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Presenting to colleagues, clients and investors. By Jack Downton
Who do you think is a particularly influential speaker – Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, perhaps Barack Obama, Warren Buffett or maybe Richard Branson?Charismatic, clear, succinct and influential speakers – yet people who are not renowned for their use of PowerPoint! So why do accountants use it as though they are being paid by the slide?
I have coached hundreds of partners and directors, and many high-flying managers and associates at accountancy and other professional firms. Three common factors are at the heart of weak presentations: too much PowerPoint, a lack of thought about their audience and a failure to pause in the right places.
For most people, addressing each of these points will dramatically improve their performance while improving their confidence, and will also help to overcome the terror that afflicts many people at the thought of speaking to a large group.
There are a number of areas that are particularly relevant to accountants and Financial Directors. They often try to cram in far too much detail ending up with a data dump, thinking that Power Point makes it understandable for the audience on the basis that “the more I tell them the more they will go away with”. In fact the very reverse is true – Less is more! This can be partly due to the assumption that “I need to tell them a lot to prove I know my job” and partly on an assumption that, because I am interested in the detail, so too will the audience. Mostly, the audience doesn’t want to know what the accountant/Financial Director knows. They want to know what the implications are for them. In short, the accountant/Financial Director is not asking the critical “So what?” question about their content.
When a senior financial speaker stands up to speak, I automatically assume, until proved otherwise, they are competent to speak – namely that they know their business. They don’t have to prove it to me over the first few minutes. Any ‘proving’ session is counter productive as it takes that much longer to get to the point.
The best speakers on financial matters I have heard are those who have taken a complex set of figures or data and simplified them to the extent that the implications were clearly understandable to me.
So, two other factors at the heart of poor presentations are the inclusion of far too much material and the failure to simplify. Strategic, key issues are the province of the spoken presentation; back up detail the province of follow up notes. Together, speech and notes, form the complete presentation.
PowerPoint – how it dramatically reduces your impact
With slides you need to remember that the audience will not be concentrating on you. And if they aren’t concentrating on you, they certainly won’t remember your key points or be influenced by what you are saying. Who makes the impact? You as a highly competent professional or you as a highly paid slide shop operator?
- Use slides sparingly, especially those containing only words. However, a picture is worth a thousand words;
- Ask yourself “are the slides for my benefit or the audience?” If the slides are really your notes, don’t use them;
- Handing out notes before you speak makes it difficult to hold you audience’s attention. Give them out afterwards if at all possible (ninety-five percent of the time they are never read anyway, unless they contain really important financial information!);
- Often you will have to present charts or large amounts of figures. Introduce the slide before you show it, have key data highlighted and give the audience a chance to read the data before talking over the slide (they can’t read the chart and listen carefully to you simultaneously).
What does your audience need to hear?
With most presentations, the purpose of the meeting is to influence your audience, win work, secure investment or enthuse colleagues. But many people, particularly accountants, see presentations as an exercise in bombarding their audience with lots of information. Most of this is superfluous and only a fraction will be remembered.
The problem a lot of people have stems right from the start of their preparation – they are not clear with themselves at the outset what the point is they want to put across.
One senior accountant from a large firm forced himself to give seminars because he realised they were potentially an excellent way of gaining clients. However, he was continually conscious of his nerves and as a result, was noted as speaking much too fast. Not only was he highly uncomfortable but so too were his audience and the critical thing was that they did not leave the seminars with the confidence in him that he wished to instil. When we worked together, it became clear that he was convinced that he should memorise his talks and give them without notes. He was concerned that to use notes would appear unprofessional. We looked at a very powerful form of speaker’s notes that he could follow unobtrusively, giving him the confidence to relax and cover his subject matter without worrying that he was going to forget what he wanted to say. After his next and happily, very successful seminar, I asked him for one thing that had made a key difference. Without hesitation, he said “Notes – and permission to use them”!
It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it
There is a lot of nonsense talked about body language, arm movements etc. when presenting. Unless you are doing something incredibly odd or irritating (like jingling you keys in your pocket) if you are doing a half-decent presentation your audience won’t notice as you as you will be holding their attention.
However, a big mistake many people do is speak slowly in order to make themselves more easily understood. In fact all speaking slowly does is turn your voice into a ponderous monotone.
