Avoid “Death by PowerPoint”

Let’s assume that you’ve started your speech or corporate presentation strong; with energy and purpose, and you’ve captured your audience’s attention. They’re engrossed in your performance! Which is great … but now the trick is to keep them there. 

I’ve seen too many speeches that start well but deteriorate into a series of meandering slides. Number after number, data point after data point, with no engagement of the audience and the inevitable loss of interest and checking of phones. A slide deck can certainly be your ally, and it can enhance your presentation, but it can also be a crutch and a momentum killer that prevents you from truly connecting with your audience. With that said, keep these recommendations in mind.

Always remember that YOU are the star of the show. The slide deck is there to reinforce what you’re saying, not to be the driving factor behind your presentation. Think of the deck as added value and remember that people connect with people, not with a slide deck. Ultimately your engaging performance as a presenter will be what your audience remembers most. Not how colorful your pie charts looked. 

Don’t Turn Your Back To Your Audience:

You want to make sure you interact with your audience throughout the entire presentation. There’s nothing wrong with asking for another show of hands five minutes into the presentation and breaking out another meaningful quote five minutes after that. If it worked for you in the beginning of the speech it will certainly work in the middle and the end. Be a storyteller from your first word to your last! 

To that point, even when you are showing slides, make sure you don’t turn your back to the audience and read the slides to them. In that case, you might as well do the entire presentation as a voice-over. Keep your eyes on the room, walk around the space as we discussed before, and reference the slides behind you. Hopefully you’ve rehearsed your presentation enough that you can recite the material without reading it off the screen.

Think about some of the most boring classes you had in school. Teachers droning on, pointing at the chalkboard, or reading the words projected onto the screen from the overhead projector. That’s right around the time you and your classmates would hand notes to each other and throw paper airplanes at the teacher. You certainly don’t want to get hit in the back of the head by a paper airplane.

To maintain focus in the room, you must keep the content of your deck manageable. The term “Death by PowerPoint” essentially means that you present slide after slide of charts, graphs, and text that are overwhelming and intimidating and can lead to your audience losing interest in your message. Understandably, some presentations are data-driven, and the audience specifically requests a breakdown of numbers. This is certainly a common occurrence in the financial sector. 

What If You Have Too Much Content?

Fair enough, you can’t ignore the need for numbers. You can, however, manage it. If you do have a significant amount of numerical content like stats and charts, perhaps you can email all of it to your audience before or after the speech. This works well when you’re presenting to colleagues, and you have their email addresses. In this situation, you can streamline your performance and give a high-level overview of the data, freeing you up to focus on delivering the material with energy and passion. The audience members can read all the fine print and numerical data at their leisure.  

Another way to minimize intimidating content on your slide deck is to build in blank slides or slides with your logo and insert them between the content slides. This way, if you’re talking about one point for a few minutes and you’ve already referenced the corresponding slide, you don’t have to leave it up while you keep talking. You can transition to a simpler, cleaner slide that redirects the focus to you. 

Make It Look Good:

As you think of ways to make the presentation easier to digest, you need to concentrate on the aesthetics of the slides. Keep the design consistent, which is to say the slides should have a uniform layout. Pick a color theme and a design theme and run with it. Make sure the font is legible, big enough and not too “artsy.” Certain fonts just look better on slides and you should try a few until you find one that looks great and, if possible, reflects the energy of your presentation.

Regarding font size, you certainly don’t want people squinting to try and read the words. I typically use between a 28-36-point size font, and even larger than that for titles and headlines. Think about the person in the last row, and make sure they can easily read your slides. A bigger font size also serves to limit the amount of text you can have on a slide. This is a good way to prevent you from overloading your slides with content. 

Make Sure To Proofread Your PowerPoint:

When you’ve built your entire slide deck, make sure you do one final thing: proofread it. This action item often gets overlooked. One grammar error, misspelling, or typo can destroy your credibility, especially if that mistake is on a giant screen. So proofread your presentation and have somebody else proofread it as well. Four eyes are better than two. 

After you’ve proofread it, incorporate your deck into your rehearsal. You need to rehearse the timing of the slides and when you want to transition from one to the next. As you’re rehearsing, you’ll notice a nice little bonus: the slides can almost serve as a script. If you finish talking about a slide and forget what you’re supposed to say after that, just advance the deck and it will remind you what you need to cover next.

End As Strong As You Start:

Let’s end this blog with the end of your speech. How you end your presentation is crucial, because it’s the final impression your audience will have of you. You’ve entertained, informed, and inspired them and now you need to tie it all together. Your final message should empower your audience to act. Whether that’s to live life to the fullest, embark on a new adventure, or change the way they’ve previously approached a problem, deliver your final message with passion and purpose. Like a head coach getting his team ready to run through a tunnel, minus the shouting and cursing. In fact, depending upon the tone and content of your speech, you don’t have to raise your voice at all. Use the vocal inflection skills we covered earlier, and you can give the entire crowd goosebumps with nothing more than a whisper. 

If your presentation is more sales-driven and is about your brand-new product, you shouldn’t be obnoxiously salesy as you finish. If you’ve done the work and built a compelling speech, the audience already gets it’s a great product that they need. Leave them inspired to act and trust that they’ll get there on their own. Don’t hammer them to give you money now. You can certainly let them know how to contact you and how to learn more information about you and the product but coming on too strongly can negatively impact how your audience feels about you.

Another smart strategy when conceptualizing how to end your speech is to allocate time for a question-and-answer session. This is a great way to discuss specific needs that you might not have previously covered. If there are difficult questions, and potentially controversial ones, you can address those concerns and control the narrative in a way that’s advantageous to you. No matter what types of questions you get, speaking directly to the audience is a great way to connect and come across as likeable. You can even invite audience members to meet you after the speech to continue the conversation. The more approachable you are, on and off stage, the more trustworthy you’ll seem.     

Here’s another cool article with more about creating a fantastic PowerPoint.