The 5-Step Presentation

A simplified approach to creating presentations

Jan 21, 2024

Most of my content focuses on speaking skills, but I spend just as much time helping my clients organize information for talks and presentations.

So today, I want to share a simplified approach you can follow when preparing for your next speaking opportunity.

Before we start, I need to make it clear that there’s no one “right” way to organize a talk or presentation.

How you choose to organize your information should be influenced by…

Your audience
Your message objective(s)
The context of your opportunity (event theme, environment, time, who else is speaking, etc.)
Your public speaking strengths

Just because something works for one person doesn’t mean it will work for you.

With that in mind, let me introduce you to…

The 5-Step Presentation

Step 1: Learn about your audience

Your success depends entirely on whether or not your specific audience finds your information helpful, so it makes sense that you should learn about your audience before doing anything else.

Yes?

Glad you agree!

Here are four questions worth answering about your specific audience:

What specific problem or opportunity does my information address for this specific audience?
Considering the information I want to share with my audience, what will be already known to them? What will be completely new? What will challenge and/or reinforce their current stance?
What practical experience does my audience have with my topic area that I can incorporate into my presentation? If none, what future experiences related to my topic area do I expect my audience to have?
Where does this specific audience like to go to learn new information? What sources does this specific audience find reputable? How might the answers to these two questions influence what information I include in my presentation and how I deliver it?

Step 2: Define your finish line

Yogi Berra once said…

If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.

If I came up to you after your presentation and asked, “Was your presentation successful?” the only way you’d be able to answer that question is by knowing what change you were trying to create in the first place.

The typical response to this question is…

“I think it went well.”
“I think I did a good job.”
“They seemed to have enjoyed it.”

Frankly, those aren’t good enough.

Good enough would sound like…

“My goal was to introduce new strategies they could use to _____, and then give them a few ideas on how they might implement them with their team. I spoke to someone in the audience after my presentation, and they already had a rough plan on how they would do just that.”
“My goal was to share the updated research on ____, and start a conversation on how it might impact how we approach ____. Based on the questions I got during Q&A and the lively discussion among the group, I know I was successful.”

To define your finish line, answer this question:

What will my audience know, be able to do, or feel by the end of my presentation that they didn’t know, were able to do, or feel at the start?

Step 3: Plan your presentation structure

There are many ways to structure your presentation, but regardless of which you choose, it must follow logic.

If you’re a coach or trainer reading this, it’s no different than how you’d go about planning a practice or training session — you start with a warm-up, some skill-type drills, move into scrimmaging (coach) or strength blocks (trainer), then finish with conditioning and a cool-down.

There’s logic in your plan…

The warm-up gets the body warm and the mind focused.
Skill-type drills teach and solidify movement patterns, and groove habits.
Scrimmaging / Strength blocks provide space to practice those movement patterns and habits at speed and with weight.
Conditioning comes at the end because it requires the least amount of skill, and is about building long-term capacity.
And if you do one, a cool-down kickstarts the recovery process.

The reason I took the time to write this out is because you need to see that you already know how to organize around logic, and presentations are no different.

To keep this simple, here’s a universal presentation structure you can use, and an explanation of what each section might include:

1/ Open

Introduce your topic
Provide background/context on your topic to establish relevancy
Make it clear why your topic is important for your specific audience
Share your presentation objective(s)
Introduce your key points and tell your audience how their time will be used (agenda) - As the adage goes: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them…”

2/ Middle

Elaborate on each of the key points you introduced at the end of your opening (share information, cite research / data, use analogies, tell stories, etc.) - As the adage goes: “Tell them…”
Continually remind your audience how each key point ties into the overall objective(s) of your presentation

3/ Close

Recap and summarize your key points - As the adage goes: “Tell them what you told them…”
Make a concluding statement and/or clear call-to-action (or tell a story that pulls everything together)

If you need personalized support organizing an upcoming talk or presentation, email me at FitToSpeak@gmail.com

Step 4: Select your content

When deciding whether or not to include something in your presentation, start by answering these two questions:

Why does this matter to this specific audience?
How does this help accomplish my presentation objective(s)?

If you can’t easily answer these two questions, leave that piece of information/content out.

There are three things to you need to remember here…

Great presentations don’t share everything; they share what matters.
The more you say, the more you have to explain.
Each new piece of information you add reduces the impact of something more important.

If you want more guidance on this specifically, check out this article I wrote.

Step 5: Determine what needs visual support

You don’t need a slide for everything you want to say.

I always recommend creating a written outline of your presentation first, then picking out which points from your outline need a slide.

This is the opposite of what most people do, which is to build out their entire presentation in presentation software first, then try to eliminate unnecessary slides. As you can imagine, not many slides get eliminated.

Generally speaking, slides pair well with…

Key points
Section transitions
Detailed information you’ll struggle to remember off-the-cuff
Complex information the audience would better understand if visualized
Quotes, stories, data, analogies, comparisons, etc.
Recap / Summary of information

The idea here is to make sure YOU (the presenter) remain the center of attention. Your audience should spend more time looking and listening to you than looking at and reading your slides.

A good litmus test is to ask: “What’s the point of this slide?”

If you don’t have a straightforward answer to that question, get rid of the slide.

In Closing…

Even though there’s not one “right” way to organize a talk or presentation, you should follow these universal principles to ensure your information meets your audience’s needs, delivers value, follows logic, and doesn’t force them to do more reading than listening.