12: Developing and Delivering Business Presentations
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CHAPTER 12:
Developing and Delivering Business Presentations
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Chapter 12 addresses how to plan, write, and complete oral and online presentations. Delivering
effective presentations is an important part of the job for many business employees over the
course of their careers. The chapter begins by noting how students can build their careers with
oral presentations. Next, analyzing the purpose of the presentation and profiling the audience is
discussed. Once this analysis is complete, the chapter guides students through the steps of
organizing and composing effective presentations, including laying out such elements as the
introduction, the body, and the conclusion. The chapter addresses some of the advantages and
disadvantages of using visual aids. It provides guidelines for designing visual aids that will
enhance any oral presentation. Finally, students study effective delivery techniques for oral
presentations, including tips for getting ready to speak, overcoming anxiety, presenting visuals
effectively, and handling audience questions.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
Developing and Delivering Business Presentations
Planning a Presentation
Analyzing the Situation
Selecting the Best Media and Channels
Organizing a Presentation
Defining Your Main Idea
Limiting Your Scope
Choosing Your Approach
Preparing Your Outline
Developing a Presentation
Adapting to Your Audience
Crafting Presentation Content
Presentation Introduction
Getting Your Audience’s Attention
Building Your Credibility
Previewing Your Message
Presentation Body
Connecting Your Ideas
Holding Your Audience’s Attention
Presentation Close
Restating Your Main Points
Ending with Clarity and Confidence
Enhancing Your Presentation with Effective Visuals
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Choosing Structured or Free-Form Slides
Advantages and Disadvantages of Structured Slides
Advantages and Disadvantages of Free-Form Slides
Designing Effective Slides
Designing Slides around a Key Visual
Writing Readable Content
Creating Charts and Tables for Slides
Selecting Design Elements
Adding Animation and Multimedia
Using Presentation Software to Create Visual Reports
Integrating Mobile Devices in Presentations
Completing a Presentation
Finalizing Your Slides
Creating Effective Handouts
Choosing Your Presentation Method
Practicing Your Delivery
Delivering a Presentation
Overcoming Presentation Anxiety
Handling Questions Responsively
Embracing the Backchannel
Giving Presentations Online
The Future of Communication: Holograms
What’s Your Prediction?
Chapter Review and Activities
TEACHING NOTES
Planning a Presentation
Oral presentations, delivered in person or online, offer important opportunities to put all of your
communication skills on display. Executives looking for talented employees to promote often
value the following presentation skills:
• Research
• Planning
• Writing
• Visual design
When planning presentations, one task (gathering information) is essentially the same as for
written communication projects. The other three planning tasks have special applications when it
comes to oral presentations.
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Analyzing the situation involves defining your purpose and developing an audience profile. The
purpose of most business presentations will be to inform or persuade. Consider the
circumstances, since many variables can influence not only the style of your presentation but the
content itself.
There are two basic organization strategies: linear or nonlinear. Linear presentations are like
printed documents, in that they follow a fixed path from start to finish. Nonlinear presentations
can move back and forth between topics, and up and down in levels of detail. They can be useful
for showing complicated relationships between multiple ideas or elements, or when you need the
flexibility to move from topic to topic in any order.
PowerPoint and Apple Keynote are two platforms for creating linear presentations. Prezi is the
best-known nonlinear presentation software and it doesn’t use the concept of individual slides.
To get your main idea across most effectively, try to:
• Figure out the one message you want audience members to walk away with.
To limit your scope and estimate the time required to present your material, figure that it will
take you 3 or even 4 minutes to get through a single slide.
When organizing longer speeches, organize them like reports:
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• If your purpose is to motivate or inform, use the direct approach and a structure suggested
by your subject (for example, comparison, importance, sequence, chronology, geography,
To ensure effective organization, prepare your outline in several stages:
• State your purpose and main idea.
• Organize your major points and subpoints in logical order.
• Identify major points in the body and then outline the introduction and close.
