hear it, presenting becomes much easier. You no longer have to fit everything in. You know where you’re going.
And that’s exactly where a story that sticks begins.
Want to learn how to turn your expertise into a clear and convincing story? In Happy Good Talk’s Overtuigen training, you’ll learn how to sharpen your message and present it in a way that feels authentic to you.