Whether you’re standing in the ashes of a messy presentation, struggling through one that is sliding down the slippery slope, or just trying to avoid the pain and suffering you’ve seen others experience, take heart. Everyone’s been there, and there are steps you can take to avoid the most common presentation disasters.
Here are a few tips that can help you survive (or dodge) a bad situation:
- Never, Ever Wing It – Just showing up is not an option. Prepare, prepare some more, and then prepare again. Possibly the worst mistake any speaker can make is to come to the podium noticeably unprepared. The more you know about the market, industry trends, your audience, their needs, and how your product or service can fill those needs, the better. There is no such thing as knowing too much.
- Leave Don Rickles at Home - If you’re a bit nervous going into a presentation, breaking the ice with a short joke is fine. Just don’t force your secret aspirations of being a stand-up comic on your listeners. Every audience is a wild card; you never know what its hot buttons might be. If you play the jokester, you run the risk of not being taken seriously, or—even worse—they might find your humor inappropriate or downright offensive.
- Get Your Facts Straight - Assume that those you are addressing may know just as much about your topic as you do. Make sure that all of your information is current and supported by concrete, easily accessible data. If you use research or charts leveraged from another source, don’t present someone else’s findings as your own.
- Have All the Answers - When it comes time for Q&A at the end of your talk, make sure you are able to answer every inquiry completely, with confidence, and to the satisfaction of the questioner. Develop a comprehensive FAQ that explores the full spectrum of questions you might receive—from the basic, to the obscure, to the strange—and have handy responses in your head as you swing into your presentation.
And in that rare instance that you do really crash and burn, you’ve just gotta own it. The only way to survive a presentation disaster is to 1) take complete responsibility for your actions and the subsequent fallout; 2) apologize, apologize, apologize to your management; and 3) proactively build, communicate, and live your plan for improvement in the future. You may still have to suffer the slings and arrows of upper management for a while, but at least you won’t run the risk of being perceived as arrogant or insensitive.
