Why most presentations fail

Editor's Notes

• #3: I’m sure you’ve noticed that it is harder all the time to get people’s attention.
• #4: Do you wonder why sometimes your audience just doesn’t really get the message? You may feel like you’ve wasted your time preparing and giving your presentation because they don’t seem to understand what you’ve told them and they’re not responding.
• #6: If you give sales presentations, you may go thru the whole show to get a tepid response and only a few people ready to take action.
• #7: If you’re a trainer, you may feel like they’re just not retaining and applying what you teach.
• #8: If you do webinars, you can see how many attendees are leaving your screen to do other things.
• #9: I’m sure you have some stories you could tell about rude or disinterested audiences. You see some of them checking their email on their smart phones.
• #10: Or maybe they just don’t participate when you ask questions and try to get them involved.
• #11: You’ve seen plenty of bored looks
• #12: People answering their cell phones in the middle of your talk or Sending text messages
• #13: Some of them are slumped down in their seats And even dozing off with their heads bent down.
• #14: It’s frustrating because you know that your presentations can help a lot of people so you’d like to make sure your message really gets into their brains.
• #15: Here are 3 major hurdles you need to overcome to make sure that your presentations really get results.
• #16: First of all, you need to know that your audience is overwhelmed BEFORE they even get to you presentation.
• #17: Consumer Reports says the average American is exposed to 247 advertising messages per day. Other sources put that estimate closer to 3,000.
• #18: During an average 30 minutes in an American super-market, approximately 50,000 different products vie for your attention.
• #19: Nobody knows what to do with 240 million search results. So most people now are looking for recommendations, not information. And people want to feel a connection – and sense of trust – in the other people from whom they receive those recommendations.
• #20: Unfortunately, most presenters are still throwing way too much information on the screen, as if . . .
• #21: . . . as if they could just pour all the information into their audience’s brains and have them receive it and understand it
• #22: You need to respect the limits of working memory or short-term memory. For the average audience member, that means no more than 3-4 key points in a 45 minute presentations.
• #23: Too much information on each slide quickly overwhelms working memory. 
• #24: When you force them to read and listen to the same text at the same time, they tune out.
• #25: On top of all that, nobody wants to be sold to any more. When your audience expects that you are going to sell them something, they are naturally defensive.
• #26: When you overwhelm them with too much information in your presentation, they become even more defensive and resistant.
• #27: You can overcome this first hurdle by limiting the amount of information you share in your whole presentation and limiting the amount of information on each slide
• #28: Secondly, you need to understand why your audience is resistant to your ideas, even when those ideas would be really good for them.
• #29: You probably notice this all the time: the arms crossed on the chest, the scowling faces and furrowed brows, the closed body language. Most people are naturally skeptical about new ideas. And when you’re asking them to make a change in their lives PLUS pay money for it, they are even more skeptical. Most of us resist change, even if we’re not aware of it at a conscious level.
• #30: The unconscious brain is responsible for more than 95% of what we think and do. And it is trying to protect us from the overwhelming amount of information. We can’t consciously process all that information, so our unconscious filters the information to try and make our decisions easier.
• #31: But our brain only lets in what we are already familiar with and comfortable with. This makes us naturally resistant to information that is too far outside our comfort zone.
• #32: Your message needs to be familiar enough and non-threatening enough for people to take it in, yet to get people to really notice, you must offer a different perspective that makes someone stop and reevaluate their existing beliefs about it. stories, pictures, and emotions to seduce the subconscious brain.Teachable moments need to be both familiar and original to be captured in memory and easily retrievable for processing and decision-making.
• #33: You can overcome this second hurdle by using metaphors, stories, pictures, and emotions to slip past their resistance about being sold to and seduce the subconscious brain into relaxing its guard.
• #34: Finally, there’s been a lot of research in recent years about how we process multi-media information.
• #35: And researchers discovered that poorly designed multi-media presentations . . .
• #36: . . . actually reduce learning and attention.
• #37: They also discovered that we take in information best when it is presented through both our audio and visual channels.
• #38: However . . .
• #39: Researchers now know that that, before we can interpret the words we read, we actually have to translate them into auditory information inside our brain.
• #40: When you force your audience to read a bunch of bullet point text while listening to you at the same time, you’re really asking them to multi-task. And, as you’ve probably heard or read recently, more and more studies are showing that multi-tasking is a very inefficient process for the human brain. People complete tasks much more slowly when they multi-task and they make a lot more errors – even people who think they’re really good at multi-tasking.
• #41: To overcome this hurdle, you need to create multi-media presentations in which the audio and visual channels support each other instead of interfering. A good place to start is by learning about the picture superiority effect in multi-media presentations.
• #42: If you want to achieve great results from your presentations, you need to avoid death by PowerPoint
• #43: By learning how to overcome these major hurdles and changing the way you do presentations.
• #44: You can learn to organize your presentations in a way that doesn’t overwhelm your audience, but guides their attention and makes it easier for them to choose to take action.
• #45: You can learn how to create “Presentations With Results.”