Land your next sale by avoiding these three crucial presentation mistakes

In my 25+ years leading strategy across a range of advertising and marketing roles, I have now pitched solutions with a combined value of several hundred million dollars to global and local clients, sat through thousands of sales presentations, and seen great ideas fail to connect more times than I care to remember.

When it comes to pitching business ideas and important messages that you want someone to buy into and where you need to convince someone to back you, there are three things that should always be avoided.

Pitching something for everyone

Have you ever sat through a presentation or even read a book and thought, ‘This isn’t for me’, ‘What is this all about?’ or ‘Why am I bothering with this?’

That isn’t how you want your audience to feel when you present, but I can’t tell how often this happens.

This usually occurs when the audience for this specific presentation isn’t clearly identified upfront. As a result, different pieces of content get added for everyone ‘who might be interested’ or who might attend the meeting. All bases get covered. What could have been a clear message for the right audience, addressing a clear problem, becomes a waffly rambling collection of something for everyone.1`

The hope that something sticks and that someone might get excited about something in this presentation is a terrible strategy but a far too common starting point for many pitches.

Drowning them in your content 

Often as a consequence of not getting clear upfront on why this presentation should exist, its purpose and its role in helping this audience move forward, it becomes hard to both decide what should and shouldn’t be included as well as defend against well-meaning contributors who all make valid arguments for what should be included, particularly in sales presentations when there might be a small window to convince and a lot that you COULD say. 

Without becoming very clear upfront about what this presentation is there to do and the journey you want to take the audience on, defined by key points that form a flowing narrative from problem to resolution, wrestling content into an orderly structure will be incredibly challenging.

When you have too much content, too much detail and too much information for them to take in and recall, your audience can easily become overwhelmed and confused. I don’t know about you, but I can’t recall the last time I made a decision to move forward with something important when I was overwhelmed and confused.

Worse still, there is very little chance that your audience will later present something where the level of detail exceeds their level of knowledge and comfort. The risk of being called out, of being embarrassed by not being able to explain something when questioned by a peer or boss, means they will shy away from presenting anything you have made look complicated or with more detail than they are comfortable with.

Nobody will ever present something they don’t understand.

Leading with feature over benefits 

Even if you are asked to present pure credentials, a ‘why you’ presentation, there needs to be some consideration given to what each part of your story means to your audience, why they should care, what benefit they get from whatever point you are making, and how it helps them solve a problem or move forward.

Without this, you risk boring them with a presentation that does little to connect and is easily forgotten.

By way of a straightforward set of examples, which in themselves appear far too commonly as content that hasn’t been reframed to give the audience a reason to care, leading you into an ‘all about me’ moment:

• the company history or timeline, companies that have merged, and when new products were acquired and added
• the strategic approach or steps to creating your products or ideas
• product catalogues and overviews of everything you do
• office locations and staff by location.

It is not always that these sections shouldn’t be in your presentation, but without thinking about the ‘so what?’, which is the benefit of this to your audience, the value of this to them, you risk losing the audience’s attention and engagement, particularly if this is the majority of the content you have in the whole presentation.

Structuring for the outcome you need

The often overlooked aspect of a presentation is that after you leave, the audience that has just seen your content for the very first time now has to do something with it. All of these mistakes make it so much harder for them to become you, particularly if you have lost their attention on the third slide of sixty. 

What is needed is to take the time to structure a compelling story that draws them into a flowing narrative. One that makes it easy to stay connected to the points you are making and the slide that supports that point. All of the time, ask yourself ‘Why should they care about this? What does it mean to them?’ That is what becoming a strategic storyteller is all about. 

David Fish is a strategic communication specialist, founder of No Two Fish and author of What it Takes to Create Winning Presentations.