Boost The Professionalism Of Your Presentations With 7 Tricks

From sales pitches to training classes, there are many situations in the modern business world where you may be expected to give a presentation. In order to build trust in your company and what you are saying, you need to make sure that your presentation is conducted in a professional tone.

Below are just a few tricks that can make your presentations feel more polished and help you to win over your audience. 

1. Open with a strong hook

A good presentation needs to start strong. Grab people’s attention straight away by asking a juicy question, by stating a crazy fact or by telling an amusing/shocking short story that links to the content of your presentation. Continue to build off of this opening or plan to circle back to it at the end. 

2. Follow the 5-5-5 rule

One of the most common presentation blunders is making slides too text heavy. Many of your audience members will be overwhelmed by walls of text and will stop taking in what you are saying. Use the 5-5-5 rule to keep text concise and comprehensible – use no more than five words per line, no more than five lines per slide, and no more than five text-heavy slides in a row.

3. Visualize data with charts and graphs

When using figures and percentages to back up your pitch or lesson, consider using charts and graphs to help your audience clearly visualise what you are saying. Get creative with colors, images and labels to make these graphs more engaging. This site offers some tips for making charts and graphs: https://laurensergy.com/graphscharts/. 

4. Hand out presentation folders

Presentation folders can provide information that your audience can take away with them. You could also include contracts to sign, contact details or QR codes. There are companies as found here wholesalepocketfolders.com/custom-printed-presentation-folders/ that can help produce custom printed presentation folders for you.

5. Use gestures, movement and eye contact

To grip your audience, you also need to master your ‘stage presence’. Avoid standing still and reading from notes. Instead, move around while you are talking and use hand gestures to visually accompany your speech. You need to look at your audience too, but try to stick to brief eye contact with individual audience members rather than glancing over the crowd. Focusing on individuals will help to make each audience member more engaged while also helping you to maintain a more naturally intimate tone. Make sure to smile too.

6. End with a clear takeaway or call to action

Just as the beginning needs to be strong, so does the end of your presentation. Leave your audience with a clear takeaway of what they have learned or finish with a call to action if you are delivering a sales pitch to clients or investors. 

7. Prepare for Q&A

It’s important to give your audience time to ask questions. Prepare yourself for some difficult queries and rehearse answers so that you can respond quickly and confidently. If someone asks a question that you don’t know the answer to, don’t try to bluff an answer – own up to the fact that you don’t have the information right now to answer, but tell them you will look into it. A great trick with situational questions is to redirect them back to the audience (e.g. ‘That’s an interesting point. Does anyone else in the room have experience with that?’). 

Final thoughts

The key to a professional presentation is to keep it well-paced, factual, confidently delivered and visually interesting. Some people find it beneficial to rehearse their presentations, while others find it easier to memorise key points and then deliver a more improvised presentation around these. High quality slides and a top level presentation folder will help to provide more authority to what you are saying, so prepare these documents well in advance.