If you’re feeling like your presentations in small meetings are suffering, try these three simple tips to jump start things:

1) Call or email your attendees beforehand – This is the simplest and most effective way to improve your presentations and gauge what is important to your attendees. Ask some probing questions beforehand, and flesh out what is important to your group. Eliminate elements of your presentation that aren’t needed.

2) Check in with your group after each major bullet point – Everybody professes to do it, yet it’s seldom done. If your attendees are confused about the product you are selling, or the initiative you are launching, they are not always likely to say so. By giving your attendees permission to speak up during your presentation at the beginning of the presentation, you take out the risk of being misunderstood. A simple “Please feel free to ask a question if you are confused about something” should suffice.

3) Watch out for death by PowerPoint – Statistically we can absorb three pieces of information per slide. Not four, not five and certainly not fifty-six. Three. If your slides look like a page from a calculus text book, weed out the less than pertinent data and put it into a hand-out that you can pass out before the presentation. Check out this blog post for examples of great Power Point slides.

There you are! If you would like to sharpen a presentation or speech, call me to set up a free, 20 minute consultation!