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You are here: Home / Delivery / Experiences from the presentation trenches

Experiences from the presentation trenches

March 29, 2015 by Ellen Finkelstein 1 Comment

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I gave 2 presentations in the last month and thought I’d share my experiences.

powerpoint-tips-speaking at nams13-standing1A live presentation

I gave a live presentation at a marketing conference/workshop. I wasn’t paid but was expected to pitch a product at the end, using an affiliate link of the workshop organizer. In this way, we both made money. (All of the sessions were organized in this way.)

My topic was “High Persuasion PowerPoint Presentation Secrets.” I’ve done this topic as a webinar many times, but this was the first time I did it live. About 25 people attended my session.

There was formal feedback, which I received. Of the 11 people who submitted feedback, I got ten 5s (the highest) and one 4. I thought that was pretty good! Here are some of the comments:

“Ellen was awesome.  She was very clear, concise and delivered tons of valuable content”

“I received a tip which will save me 15 minutes each time I make such a slide.”

“I have used Power Point for 2o years in Industry but Ellen opened up a whole new way to present.”

I also got a great tweet, which I really appreciated.darthjordan tweet

I think that knowing my audience was key. They were all marketers, so the topic was valuable for them. But you can’t please everyone. One person said, “Turns out I already knew what she was teaching but it was good to know I was doing what I should be doing.”

A free webinar

I did a free webinar for Learning Magazine Network. You can watch it here, after registering. It was called “13 Techniques that will Make Designing PowerPoint Slides EASY.” The feedback that attendees wrote in the webinar chat box was amazingly positive.

After the webinar, the organizers wrote, “Thank you, Ellen, for a great webinar and presentation. The responses and feedback from the participants was outstanding. It’s always appreciated having the right subject matter expert give their knowledge to our members on subjects and topics that matter.”

But the best feedback was an email I received a few days later from someone who attended the webinar. Here’s what she wrote:

“I was asked to give a briefing and was provided a PowerPoint presentation designed by others. The slides were bland, filled with verbiage and all looked the same.

“Thanks to editing based on Ellen’s webinar tips, I ended up with a winner! I previewed the briefing in-house, showing them both the original slides and the “new and improved” slides. To much applause, the new version won. My final briefing was a huge success – the committee I presented to made an immediate decision to adopt the proposal that was offered. Thank you Ellen.” – J Holden, Trainer/Facilitator

Doing well in an event like this is not hard if you know your audience and their needs. I wasn’t selling anything this time and all I had to do was provide great content in a way that was easy to apply. It’s important to understand the level of expertise of the audience and I’ve given a similar presentation to a more advanced audience with not such great results. So definitely do your research!

3 orange large asterisks

Have you spoken recently? What kind of feedback did you get? Leave a comment!

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READ LATER - DOWNLOAD THIS POST AS PDF >> CLICK HERE <<

Related posts:

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  2. Present interactively: Your audience expects it!
  3. Use PowerPoint like a flip chart–draw as you speak
  4. Speaking PowerPoint by Bruce Gabrielle — A review

Filed Under: Delivery Tagged With: feedback, researching the audience

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If you only got one negative, that’s great! It’s really hard to know exactly what the audience knows and doesn’t know. I always try to find some very obscure bit of information that most people in the audience will have never heard of. I recently spoke to a huge group of international engineers and both myself and the meeting planner assumed at least someone would have heard of a famous engineer in history, but no one in the whole group raised their hand. You never know!

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