The right pace to speak is at your usual pace with your head held up as normal (not buried into your chest reading your notes, as this kills your voice projection). However, what is really important is where you pause.
There is only one person in the room who doesn’t like silence during a presentation and that is the presenter. Pause to add emphasis, hold eye contact with the audience to show you mean what you say and allow people to think about what you have said. This is particularly important when addressing foreign audiences as even the best linguists need extra time to assimilate speech not in their native language.
You almost cannot pause for too long! No matter how long you pause for, the length will feel okay for your audience but for the presenter it lasts an eternity. You can test this by recording a presentation (preferably a rehearsal with a few willing colleagues as the audience and when you play back compare how long you think you paused for, with how long you actually did).
Your purpose as a speaker is typically to; get the audience to pay attention to you, remember your key point and trust your judgement. They can’t do this if they are distracted by reading slides, sent to sleep by a slow monotone or wondering when you are going to get to the point (or receiving too much information too quickly). Following the above tips will help most speakers make a dramatic improvement – as long as this is combined with healthy amounts of preparation and rehearsal too.
Jack Downton is the managing director of Influence Business Ltd. He is a former colonel in the Royal Marines and a member of ACCA. Contact:
Jack.Downton@TheInfluenceBusiness.com .
AccountingWEB.co.uk 7-May-2008
Categories: Practice Features
Times read: 2847
by 2 user(s)
Sorry for a slow response Robert. The use of word slides is frequently an indication that the speaker is transmitting far too much information. Transmission does not automatically equate to reception, especailly as the quantity of information increases. Slides that reinforce are powerful so, if for instance you are trying to convey the scale of a set of numbers or how one group of figures relates to another, a graphic is very powerful. If the speaker has already talked through the concept without the distraction of a slide so that the audience understands broadly what is being said, they will each create some form of image in their mind . That image will however be different for each person in that audience. If the speaker then supports what has been said with a graphic of some sort, the audience will confirm and clairfy what they heard and all go away with a very similar idea of what was said by the speaker. So a picture can give or support a whole story. A word of a few words are just that - a word or a few words. And in a presentation, words or stories are much better spoken rather than written as the power to influence comes better from the speaker rather than from the slide. Think also of verbal pictures and how you can convey full understanding of a difficult topic with a well chosen example, which can be hypothetical or real. Go light on the facts and heavy on the illustration if you want to get your message across and be remembered as an engaging speaker.
Jack Downton
The Influence Business Ltd
Great article, Jack. Couldn't agree with you more on all items. I do have a question, though, not being a member of a financially-related profession. You mentioned that a picture is worth a thousand words but I'm curious as to what that might mean in an accounting context. What kinds of pictures do you use to express ideas in this field and what concepts do those images communicate? The reason for asking is that I'm in the early stages of writing a book exploring the concept of "visual language", expressing meaning through the display of images and other visual media. Accounting seems like a tough subject to make visual, other than throwing a bunch of numbers, tables, and charts on the screen. Does anyone have ideas for what image-based communication might look like in your field, to get rid of all that text?
Love what Jack is saying.
If you don't ask "So What" beforehand you leave to your audience to try and work it out. That reduces your impact and value drastically.
The extra time to translate the numbers/facts into "So What" is worth its weight in gold!
Anton Verster [mailto:anton@lifequest.co.za]
Practice Performance Specialists [http://www.lifequest.co.za/]
Great, great advice above. I wholly agree and support those words of wisdom
If I may I would add that there are two other factors that can be more relevant to the typical presentations made by many accountants:
1 - They have just about managed to make time to prepare the presentation and anticipate relying on their slides as a sort of crib-sheet. To avoid this they must factor into their advance planning the time to get sufficiently familiar with their material. This can be almost as big a challenge as standing up in front of an audience in the first place.
2 - Their presentations are often based on material (such as new tax rules) that are new and there simply hasn't been time to get sufficiently familiar with it to do without detailed slides. Of course the same material could be relegated to the speaker's notes but that would necessitate someone thinking about what to have on the slides instead. More time. More pressure. Given the choice, most people take the easy route.
I'm not in any way defending the status quo, simply suggesting a couple of answers to the question at the top of the article.