Many speakers prepare both a detailed planning outline and a simpler speaking outline that
includes the cues and reminder s needed to present. To prepare an effective speaking outline:
• Start with the planning outline and then strip away anything you don’t plan to say directly
to your audience.
Developing a Presentation
Although you typically don’t actually write out a presentation word for word, you still engage in
the writing process. Adapt your style to fit the occasion:
• Audience size
• Venue
A more casual style suits a relatively small audience:
• Choose an avenue such as a small conference room with audience members seated
around a table.
• Use simple visual aids.
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• Deliver your remarks in a conversational tone, using notes to jog your memory if
necessary.
With a larger audience, use a more formal style, especially when you may be on a stage or
platform, standing behind a lectern, and using a microphone.
Like written documents, a presentation has three parts:
• Introduction
• Body
• Close
In the introduction:
To get the audience’s attention, make sure you can give audience members a reason to care and
to believe that the time they’re about to spend listening to you will be worth their while. Here are
six ways to arouse audience interest:
• Unite the audience around a common goal.
• Describe a problem your audience has or is worried about having.
• Tell a compelling story that illustrates an important and relevant point.
• Pass around an example or otherwise appeal to listeners’ senses.
To build credibility in your introduction, consider letting someone else introduce you (without
exaggerating your qualifications). If you’re introducing yourself, be sure to:
• Mention your accomplishments.
• Tell listeners briefly who you are and why you’re there, and how they’ll benefit from
listening to you.
• Mention a few aspects of your background.
To preview your message:
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In the body of your speech, your goals are to make sure that:
• The organization of your presentation is clear.
• Your presentation holds the audience’s attention.
When developing the body of your speech, you must rely on words to connect various parts and
ideas:
To hold your listeners’ attention during the body of your speech, try to:
• Relate your subject to your audience’s needs.
• Don’t overwhelm your audience with details.
• Anticipate—and answer—your audience’s questions.
The close of a speech or presentation has two critical jobs to accomplish:
• Making sure your listeners leave with the key points from your talk clear in their minds
• Putting your audience in the appropriate emotional state
Use the close to:
• Restate your main points.
Enhancing Your Presentation with Effective Visuals
Visuals can improve the quality and impact of your oral presentations by:
• Creating interest
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Popular visual aids include:
• Electronic presentations
• Overhead transparencies
This chapter focuses on online presentations, although most of the design tips apply to overhead
transparencies as well.
Choosing between conventional structured slides or more visually oriented free-form slides is an
important decision. The number of slides you include depends on this decision.
Structured slides often follow a template built into PowerPoint, whereas free-flowing slides
don’t follow a rigid structure and emphasize visual appeal.
Structured slides are easier to create, but presenters tend to pack too much information on each
slide.
The primary disadvantage of structured design is that text-heavy slides can all look alike. Slide
after slide of dense, highly-structured bullet points with no visual relief can put an audience to
sleep.
Free-form slides can overcome the drawbacks of text-heavy structured slides and fulfill three
criteria that researchers have identified as important for successful presentations:
• Providing complementary information through both textual and visual means.
Free-form slides do have several potential disadvantages. They:
• Can be more creatively demanding and time-consuming to create, requiring more visuals.
Slides are most often ineffective when the producer suffers from:
• Lack of design awareness
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Another reason for ineffective slides can be treating slides as stand-alone documents that can be
read on their own, without a presenter. These “slideument” hybrids that try to function as both
presentation visuals and printed documents don’t work well either: they often have too much
information to be effective visuals and too little to be effective reports.
With both structured and free-form design strategies, it is often helpful to structure specific slides
around a key visual that helps organize and explain the points you are trying to make.
Stuffing slides with too much text is a common mistake for beginners. Doing so:
When writing content for text slides, limit the amount of text you include on each one, and use
them to:
• Highlight key points.
• Summarize and preview your message.
Charts and tables for presentations need to be simpler than visuals for printed documents.
