You usually feel like a rockstar when all of your business presentation pieces come together seamlessly. It’s such a heady experience and feels as if your planets and stars were aligned perfectly that day. Business presentation skills are extremely significant when it comes to wanting to experience that rockstar moment in front of your boss and colleagues. Presentation is something which is quite regular if you’re working in an office setting and improving on this will eventually make you stronger day by day in business communication and crucial meetings with investors and clients.
The most important prep in terms of your presentation skills is often not obvious. It’s the thought, time and research you spend on weeks that make it stand out from the rest of your colleagues. Therefore, the three cornerstones of successful business presentations include proper preparation, knowledge and spicing up of the material. If you’re not adept with these three then you’ve absolutely landed on the right article. Therefore, keep reading to learn how to improve presentation skills.
6 Useful Tips To Enhance Your Business Presentation Skills
Just like how business meetings are incomplete without proper analytics and your boss’ insights, it’s also patchy if there’s not at least one presentation incoming. Nevertheless, if that presentation is lengthy and boring just like your boss’ lecture, you might visibly doze off along with your colleagues. You would definitely not like to be the one responsible for the latter, therefore here are 6 creative ways to improve your business presentation skills!
1. Know Your Target Audience
This is one of the most important presentation skills among many. The target audience for your presentation is a group of people who you want to listen to or see your presentation. Audiences will keep on varying based on your company’s goals. So remember that a presentation that might work well with one group, might not go down well with the other. Therefore, researching your target audience is extremely important when it comes to creating a presentation based on marketing or information about a particular product. If you want your presentation to be a success, then you must learn to know about your target audience.
2. Limit The Content And Goals
One of the most effective presentation skills includes the fact that no matter how much time you have allotted for your business presentation, you don’t have time to tell the audience everything you know. It’s absolutely impossible to do so and if you try it, you will result in the unavoidable, that is, a long and uninteresting presentation. Oral presentation in business communication is as important as the presentation content and style, therefore speakers who have years of experience make sure you don’t overwhelm the audience with everything you know. You will end up boring them, annoying them and will ultimately fail to earn fans. Limit the content on your presentation, keep it short, interactive and make sure you don’t divert from the topic.
3. Begin Your Presentation With An Attention-Grabbing One-Liner
You can start your presentation with a surprising fact, a question, revelation or even ask an interactive question to the audience. Once you have gained enough attention from your clients, colleagues or boss, tell them what you’re going to talk about in the presentation. This is one of the most important presentation skills. Keep in mind that if you start a presentation directly without any attention-grabbing content, in the beginning, you’ll end up losing everyone’s interest in not more than 5 minutes. Make sure you stick to 5-6 main points and finish the presentation by summarising the key points.
4. Unleash The Power Of Canva
Canva is the best tool to create amazing drool-worthy presentations and the most amazing part is that it is free! It’s a great alternative to Adobe Photoshop and millions of graphic designers and amateurs are trying out their hand on this great platform. Canva is preloaded with templates designed by their in-house designers and about 12 million images to choose from. Customise the size setting as per your choice and you’re good to go. Remember that presentation and public speaking go hand-in-hand. Though Canva can help you in making a creative business presentation, you have to harness your public speaking skills too in order to leave your clients in awe!
5. Conquer The Fear Of Presenting
One of the most effective presentation skills involves conquering the fear around the presentation. Nervousness or feeling jittery before public speaking is normal but try focusing on something else. For instance, try telling yourself that this presentation is not about you but about the message that it will convey to your audience. This might take some pressure off you.
6. Practice Before A Close Friend/Colleague
Practising before a friend or a colleague can help you understand and get direct feedback on how you’re performing. Errors in the first 20 seconds of your gestures or movements can be very disorienting. Try not to over-prepare and practice the moves you have to make like getting up from your chair to the podium. Don’t forget to test the equipment before presenting as you don’t want to be doing that in front of a room full of professionals.
Key Takeaways
Here are some key takeaways on how to improve presentation skills and build yourself as an effective business communicator.
- Improving presentation skills is not just about communicating information better but also about the need to create excitement, interest, trust and enthusiasm in the subject.
- Before diving deep into the presentation, think about your content and style. Video yourself and ask someone to evaluate it for you and let them highlight your best skills. It will be difficult to objectify those skills yourself.
- Avoid the Blue-Peter Syndrome and trust the skills that you have. Don’t rehearse too often. Make sure that you go with the flow.
- One of the most effective presentation skills includes being more expressive rather than less. Gestures help people to understand better and you in turn are successful in creating enthusiasm in the audience.
- Go slow. Don’t rush to finish your presentation because you’re feeling nervous. A good amount of nervousness is vital to present. However, remember that the rest of the energy should be spent on communicating.
Now that you know the power of business communication and ways on how you can improve your business presentation skills, tell us in the comments how you plan to blow your boss’ mind away with it!
