An industry leader on effective presentations has catalogued his expertise in the field in his first book on the subject, Firing Up Your PowerPoint: 10 Immutable Laws for Presenting in the Digital Era. Knowing how to give an effective presentation helps his clients achieve success, sales, and career progression. It was the natural subject for a book.
Lee Featherby is the author in question, and founder and CEO of Powerful Points, an industry leader on the fine art of making effective presentations. Teaching businesspeople the key factors that can turn uninspired presentations into ones that change lives and alter the trajectory of people’s careers.
After 40 years’ experience in sales and marketing, Lee has figured out the tricks of the trade, and his book hopes to make it easy for anyone to follow.
“Being seen as a very good presenter and a very good communicator will profoundly impact your career,” he promises.
Communication evolves; PowerPoint presenting left behind
In multiple decades of business, Lee has seen many forms of communication change, with the ways people use PowerPoint having remained essentially the same since it first found its way into offices in 1990.
Lee says that even when it was new, we were complaining about ‘death by PowerPoint’.
“Back then the rule of thumb was: six points per slide, six words per point, which is the same these days.”
He says that what has changed since then is how easily we now access information, we need information presented to us in a way that’s easy to digest.
“We don’t tend to spend the time dwelling on the things that are presented to us … the world has gotten so much busier with people going from meeting to meeting.”
Presenters should make it easy for audiences to get where you want them to be. The ‘how to’ is relatively simple, coming down to knowing what to leave out.
“It’s understanding what’s important!”
The keys to effective presentations – in just three steps
The essence of what you need to remember to present effectively boils down to three key tips.
- Don’t make your presentation a data dump. It’s hard to engage with data in isolation. Data is only used to prove a point; it’s not an end in itself.
- Stories are what engage audiences best. Take people on a journey. Build your argument, have people nodding in agreement or interacting. It’s better to do a presentation that says how you achieved your sales, telling the story around it, than to simply present what your sales were (that goes back to Point 1 about the ‘data dump’).
- Answer the question, “What do I want to achieve out of the presentation?” Being clear about your outcome is essential. Ask yourself, “Why am I including this slide? I want to communicate this point; a slide exists to deliver or evidence a key message. And that’s it.
The difference a good presentation makes
To this presentation expert, a good presentation means a greater likelihood of getting what you want. He says you don’t want to rob yourself of the opportunity to sell who you are, the trajectory your career takes, what your capacity is, and what your abilities are. Presenting well can do all those things, while simultaneously doing a good job for your organisation.
Lee’s tips can be applied to all communications: knowing what ultimately the purpose of the communication is, and then applying that to every point being made. “One of the things we know about our training courses is that they apply just as well for writing an email.”
Lee Featherby’s book, Firing Up Your PowerPoint: 10 Immutable Laws for Presenting in the Digital Era, is now available and promises to show you the way to separate yourself as a dynamic presenter and engaging storyteller, from all those presentations that send their audiences to sleep.
