We have all heard the adage, "Well begun is half done". While it may be true, does it apply to PowerPoint presentations? How crucial is the start to any presentation? It turns out, the start is a make or break opportunity. Let me show you a graph from Sequoia's blog. For those of you who might not know Sequoia, it is one of the biggest venture capital firms in the world and it has made significant investments in some of the biggest start-ups. In his blog post 'How to present to investors' Aaref Hilaly (of Sequoia) shares an attention graph. The above attention graph is for a 60-minute long presentation. The graph indicates how the attention of the audience changes during your presentation. There are a few important implications: Everyone pays attention to you at the start Attention falls sharply after about a minute or two (because the start was bad and not exciting) Attention rises at the end (we usually focus back on the presenter when the talk i...

Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Laureate and a renowned figure in the field of behavioural psychology. In his classic book, Thinking Fast and Slow  he has shared insights about how humans think and act and the predictable mistakes we tend to make. He has one great tip to offer to you as a presenter. Your audience, as per Daniel Kahneman, has two selves The Experiencing Self, and The Remembering Self The experiencing self lives in the moment and answers the question, "How is the presentation now?" Whereas the remembering self answers the question, "How was the presentation, overall?" Now the psychological insight is - Our memory is controlled by our remembering self. The duration of the presentation is neglected. What matters is how we remember the overall experience of your presentation. The two things that affect this are: How did the presentation end? How were the peak moments in the presentation? As per Daniel Kahneman, the way your presentatio...

You are building a presentation from scratch. The first step in doing that is to decide on the objective of your presentation (read about it here  How to start working on a presentation? ). The next step is audience analysis. Unless you have followed both these steps, do not start building your content. How to analyse your audience? Answer all these questions: Who is my audience? Why are they coming? What is their objective? What do they expect from my presentation? What do they already know about my topic? What is their designation (if pitching to a company/organisation)? Have you met them before? Do you know their likes/dislikes? What are they most likely to ask me? Here are a few examples where analysing the audience helps deliver a much better presentation. Designation: CEO or Junior Manager You cannot deliver the same presentation to your CEO and your peers, can you? Your CEO will give you 10 minutes whereas you can speak to your peers for an hou...

You have to make a presentation from scratch. What do you do first? You have to think of your objective. What do you want the audience to do at the end of the presentation? It is not easy as you think. Let me illustrate. Example: B2B sales presentation You are selling cloud ERP software to large companies.  What is the objective of your B2B sales presentation? Sell the software! No. The only objective of your first presentation to the prospect is to secure the second meeting. It will need much more than one meeting and one PowerPoint presentation to close the deal. If your 'new' objective is to secure a second meeting with the same client, you would now focus on creating a good first impression and answering the few basic questions which will help you reach round two of the discussions. You are not under any pressure to 'sell' the software in the first meeting with the prospect. This takes away a lot of pressure and a lot of needless and...