Effective Presentation Tips from Top Executives: Keep It Short and Engaging (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Very often I interview CEOs and Vice Presidents in big companies because these are the people who present themselves and they are very often in the audience. So I want to know from them what is important in terms of presentations. And there are two interviews that I remember very well and one of these interviews was with a top guy of a big company and I asked him this, what do you expect from a presentation, someone who does a presentation for you? He says, well up front I want them to send me the detailed report because I want to be prepared for that presentation. That's what they send me. But he says during the presentation what most speakers tend to do is they project that whole detailed PowerPoint presentation and they comment the slides. Now he says that's not what I expect during that presentation. He expects three things. First of all he says I want it to be crystal clear from the very beginning so that I don't have to think about that presentation. Second thing he wants is a very clear thread during that presentation. The third thing, and that was the most shocking thing you might say that he told me, he says I want the speaker to get the message across in just five minutes. Now I heard something similar when I was doing another interview with a vice president, someone who was part of the board of directors and he gave me the example of someone who gave a presentation for him in his office. He said obviously it was a PowerPoint presentation because that's what we do and that's fine. Now during that presentation he didn't project obviously the PowerPoint because it was just for one person. He had printed out two documents, the PowerPoint for himself to present it and the PowerPoint for the vice president to follow the presentation. Now that guy wanted to start his presentation and he already went to slide one, being page one, he wanted to start commenting the slides. Now what did the vice president do? He took that PowerPoint report from the speaker, he put it aside and he said to the guy you know what, just talk to me. Now that was important for me because that's what I like speakers to do, to just talk to the audience and please keep it as short as possible, especially for in-company presentations. Don't think that a good professional presentation has to be a 20 minute presentation with PowerPoint. When I interview these people I hear it again and again that they prefer five minute presentations. When you come to think of it, doing a 20 minute monologue is a difficult thing to do, to grab and to keep especially the attention of the audience. So what I recommend you to do is where possible do a five minute presentation and by this I mean just get your messages across in five minutes. You cannot give the details, the details are afterwards, when you have your dialogue, when you have the Q&A. I'd rather have a short presentation and a long Q&A than you talking for 20 minutes. Now when you are in a situation when for example you're at a conference and you need to have or to fill a slot of one hour, you cannot just talk for five minutes, you have to talk longer. But there you really need the combination of not just facts and figures but please give them examples because it's examples that people remember. So have that variation but where possible just keep it short.