've got to start with something a little cruel. What is important to you in your presentation is completely irrelevant. All that matters is what's important to the audience you're trying to reach. Notice, I said the audience you're trying to reach. It's not uncommon for presentations to be attended by a variety of people. Yes, sometimes you're trying to connect with all of them, but sometimes it's just a specific cohort you're after. Know who you want to reach and cater your presentation accordingly. In this article, I'm going to explain how to go about doing that.
When someone sits down to watch your presentation, be it in a small conference room or a large auditorium with hundreds of other people, they're asking themselves two questions. What is this person going to talk about? How does that affect me? That's it. That's all they care about. You have to be able to answer these questions for them as quickly as possible or you'll lose them. It's crucial that you put yourself in your ideal audience members' shoes and give them the answers that will keep them engaged. I'm not saying you have to answer those questions in your very first sentences. Feel free to start with a funny story or meaningful anecdote. That's fine but make it short. If your audience ever thinks, "What's the point of this story?" you've lost them and are likely never getting them back. In fact, you might lose them for many presentations to come as they think, oh yeah, this is that long-winded guy or gal who never gets to the point. Speaking of which, I should probably move on.
So, how do I accomplish this? Well, it's all done during preparation. In the first step, I identify the outcome I'm looking for. It might be something like, "I need to convince leadership to add three more people to my team in order to be able to accomplish this new project on time." Often times, I'll actually capture this in a slide that I later delete in order to make sure it's always front of mind. Next, I identify who is likely to be in the meeting, and if there is a subset of those people that are my target audience. In the example goal I just mentioned, there might be members of my team as well as executive leadership. While I love my team, my true target for this presentation is those people that can actually get me the resources I need. I'm going to build my presentation for them and no one else. I will do everything I can to understand what motivates those people, and I will use that knowledge to answer the two fundamental questions in a way that will resonate with them. Everything else is secondary.
Now, let me take a slightly more ambiguous example. Let's say I'm giving a monthly status meeting to a group of stakeholders. My goal might be as simple as, "Provide stakeholders with useful information about our project's progress." Now, there are a plethora of metrics I could choose from. But once again, the goal is to identify the audience members we care about. It doesn't matter whether I find a particular metric interesting or insightful. All I care about is what metrics are going to be meaningful to that target audience. If I don't think they'll care about it, I'm not including it. So, I'm only building my presentation around what matters to them.
Your first real slide (not your title slide) is the single most important slide, and it needs to concisely describe the purpose/topic and explain why your target audience needs to pay attention in the most compelling way possible. There's a lot of lofty ideas packed into that sentence, and yes that is what I'm shooting for. In my mind, I'm thinking about how my presentation is going to change their lives. Is it really? Probably not, but I'm shooting for the moon every time. What exactly your special sauce for this is depends on your individual style, your strengths and weaknesses. The important thing is that you spend more time polishing this first slide than any others. One thing I do encourage people to include verbally or on the slide itself is the briefest overview of the structure of the rest of your presentation. There are many reasons for this, but the one most important for this discussion is it hopefully lets the audience say to themselves, "I have a question about that topic. Oh hey, he's going to talk about that piece later. I can't wait to hear what he has to say."
With each subsequent slide, you want to deliver on the promises made in that first slide. Remember that bogus slide I mentioned earlier, the one where I wrote down my goal? For every new slide, I revisit that goal and make sure I'm moving in that direction. If I'm deviating from that goal or just treading water, it's gone.
There is so much I could say about how to sculpt every part of your presentations, from the slides themselves to the intonation of your voice, but this article would go on forever, and I'm trying to keep these short. If you implement nothing else but ensuring every one of your presentations is focused on satisfying your audience's needs, you'll find your results will start to get astronomically better.