by Tim Calkins
Another option is to give it your best shot. You step up and confidently say, “Australia made up 8.2 percent of our sales in 2017.” This is terrific but it only works if you are 100 percent confident your number is correct. If you are wrong, if Australia only made up 7.6 percent of sales in 2017, you have a problem. Worst case, someone in the meeting will interrupt and say, “Actually, John, in 2017 Australia was 9.8 percent of our revenue. I have the report here.” This is not ideal.
The best option is to hedge your comment. If you say, “I believe it is about 8 percent,” you are safe. You aren’t committing to accuracy, but you seem well informed.
Second, you can put key pieces of information in your presentation slides. Then when you stand in front of the room, you can quickly glance at the screen, locate the fact and speak it.
You can’t put all the data on your slides; this will leave you with cluttered slides that don’t work very well. This is never a good idea. But you can put a few figures on the slides. These numbers are there primarily for you to use when presenting or when answering a question. They aren’t really there for your audience. “Any visual aids you use aren’t just exhibits for the audience, they’re giant-sized notes for you,” observes Cary Lemkowitz. “You can appear to be speaking extemporaneously by glancing over your shoulder and casually paraphrasing the giant image behind you.”15
The third way, and in many respects the best way, is to simply write down a few numbers on a piece of paper and leave it on the table in front of you.
You don’t want to hold the paper in your hand. This approach can work but it takes away from the effect. You are trying to create the perception that you are an expert, and you are providing the figures just because you know the business so well. It sends quite a signal: “Of course I know the sales growth figure in the Central Region for 2018.” If you look at your notes, then it is clear you don’t know the figure; you just happen to have notes.
One other tip: write the figure in large print. You want to be able to see the figures from quite a distance. Small type will force you to approach the paper. You might squint a bit. With nice, large numbers, you can easily see them from across the room. In most cases you will already know the figures; the paper is just to give you confidence that you are accurate.
For this approach to work, you want to identify a few impor-tant and precise numbers. You should be completely confident in these figures; you know the source and you should verify the accuracy for each one.
The figures should be relevant and important, but detailed and precise enough that your audience wouldn’t expect you to know them with such certainty and detail. You aren’t grabbing scattered facts; you are highlighting a few important figures.
Then, as you are presenting, or as you are answering a question, you can just drop in these numbers. If you are answering a question about your proposed price increase, you might mention, “Well, our key competitor took a price increase in 2012 of 3.4 percent, and then took another increase of 4.1 percent in 2017.” Or if you are talking about your proposed label update, you might say, “We’ve changed our label three times in the past thirty years: 1994, 2008 and 2014. The biggest change was that we introduced the color blue in the 2008 update.” You are dropping in very precise data in a very casual fashion.
This approach creates the impression that you really know the business. Your audience will probably think, “Wow. This product manager really knows her stuff. That is pretty impressive!” Just be sure the data is completely accurate.
Read the Room
As you get going in your presentation, it is important to read the room and adjust your approach. By looking at your audience, you can predict what they are thinking about and then modify your presentation accordingly.
The easiest signal to identify is impatience. It is fairly easy to tell that someone wants you to move faster. They will get distracted and look at other things. They might flip ahead in the presentation. They take a look at their phone. These are all fairly clear signs.
When you see these signals, you have to pick up the pace. You don’t want to start skipping slides; this will create other problems. You can simply present the headline, or perhaps talk about the headline and briefly review the support points, and then move to the next page.
It is also easy to identify when people think you are moving too fast. They might ask you to go back a page in your presentation or to wait before advancing the slides. If you have a printed version of your presentation, they might hang on to the prior page and flip to the next page slowly and with great reluctance.
In this case, you need to slow down. It might be that the material is complicated or you are presenting to someone who likes to absorb the information over time.
Be careful not to inadvertently put down your audience! If you say, “Well, John, I see this information is too complicated for you. Let me slow down a bit,” or “Looks like a few of you are having trouble keeping up! Let me go through this one more time,” you are making your audience look slow. This will not win their support.
You can also see if people generally agree with your recommendation or if they don’t. Agreement cues include a smile, nodding and soft questions. They will look at you with a positive demeanor. People might be leaning forward in an encouraging position or leaning back in a relaxed, positive style.
People who don’t agree with the presentation will act in a very different manner. You might get a frown. They might look away. If they are ready to challenge you, actively disagreeing with your points, they will lean in, poised to attack. Often, however, these people lean back. Perhaps they shift from side to side. They might be disengaged or they might be thinking through all the reasons why your analysis is incorrect.
