Meetings industry professionals have an ever-growing number and variety of digital and other choices when making presentations to clients and stakeholders, but often make wrong choices because they don’t carefully consider the groups’ mindset and needs.
Ranjith Kumaran, CEO of Hightail, makes four recommendations for delivering presentations in several contexts, including face to face, by email, phone, video conference and specialized software.
1. Provide a clear context: Come prepared, with a thorough knowledge of the situation and an understanding of what the clients would like to achieve. But don’t assume that your clients have been spending as much time as you have mulling over your subject matter. Introduce key goals and how you are able to achieve them.
2. Control the environment: Rather than requiring your clients to download an email attachment or navigate through a shared folder, use dedicated software to host your video, image, presentation or PDF. By providing access to the work via a simple link click and using a well-designed app, your presentation becomes more polished and professional, As a result, the presentation is easier for clients to understand.
3. Guide their feedback: Remember that you aren’t merely trying to put on an impressive show for your clients; their response is vitally important. Provide a streamlined way for them to give meaningful feedback by using a dedicated collaboration tool that collects comments and conversations in one place. Otherwise, you will need to sort through a flood of emails, text and phone messages, and more. Also, be clear about when their feedback needs to be submitted.
4. Sweat the small stuff: Mistakes made in face-to-face presentations usually can be easily rectified, but digital errors, such as sending the wrong version of a file, can stand out for a long time. So, it’s important to check and double-check your work, and when sharing visual files, send the best quality version possible.
