How a good presentation will boost sales and your career

Knowing how to give an effective presentation will help you achieve success, sales, and career progression, according to the author of a new book on the subject.

Lee Featherby, an industry leader on effective presentations, has catalogued his expertise in the field in his first book, Firing Up Your PowerPoint: 10 Immutable Laws for Presenting in the Digital Era. The author has accumulated his insights as to how to make an effective presentation after 40 years’ experience in sales and marketing, going back to presenting in a very ‘analogue’ manner.

“In my very first job at Cadbury-Schweppes, I was the marketing manager for Caramello Koala and Freddo Frogs,” he recalls, “and we had to do a trade presentation. I was 21 at the time, and we used nine slide projectors and a reel-to-reel tape deck and three people in the marketing department spent three months putting the thing together, to do what we can do in PowerPoint now in about three weeks with one person. 

“I remember thinking, ‘That's just so impressive!’ At that time, it was so leading edge!”
 

Communication evolves; PowerPoint presentations left behind

Lee has seen many aspects of marketing, presenting and general business evolve over the ensuing decades. While many forms of communication have changed, presenting with PowerPoint has remained somewhat constant since its debut more than 30 years ago.

“It doesn't look that different these days. How people are delivering information hasn't changed. 

“Even then we were complaining about ‘death by PowerPoint’. Back then, the rule of thumb was: six points per slide, six words per point. If you think about that now, it is the same recipe for death by PowerPoint. It's a sign of how things haven’t changed.”

Lee says that we lived in a very different world then in terms of how we are getting our information, and communicating, and this should be reflected in how we give presentations. 

“What's changed is that we are so used to being spoon-fed information,” he says. “If we see a presentation that's hard to digest the information, it gets difficult. We take the line of least resistance. We don't tend to spend the time dwelling on the things that are presented to us … the world has got so much busier with people going from meeting to meeting.”

He says presenters need to make it easy for audiences to get where you want them to be. The ‘how to’, is relatively simple, and for Lee, it comes down to knowing what to leave out.

“Mark Twain said it best,” Lee says, “When he said, ‘I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.’ That's fundamentally the problem. The essence of a good presentation is knowing what to take out and what to leave in. 

“It's the same with presentations. It's understanding what's important and not just doing a ‘data dump’.”

Citing how often presentations have their on-screen words simply read aloud, Lee says it’s among the biggest complaints they hear. 

“Try and avoid that!” he says. 
 

The keys to making a presentation effective

If there are certain things to be remembered going into a presentation, there are a couple that Lee says are paramount.

“Number one, it’s not a data dump,” he says. “It's really hard to engage with data in isolation. Data is only used to prove a point. It's not an end in itself.”  

He says that stories are what engage audiences best. People doing a presentation without a story show they’re not proving anything. 

“They don't take people on the journey. They don't build an argument, which has people nodding in agreement or interacting. You can stand up and do a presentation on sales results for May 2021 … or you can do a presentation that says how we achieved our sales, and then create a story around it. 

“It brings people on board. It gives it a story, and it's so much more engaging for people. These things will make a big difference to presentations going forward. “
 

What difference a good presentation makes 

For Lee, giving a good presentation means you’re more likely to get what you want. 

“Ultimately, we are presenting  to inform or to make change. We never present to keep things the same. I would argue if you're presenting just to inform, you're losing an opportunity to sell yourself, your career, your capacity and your abilities. 

“Being seen as a very good PR presenter and a very good communicator will profoundly impact your career. One of the main driving factors for people to get promoted is their ability to communicate effectively to two groups, which is a presentation.”
 

What presenters need keep in mind

Success, according to Lee, will forever lie in a presenter’s ability to answer the question, “What do I want to achieve out of the presentation?” Being clear about your outcome is essential.

“The problem has never been knowing what to put in a presentation. The problem is knowing what to take out of it. No one ever walked out of a presentation and said, ‘That was great. I wish it had more slides.’ It's never likely to happen. 

“Number two, being clear about the purpose of each slide. 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. 

“Number three is making sure the key message around that slide is easy to get,  it's in the title. It's really easy to take away.”

Lee’s tips can be applied to all communications: knowing the ultimate 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.”

“Why am I putting it there? And what do I want people to take away from that point?”

Lee Featherby’s book, Firing Up Your PowerPoint: 10 Immutable Laws for Presenting in the Digital Era, is now available.