DEALING WITH DISAGREEMENT
If you know that someone in the room disagrees with your recommendation, you should consider taking the time to explore the issue. You are seeking agreement. If you can tell that someone isn’t on board, take action promptly. It might be possible to press on and finish the presentation, but it probably won’t be successful in the long run. The group might not approve the recommendation. People might share concerns after the meeting, when you aren’t even in the room.
When facing disagreement, you might slow down. You could ask if anyone has questions. You might actually call on the person who has the concerns to identify their issues.
You have to use judgment when dealing with objections. Senior people are of course a priority, as well as particularly influential people. Not everyone warrants attention. You shouldn’t get bogged down explaining a calculation to a confused summer intern. Your goal is to get enough support to move forward and to identify all the potential issues that might trip up your success.
WATCH THE TIME
It is important to watch the time when you are presenting. Sometimes you will need to speed up and sometimes you can slow down.
Ideally, you want to finish your presentation with some time remaining for people to ask questions and respond to your ideas. So if the meeting ends at 3, you should finish the presenting portion by 2:45 or 2:50.
To make this happen, you need to monitor the time. You should know approximately where you should be as you go through the presentation. If you find yourself tracking behind, you can accelerate a bit. In general, you don’t want to skip pages, but you might spend less time on a particular page or exhibit in order to make up time.
Transition Smoothly
It is quite common to have more than one person presenting at a particular meeting, so transitions are important.
You don’t want too many people speaking. Every transition is a bit of a bump. It slows down your progress and it forces the audience to adjust. It is often fine to have two presenters in a meeting, or even three. Going much beyond that will often create problems.
Transitions should occur at logical points in a presentation. You shouldn’t change presenters in the middle of a section or partway through a story. It just doesn’t work v
ery well. For example, don’t do this:
Our pricing issues have been extreme over the past several years. We reduced our prices in 2011. This was a dramatic move but it worked out. In 2014, we started increasing our prices and our competition followed. This was a surprise given that they had lost market share the prior year. And then, in early 2018, we changed our prices again. Now I’m going to turn it over to Susan to continue the presentation.
When transitioning, you should introduce the change and make it as smooth as possible. Explain who is taking over and what they are going to talk about.
Try to avoid changing computers; you should load all the material on one computer. Getting a new computer hooked up is disruptive. At best, the presenter spends time working with the computer instead of engaging with the audience. Frequently, there are technical issues that delay the presentation and create negative perceptions.
It is always a good idea to explain who will be presenting at the start of a meeting. You don’t want people to be surprised when you sit down after going through a few pages.
Be sure to wait at the front of the room until the next speaker arrives. It is bad form to leave an empty stage; this will make your audience nervous and uncertain. They might think, “What is going on here, anyway?”
If you are using a wireless clicker with your computer, one nice approach is to hand the device to the next person as part of the transition. This can be an informal, casual gesture, but it sends a clear signal to the audience. You are subtly saying, “I’m stepping aside now and Jennifer has control. You should focus on her.”
Close Strong
How you finish a presentation is important; people tend to remember the start and the end. The key is to finish strong, to end seeming confident and in control. A summary page is a nice way to end; it recaps the key points.
At the finish, you need to pause. This is a logical time for your audience to ask questions, so you have to leave time for that. It is also when people will give you their assessment. With any luck, people will approve your recommendation and talk about next steps.
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MANAGE QUESTIONS WELL
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Questions are a part of almost every business presentation, so you want to think strategically about how you will deal with them.
That is one way a business update is different than a speech or TED talk. In a formal address, there is no place for questions. People don’t interrupt the president of the United States during the annual State of the Union address. You don’t hear, “Excuse me, I’m confused about the unemployment figure. Is that a year-to-date number or projected full-year number? And what is the change from last year on that?” In a business update, however, there is a good chance you will face a series of questions on a wide range of topics.
How you handle the inevitable questions is important; sometimes, people asking the questions are testing you to see if you really understand the material. If you deal with the questions well, you build confidence and commitment. If you stumble, you can destroy your credibility and weaken the recommendation.
Seek Out Questions
The first thing to remember: questions are good! You want questions.
Questions mean that people are engaged. A lack of questions is often a very bad sign; people might be bored or apathetic. If you are getting questions, you have an audience that is paying attention and interactive. In addition, each question is a chance for you to shine; if you answer a question well, it means that you really understand the situation, which builds your credibility. It is one thing to carefully prepare and deliver a talk. It is another thing to deftly field a variety of questions.
