The Most Effective Way To Present Boring Information

Engaging Presentation Skills

We all know the basics of a good presentation: keep it short and simple, let your passion for your product or service shine through, and engage your audience right from the beginning.

But what about when you have a lot of dry, technical information that needs to be presented to customers or prospects?

How do you go about making dry facts and figures understandable, memorable, and emotional?

“Successful presentations are understandable, memorable, and emotional.”

Carmine Gallo, International Communications Coach, Forbes Magazine

At university, there was a professor of Botany that made spores and seeds absolutely fascinating, and people were clamoring to sign up for his class. Not because Botany is such a sexy topic, but because he taught with the wonder and excitement of a child discovering ice cream for the first time.

Presentation tips to differentiate yourself:

1. Tell a personal story. Facts and figures can lose people. But everyone loves a good story. Rather than talk about the statistical results of a recent study on the effectiveness of a drug you’re selling, tell your customer about a single patient’s problems and how your product solved his problems. “After presentations, 63 per cent of people remember the stories, while only 5 per cent remember the facts,” states Dan and Chip Heath, New York Times and The Wall Street Journal best selling authors.
2. Give relatable, bold examples. Rather than saying your product can increase net income by 20%, tell your prospect how much more money they’ll get in their bonuses this year with your product. There’s a reason why newscasters always use a metaphor or an analogy to relate a fact. It makes information much more attainable when you say an area covers about the same size as Scotland than saying it covers over 20,000 square miles.
3. Use creative infographics. Infographics can present technical information in an easy to process picture that captures your prospect’s interest. This doesn’t mean use complex charts and graphs; infographics go far beyond those old stand-byes. A good infographic can present complex information in a way that lets your brain grasp a concept much faster than facts and figures ever could. Neo Mammalian Studios found that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text.
4. Make a different impression. If you’re pitching an abstract idea to a prospect, try relating it to something easy to understand. An example might be bringing 12 different bottles of mustard to a client presentation to illustrate the shelf-space competition experienced by products in a supermarket. Use your creativity to reduce hard-to-grasp concepts to something much more simple. It will make your presentation more warm and memorable.
5. Hand out the facts. Put all of your dry facts and figures in a handout to give to the prospect. Those who are interested in the data will look at your handout later, and those who aren’t interested won’t be forced to listen to a stilted presentation on just the facts. You could also use an FAQ sheet that gives the answers to more technical issues that some people might be interested in.

Everything becomes interesting when presented in the right way. 

Find your own innate ability to make boring information come to life, and experience the success of connecting in a manner that’s understandable, memorable, and emotional.

Presentation skills training from the team at Natural Training can help you identify your innate abilities for making your presentations come alive. Call one of our experts today to talk about how we can help you transform your pitch from boring to sensational.

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