Get Your Facts Straight

I’ll admit it, I was glued to the television for the premiere of Falling Skies, the latest series to tackle life in a post-apocalyptic world. I loved just about everything about it: the premise, the plot, the special effects. But one thing really bothered me, and that was the geographical inaccuracies. It made me think that a few wrong facts can really derail your message.

The story is set in Massachusetts six months after an alien invasion. The aliens have just bombed Boston, so the surviving humans must leave the city and fan out to the suburbs. While I congratulate the writers for using the actual names of Massachusetts towns, the dialogue contained many made-up facts.

The survivors are split up into several smaller groups, one of which is instructed to travel north on Route 3 until they reach Revere. Uh, Route 3 doesn’t go anywhere near Revere. Another group must go to Acton, meeting at the (nonexistent) Littleton Bridge before they reach their destination. Excuse me, Littleton is further west, so they’d actually travel through Acton to reach it. When they finally make camp in Acton, they dispatch some scouts to the (fictitious) Acton Armory and climb a hill with a commanding view of Boston (which, if you could actually see from Acton, would look much farther away than it does in the show).

It’s true that for the vast majority of viewers, these things didn’t matter at all. Everybody knows that Hollywood takes liberties and that it’s impossible to get all of the details exactly right. But the inconsistencies pulled me out of the story. And they would have been so easy to avoid if the screenwriters had just consulted a map.

What has all this got to do with presentations? Well, if your presentations include “facts” that you haven’t checked, or if you make claims or include information that is later proved to be inaccurate or false, you will lose credibility. People will ignore your message, preferring instead to wait for your next mistake. They might even let you get to the end of your presentation before telling you that you are wrong. Worse, they’ll say nothing to you but Tweet, blog, and email all their friends and colleagues about what a dope you are. Is that your message?

Make sure you have all your facts straight for every presentation. That one time you stretch the truth or include information you haven’t verified, there’s bound to be someone in the audience who’ll know you’re wrong.

Are you presenting for yourself or your audience?

Mary Nell McCorquodale is a management consultant with decades of  experience presenting to savvy audiences, from C-level professionals to top brass in the US Military. As a young presenter, she learned very quickly that if you stick to your own agenda without finding out what your audience wants then it will be impossible to get your message across.

Early in her career, the company that Mary Nell was working for — a multinational technology and consulting firm — offered a weeklong training program for their clients. She was conducting a workshop on Day Three of the program, and was made aware of a major problem the minute she got started. It turns out that by the time they reached her session, the executives were pretty fed up. Their perception was that it the whole event was a rah-rah program for the host company, and they told her that if her session was going to be more of the same then they would leave. Suddenly, Mary Nell’s entire presentation as she had practiced it was worthless.

What would you have done, faced with a hostile audience that didn’t want to hear what you’d prepared? Well, rather than just pack up and leave, Mary Nell asked them to tell her exactly what they wanted to learn about her company’s products and what they hoped to get out of the session. She wrote everything down then called a recess so that she could retool her presentation to be able to address all of her audience’s concerns. When they returned, she delivered a very effective presentation with which her audience was extremely satisfied.

Over the years, she’s added another useful item to her presentation toolbox: the BLUF line. This acronym stands for Bottom Line Up Front, and it’s the way you tell your audience — within the first five minutes — how what you’re talking about will benefit them. It is also an opportunity to edit your presentation on the fly. For example, if the first half of your presentation is about how to bake a cake and you find out that you’re in front of a roomful of pastry chefs, if you deliver your BLUF line early on you will realize that you should skip that part. Otherwise you will bore your audience by telling them something they already know.

Reading a room and adapting on the fly isn’t easy, especially if you have prepared extensively for your presentation, but it gets easier with practice. Communication is a two-way street, so you must listen to your audience to make sure you’re sharing information that has value to them.

You Can’t Taste PowerPoint

Some people are so hung up on PowerPoint for giving presentations that they forget that in the olden days before thumb drives, projectors, and laptops there was such a thing as an engaging public speaker. I often reference the PowerPoint Gettysburg Address as a shining example of how PowerPoint can often bring down even the most brilliant speech. PowerPoint is meant to be a tool that helps to elevate a presentation; it should never be used as the entire presentation.

Mike Consol is a California-based coach who specializes in helping professionals to become better communicators. His recent blog post, Adding the “Touch Factor” to Your PowerPoint Presentation, addresses moving away from strictly PowerPoint-based presentations and engaging the senses. For example, for a presentation about a durable and comfortable new fabric that is going to enhance the clothing industry, the presenter should put a swatch of the material in audience members’ hands so that they can feel it for themselves.

The head of sales at The Country Hen, a Central Massachusetts egg farm, takes a similar approach on sales calls to potential distributors. Rather than rely on a PowerPoint deck that extolls the virtues of his organically farmed, Omega 3-rich eggs, he lets the product sell itself. During the meeting, he takes out a portable cookstove, frying pan, and a case of eggs and starts cooking. He hands a plate of scrambled eggs to each person in the meeting so that everyone can see, smell, touch, and (most importantly) taste the eggs. After everyone has eaten, he closes the sale.

It’s easy to slip into bad habits, communicating your entire message with a PowerPoint slide deck. But if you want your presentations to have more impact, a little extra effort can yield memorable results.