Making a Technical Presentation – Aid the Audience’s Understanding

Recently I attended a presentation entitled “Understanding Financial Statements – All Myths Debunked.” Given my background in financial accounting, I was looking for some more tips to help my clients who still remain intimidated by all things financial.

At the end of that presentation, I was more confused than when I entered the room and I was even doubting my knowledge of the topic. One of the chief purposes of presenting technical information is to help your audience understand that information. Yet, time and time again, presenters do the complete opposite.

Since it’s not in my nature to criticise without helping, I shared the tips below with the presenter and now I’m sharing them with you. I hope you find them as useful as he did.

1. Write a short paragraph describing your speech and submit it to the organisers to share with the audience. There is no need for all the mystery with a technical presentation, you’re not Alfred Hitchcock!

2. Remember that while your presentation should give the audience detailed information, they also want the benefit of your insight, your analysis, what you recommend… in other words, your unique perspective.

3. It is much better for you to take an aspect of the topic and address it in detail so that the audience at least have an understanding of that part of it. Trying to cover too many areas of a topic actually leads to even more confusion in non-tech minds.

4. When preparing your speech, organise your material using at least one of the main recognised logical patterns. This will allow your information to flow smoothly from point to point. Below are those patterns:

“Time pattern” enables you to organise your points in the order that they occur. E.g. past – present – future; first – next – last.

“Space pattern” organises your speech on the basis of some physical or geographical sequence. E.g. “The State of the Financial Services Sectors in the Caribbean.

“The Topic pattern” is a “catch all” or flexibility pattern which allows you to just list a series of statements and provide the information.

“Problem-solution pattern” is extremely useful for proposing a change, trying to get something improved, offering a new idea or recommending a plan of action. When well constructed, this pattern can be very effective.

5. If you have to give the same presentation a dozen times, customise it for each audience. Yes! The CEOs of the Environmental and Energy Association are not the same as the Entrepreneurs in the Beach Vendors Association and neither do they want the information on coastal zone erosion delivered to them in the same way.

6. Use sharp, crisp, clear sentences with active verbs and use examples, comparisons and analogies to make technical points simple. And reduce the jargon, please. If you must use a few technical terms to remind us that you went to university and that you are the expert, that’s alright. Just explain them simply.

7. If you suffer with “Largewordarrogantitis”, “Smallwordsyndrome” is the cure.

8. Practice your speech at home, never on your audience and when you do, practice with your visual aids as well, if you intend to use them.

The Art of Persuasion – Making Impactful Presentations

A presentation is more than simply standing at a podium and running through a series of PowerPoint slides. It is about engaging the audience and presenting your ideas in a clear, concise and persuasive manner.

A persuasive presentation should change the emotional state of the audience so they believe and feel a decision must be made… right now. Your role as presenter is to motivate and incite the audience to act, think and feel differently as a result of what you’ve said so they will take some form of action.

To do this, we need to understand the different elements of effective communication. There are three components of the message you deliver; your words, your tone of voice and your body language.

When you are designing your presentation, the words you choose convey only 7% of the message. It is important that what you say to your audience be conveyed in the proper sequence. Your content may be brilliant, but can be boring if your message falls flat. Therefore words alone are not enough.

Tone is the second component, 38% of a message is contained in the speaker’s tonality and emphasis on various words. By deliberately changing your tone of voice, you can transform the entire message and how you affect your audience. This is where practicing both soft and harsh tones can have an impact on the outcome of your presentation.

The last component of your message is body language. 55% of your message is contained in your non-verbal communication. Visual impressions are very powerful – posture and non-verbal communication such as eye contact, facial expressions, appearance, movement, body language and gestures play a major role in your ability to communicate.

Here eight things you can do today to put you on the path to becoming a better presenter.

1. Put yourself in the audience’s place. If your presentation is boring to you, it will be boring to them. Most people ask themselves, “What do I want to say to these people?” The questions you should be asking are, “What decisions do these people need to make?” and “What information do I need to provide so they can make an informed decision?” By starting with these questions, you’ll be in a better position to create content which engages your audience.

2. Match your presentation style to the size of your audience. Successful presenters match their style to the presentation situation.

Ballroom style presentations are for larger audiences and the main objective of such presentations are to entertain. They are appropriate for imparting information to a large crowd such as that gathered in a hotel ballroom.

Conference style presentations are for smaller audiences and the objectives of these presentations are, by contrast, to inform and usually have a focused goal. The objective is to try to get the audience to take a specific action: buy the product, approve the proposal, implement the recommendations or make the investment.