It is easier to respond to questions than to deliver a talk in silence. If you think of a presentation as a conversation, the questions move things along. People can bounce from point to question to point to question. It keeps the presentation interesting and active. Speaking to a silent group is much more difficult.
Managing questions can also be entertaining and fun. It is a bit of a challenge. If you know the topic well, you can smoothly respond to issues as they come up. As Jack Welch notes, “Self-confident people aren’t afraid to have their views challenged. They relish the intellectual combat that enriches ideas.”1
PLAN FOR QUESTIONS
Leave time for questions. If you schedule a meeting for sixty minutes and then create a presentation that fills the sixty minutes, you will almost certainly have a problem. Every question will use time that you don’t have. The more questions you get, the more time pressure you will be under.
This can be a problem, especially if some of your key recommendations are found near the end of your presentation. You might never get to the heart of the matter, or you might have to rush your way through it. Neither option is ideal.
You should assume you’ll get questions and leave time in the schedule. If you get questions, you will use the time. If you don’t get questions, you can end the meeting early. Few people are upset when they get extra time.
SET EXPECTATIONS
People need to know when they should ask questions: During the presentation or at the end? You should tell them this at the start of the meeting.
In general, people will be happy to honor your request. As the presenter, you have certain powers. One of these is to set the expectations. If you say to the group, “I would appreciate it if you would hold your questions until the end,” or “Feel free to ask questions as we go along,” most people will do that.
A senior executive might interrupt anyway; they are the senior person, after all, so ultimately, they call the shots. If they do, however, then they are making a statement to you and the group.
In general, it is best to have people ask questions during the presentation. Many of the best presentations are discussions, which means you want to have a dialogue. Questions get a conversation going. It is engaging and interesting for you and the audience.
There are several problems with leaving questions for the end. The biggest problem is that at the end of a presentation you want the discussion to focus on the recommendation and, best case, next steps. If you get people debating the best way to move the project forward, you have a successful meeting in the works.
You don’t want the conversation to focus on specific questions about the deck. If people start asking things like “Susan, can you go back to page eight? What is the time frame for the first column of numbers?” and “Manu, did you include the fifty-third week in the revenue figures for 2017 that you show on page nineteen?” then the conversation is not going your way. It can be difficult to change course.
Or you might face a tough issue at the very end of the presentation; this is not where you want to encounter problems. If someone is going to say, “You know, John, I think that NPV analysis back on page twelve is way off the mark. Where did you get those figures, again? Can you walk me through the calculations?” you would prefer to get this early in the presentation, not late. At the end, the question sets the wrong tone. Remember the concept of altitude; you want the turbulence to happen when you can deal with it.
If you ask people to wait on questions, there is a good chance they won’t ask the questions at all. If someone is confused about a figure on page 4, they probably will not ask about it after you’ve gone through another thirty pages of material. This is a problem for you, not them. You want people to be convinced. If someone has a question, you want to answer it and address it.
Finally, leaving questions to the end can become a timing problem. How much time should you leave for questions, anyway? Do you leave a lot of time, or do you leave just a few minutes? If your group is highly engaged, with a lot of questions, you might not have time to answer them.
There are only a few times when you will want to avoid the questions. You might have a particularly interactive group. If you know people are going to ask questions and delay the meeting, then you might want to proactively manage the situation so you have some hope of getting through your recomme
ndation.
You might be tight on time. If you need two hours for a presentation, and you only were able to secure a one-hour slot, then you might want to try to push back the questions to give you an opportunity to get through it.
If the recommendation is complex, then you might want to delay the questions, too. There are times when explaining a recommendation requires you to lay out a somewhat complicated story. If this is the case, you might want a clear time to lay out the entire case, assembling each point. Questions might interrupt this process, so delaying them would be best.
MANAGE THE TIME
Sometimes you will need to cut off questions; if you are feel that you are getting bogged down, you might need to stop the flow.
The best way to do this is to offer to answer the questions later. A comment like this works fine: “I would love to take more questions but I am sensitive about the time. I would be happy to answer all your questions after the meeting.” You could create a list of outstanding questions. One way to do this is to get a flip chart, write “Parking Lot” at the top and then list outstanding questions as they come up.
Prepare
It is critical to prepare for questions in advance. You should think through the things people are likely to ask about and then consider how you might respond.
PREDICTING QUESTIONS