Three Easy Steps to a Great Twenty-Minute Presentation

Although twenty minutes is a perfect amount of time for a presentation, it takes work to make it effective. You need to draft a narrative, carefully edit and refine the content, and develop compelling visuals. Let me take you through a 3-step process that will help you create your next pitch or presentation when you’re given a relatively short amount of time.

1. Develop sound bites. Before you even open PowerPoint (or Apple Keynote) craft the key messages that you want your audience to remember. During our presentations at LeWeb, artists with a firm called Livesketching.com were creating one-page visual representations of the presentations. Looking at the one they created from my talk as well as some of the others, I noticed that the sketch artists were listening for key phrases as well as lists. Bill Gross, the CEO of technology incubator Idealab, delivered a presentation with 12 entrepreneurial lessons from the last twenty years. The sketch artists highlighted each of the key lessons (all of the sketches can be seen at http://www.slideshare.net/LeWeb/leweb2011). Lists are catchy and make the content easier to absorb. People like lists. Use them.
2. Storyboard the content. Speaking of sketch artists, it helps to think like an artist when preparing a presentation. Before you open PowerPoint, head to a white board or take out a good old-fashioned pen and paper and start sketching. Think about how you will visualize each of the key points and supporting messages. What pictures will you use? Are there abstract images that will reinforce your content? Remember that people process information more effectively when the content is delivered as words and pictures rather than words alone.
3. Practice the presentation. Nobody expects you to read extensively from notes for a 20 or 25-minute presentation. In fact they expect that you have the content down cold. I’m glad I did. When I went on stage I could see my slides in the monitor in front of me, but not my presenter notes. As it turns out I didn’t need them because I had practiced the presentation many times out loud. Most people save their practice time until the night before a presentation and it shows.

A 20-minute presentation is ideal for new product launches, investor pitches, employee updates, sales meetings, etc. Take the opportunity to craft, design and deliver a presentation your audience will remember.

By: Carmine Gallo