Color can grab attention, emphasize important ideas, create contrast, influence the acceptance of
ideas, improve retention, and stimulate emotions.
Slides have two layers or levels of graphic design:
In general, the more “quiet” your background is, the better.
Your foreground artwork can be either:
• Functional—photos, technical drawings, charts, and so on.
• Decorative—artwork that is there simply to enhance the look of your slides.
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When selecting fonts and type styles for slides:
To achieve design consistency in your slides, create a slide master, showing the colors, fonts, and
other design elements you’ve chosen.
You can add punch to an oral presentation with judicious use of special effects, such as:
• Sound
• Animation
Use animation not simply for animation’s sake, but in support of your message.
Functional animation involves motion that is directly related to your message, such as a
highlight arrow that moves around the screen to emphasize specific points in a technical
diagram.
Decorative animation, such as having a block of text cartwheel in from offscreen, doesn’t have
any communication value and can easily distract audiences.
Hyperlinks instruct your presentation software to jump to another slide in your presentation, to a
website, or to another program entirely.
Consider adding multimedia elements to your slides for the ultimate in active presentations.
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Completing a Presentation
To complete your presentation, you will need to:
• Finalize your slides and support material.
• Create effective handouts, if applicable.
To finalize your slide show, use your software’s slide sorter feature to:
• Add and delete slides.
• Reposition slides.
Structure your presentation by making use of:
• A title slide
• Agenda and program details
• Navigation slides
An integral part of any presentation strategy is handouts—any printed materials you give the
audience to supplement your talk. Handouts can include:
• Detailed charts and tables
• Case studies
Plan your handouts as you develop your presentation so that you use each medium as effectively
as possible. Your presentation should:
• Paint the big picture.
• Convey and connect major ideas.
You have several delivery methods to choose from:
• Memorizing—not usually a good choice.
• Reading—sometimes necessary when delivering legal information.
• Speaking from notes—usually the best method.
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Another important decision at this point is preparing the venue where you will speak. If you have
some control over the environment, think carefully about the following factors:
Practicing your delivery is essential. A day or two before you’re ready to step on stage for an
important talk, make sure you can give a positive response to the following questions:
• Can you present your material naturally, without reading your slides?
• Could you still make a compelling and complete presentation if you experience an
equipment failure and have to proceed without using your slides at all?
• Is the equipment working—and do you know how to work it?
• Is your timing on track?
• Can you easily pronounce all the words you plan to use?
• Have you anticipated likely questions and objections?
Delivering a Presentation
These techniques will help convert anxiety into positive energy:
• “Make friends with the stage.”
• Acknowledge your nervousness.
• Don’t worry about being perfect.
• Know your material and practice until you’re comfortable with it.
• Remember to breathe.
The question-and-answer period gives you a chance to:
• Obtain important information.
• Emphasize your main idea and supporting points.
• Build enthusiasm for your point of view.
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To handle questions responsively, be sure to:
• Learn enough about your audience members to get an idea of their concerns, and think
through potential answers.
During many business presentations, audiences use Twitter and other electronic media to carry
on their own parallel communication via the backchannel—a line of communication created by
people in an audience to connect with others inside or outside of the room, with or without the
knowledge of the speaker.
Effective presenters remember to do the following:
• Embrace the backchannel.
• Integrate social media into the presentation process.
• Monitor and ask for feedback.
Online presentations have become routine in some companies, but require special attention in
order to be effective.
Online presentations have benefits, such as:
• Communicating with a geographically dispersed audience at a fraction of the cost of
traveling
• Letting a project team or an entire organization meet at a moment’s notice
Online presentations have challenges, including the layer of technology between you and your
audience, which blocks those “human moments” that guide and encourage you.
To ensure successful online presentations regardless of the system you’re using:
• Make sure everyone has time to download and configure any required software.
• Consider sending preview study materials ahead of time.
• Keep your presentation as simple as possible.