You’ve interrogated the brief, developed the strategy and created a stonking proposal. How do you ensure you don’t blow everything by delivering the world’s dullest pitch presentation?

While you’re unlikely to win new business with a poor proposal, you’re very likely to lose it with a poor presentation.

So before you go in with your 112 unrehearsed PowerPoint slides, take a look at the following checklist and give yourself the best chance of winning the business.

1. Have one clear objective – What do you want from the presentation?
2. Consider your audience – Why would they be interested in what you want to tell them? How much do they know already? What’s their current frame of mind? Build your content around what your audience NEEDS to hear, not what you want to tell them.
3. Determine your message – What point are you making? What do you want your audience to believe and remember?
4. Choose the right format – Consider the objective, message, audience, venue, facilities and time allowed before determining the format. Use a few slides as possible. Consider hand-outs for detailed sections. Standing up commands attention; sitting down signals discussion.
5. Prune back slides to the bare essentials – Visual aids are not speaker’s notes. They should either aid understanding or reinforce the message. When presenting detailed slides, use animation to bring up each point separately.
6. Practise before presenting – It’s not enough to simply read your slides and write notes, you need to stand and deliver, even if it’s only to yourself in the mirror.
7. Get your brain and mouth in gear – Take yourself off somewhere private and recite a few tongue twisters to warm up your voice and slow down your thoughts.
8. Smile – It’s easy to forget to smile when you’re anxious and/or concentrating. Practise smiling as you talk; it will make you look confident and your audience feel relaxed.
9. Stand (or sit) tall – The human animal is quick to pick up signs of weakness. Standing tall (with your shoulders back, head up and feet hip distance apart) makes you look strong and capable. Slouching, fidgeting or even holding onto a chair makes you look defensive.
10. Remove physical barriers – Let people see you have nothing to hide. Sit up from the table; stand away from the desk. Even holding up papers creates a mental barrier between you and your audience. If you need notes, print them large enough to read at waist height.
11. Use your voice effectively – Slow and loud (a little louder than conversational voice) sounds more confident than fast or quiet. Try to vary your pace and pitch if you’re talking for more than a couple of minutes and don’t be afraid to emphasise and repeat key points.
12. Sit in the best light – Where possible, position yourself where you can be clearly seen. Try not to sit or stand in front of a window as light behind you will put you into darkness.
13. Pause, pause, pause – Pausing gives your audience time to take in what you’ve said, gives you time to collect your thoughts and makes you sound like you’re considering what you say. If you have a tendency to race through your material, write PAUSE several times on your print out.
14. Don’t compete with yourself – Whether presenting from a screen or hand-outs, give your audience time to look before you speak. We can read and hear at the same time but we can’t read and listen.
15. Take comfort in the fact that nobody can see inside you – You might feel anxious but if you look and sound confident, you will come over as such.

Want to improve your presentation skills? Check out my Making Effective Presentations workshop.

Photo by Alvin Mahmudov on Unsplash