by Marilyn Lindblad

Created on: October 29, 2010

Knowing how to deliver an effective business presentation is one of the most valuable job skills you can ever develop. Organizations want  employees who can give compelling presentations. These business presentation tips are guaranteed to help make you one of the best presenters in your organization:

Tip #1: Think Outside the Bullet Point

Virtually every business presentation comes with a slide deck created with one of Powerpoint’s standard slide layouts: a boring combination of bullet points and text with the occasional clip art thrown in for good measure.

Be different. Commit to creating professional-looking slides that bypass bullet points.

Here is an example: Suppose you work for a hospital and you have been asked to give a presentation to a group of nurses about how to protect patient privacy. One of your goals is to build awareness among the nurses about how much information the hospital collects. You could make a bullet-pointed list of the information, or you could add one image after another to a slide:

*a house representing the patient’s home address;
*a birthday cake representing his date of birth;
*a woman and child representing his family.

This is the kind of information the hospital collects. You just read it in a bulleted list. Wouldn’t it have been more fun to have looked at pictures? Your audience thinks so, too.

Tip #2: Sprinkle Stories Among Statistics

Vary your content by mixing technical information and statistics with stories that illustrate the statistics. Let’s go back to our nurses’ patient privacy presentation for another example.

Medical identity theft is a growing problem. In four years, the total number of identity theft victims reported by the FTC rose from 86,168 to 255,565. Create a bar graph to show this dramatic increase. While the audience absorbs the graph, tell the story of a nurse who gives a patient the wrong type of blood in an emergency because an identity thief with a different type of blood has used the patient’s identity to get medical treatment, contaminating the patient’s record with false information. The story will keep your audience engaged and make medical identity theft seem more real to them.

Tip #3: Three’s a Charm

Our brains like things that come in sets of three. Think of all the three-thinged phrases that are part of our popular culture: bewitched, bothered, and bewildered; signed, sealed, and delivered; sex, lies, and videotape … the list goes on and on (and on).

Break your presentation down into bits of three. Organize your presentations with an introduction, three points, and a conclusion. Make lists and give examples three at a time. Your audience wants to hear three things, so give them what they want.

Knowing how to give a great business presentation is a skill that will serve you well in any job. Use these practical presentation tips to enhance your next presentation.

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