Training How-To, Part 3: Minimal prep time for maximum impact

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Courtesy of The Broadcat
Ricardo Pellafone (ricardo@thebroadcat.com)

In our last two posts (here and here), we discussed how great in-person training requires using slides the right way—specifically, limiting each slide to a single phrase or picture presented in a way that really stands out.

And doing that, of course, means that you can’t just stand up and read your slides.

If this sounds intimidating, it’s because it kind of is—you’ll have to practice your slides before presenting them.  And that takes time: if you’ve got 30 minutes to present and want to deliver a well-rehearsed 20 minutes with time for questions, for example, you might spend 2 hours practicing it to get it down pat.

That can sound like a lot of time, but keep that 2 hours in perspective.

Let’s say your 30-minute training is being delivered to a high-risk sales team of 30 people.  It only takes you 30 minutes to present the training—but listening to it consumes 15 man-hours of that team’s time. If you fumble through the training, what message do you think that team receives about how much you value their time?

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Given that, spending a few hours to get it down isn’t a nuisance—it’s a smart investment in building a relationship with that team.

So, practicing is essential, but not all practice time is created equal. Here’s where to focus your time in order to get the best return on investment.
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People are most likely to remember the first and last thing you say—in psychology, this is called the primacy and recency effect.  So start your practice time by scripting out how you’re going to start and end your presentation.

These sections don’t have to be long; a couple of sentences is usually all you need. All we’re accomplishing here is making sure you start and end strong, because those are not only the areas your audience is most likely to remember, but the areas where most presenters freeze up.

For example, you’ve probably had the experience of seeing someone tank an otherwise great presentation by ending with “oh, I guess that’s it.”

That happens because we tend to focus so much on our core points—the stuff we really want people to learn—that we can forget that the audience is there to listen to a beginning, middle, and end, not a list of disjointed bullets.

The beginning and end can be short, but they do a lot of heavy lifting in helping people remember your core content.  So start by practicing them to make them great.

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The next area to focus on is your transitions. Nothing kills a presentation faster than the phrase “and on this next slide.”

Having smooth transitions between slides and topics helps demonstrate to your audience that you’re telling them a story, not reading a bunch of unrelated bullet points.  Transitions help keep your content in context, preventing people from feeling overwhelmed with too much data.

Again, these don’t need to be long or elaborate; normally you just want a single sentence. But doing this on-the-fly is really, really hard, so spend a few minutes mapping out how to attack this in advance and it’ll improve your presentation immensely.

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Finally, have a general outline of what you want to say for your substantive points.

You’ll want this fairly loose so you can adapt it as your audience reacts to you, but you should have mapped out the examples and stories you want to tell to illustrate your key points. You’ll already have this information down from creating the presentation itself, so this is just to make sure you’ve got the right structure to keep things moving.

Once you have all of this together, do a few dry runs to see what works. Sometimes a story that seems great on paper has to be cut because it just don’t sound right when you deliver it in context, or you’ll see that you need to fine-tune a transition a little.  When you can get through the entire thing without feeling anxious about trying to remember what comes next, you’re ready to present.

All of this takes time, but it gets a little faster every time you do it.  And it’s worth it:  no matter how great you think you are at speaking off-the-cuff, you’re better if you practice.  Steve Jobs famously practiced those Apple product launches for weeks, and he was just selling consumer electronics—you’re on the frontline of protecting your company from illegal and unethical behavior.

So put in the time to pare it down, make it stand out, and practice it.

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