3. Know your audience. Ask yourself the following questions: Who is likely to take action? How much does my audience already know? What would their likely response be? Is what I’m proposing in their best interest?

4. Use an attention grabbing opening. Some of the ways you can open the presentation include using a quote, give a statistic, ask the audience a question or cite a current news story or topical publication. A great opener will set the tone for what follows.

5. Use visuals to enhance your presentation and support your message. Visuals help your presentation make things happen. Clear pictures multiply the audience’s level of understanding and help the listeners’ recall days after the presentation. Visual aids add impact and interest to a presentation.

6. Prepare slides that are clear and readable. Use a minimum font size of 20 – 24pts. Use pictures, graphs, tables and props whenever you can. Limit the number of words and use large, bold letters Stick with commonly used fonts such as Arial, Helvetica, or Tahoma.

7. Close the presentation well. As you come to the end of the presentation, summarize the main points. Leave the audience with something to think about. If specific action is needed, get them started right away.

8. End with a statement of purpose. What you say last is what is remembered most. The purpose statement provides one to three key points you want your audience to remember. Use opportunity to drive home your key points one final time.

Apply these simple tips and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a great presenter.

Product Managers Know That Pricing Is All About The Presentation

How to correctly price a product has always been a bit of a black art for most product managers. The goal is to not price a product so high that nobody is willing to buy it, while at the same time not pricing it so low that you end up leaving money on the table. It turns out that the correct way to price a product has to do with its parts, not with its cost…

What Do Your Customers Value?

Pricing for a product comes down to two things: what are your customers willing to pay for the product and how satisfied will they be with the amount that they ended up paying for it? In order to create a price that will meet both of these customer expectations, product managers need to find the best way to present their product’s benefits to their customers.

This is where the problems first show up. All too often product managers spend their time (often at the request of their senior management) focusing on the cost of their product when instead they should be worried about communicating the product’s benefits.

The correct way to go about pricing your product is to view it not as a complete product, but rather as a collection of components (product, accessories, support, configuration options, documentation, etc.). Each component does not have the same value to your customer. This means that product managers need to take the time to carefully price each component so that it closely matches the value that the customer places on that particular component.

What Customer Pricing Experiments Show

Researchers Dr. Rebecca Hamilton and Dr. Joydeep Srivastava have studied how customers value different components of a product. They used auto repairs as the product that was being offered and they identified three different components of this product: parts, labor, and shipping (of the parts).

In their studies, the researchers discovered that customers valued parts more than labor, and parts more than shipping. The take-away from this research was that customers assigned a higher price to those things that they viewed as providing them with a higher benefit.

An important lesson for product managers came from the second part of the researcher’s study. Here they dropped the price for labor to nothing. That made customers nervous – somewhat surprisingly they preferred to pay at least something for this component. Clearly, dropping the price of a product’s component below an accepted threshold doesn’t make the product more attractive – it actually makes it less attractive.

Three Guidelines

The end result of the studies were the creation of three guidelines for product managers who are getting ready to price their products:

It’s All About Needs: Product managers need to make sure that they fully understand their customer’s needs. If your car battery needs to be replaced, you will be willing to visit a store and pay full price for a new battery and a big discount on the motor oil that you’ll need later instead of visiting another store that can offer you a small discount on both.
Bundles Work: The researchers found that product managers who can combine both high-value and low value components together in packages do the best. They also caution that a product manager should only take the step of offering low-value components for free if that is what the current market will allow.
Value Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: If a product that you are responsible for has a benefit that you think that customers should be placing a greater value on, then it is the responsibility of the product manager to do something about it. Specifically, you need to find ways to clearly communicate the value of that component to your customer in order to boost its value.
What All Of This Means For You

In the end, what your customers are going to be willing to pay for your product is going to depend on how valuable they view it as being. Product managers need to understand that their customers don’t see their product as a blob, instead they see it as a collection of multiple components that they place different values on.

In order to price a product correctly, product managers need to break their product up into the components that their customers see. Then those components need to be matched to your customer’s goals – what do they really value? Finally, high and low benefit components can be grouped together in order to boost your customer’s willingness to pay for the product.

Nobody ever said that pricing a product correctly was going to be easy. However, taking the time to understand how your customer views your product and the value that they put on the different components of your product is the key to doing pricing correctly. Get this right, and you’ll have found the secret to being a successful product manager!