11 Tips to Best Present Your Strategy
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You might have a strategic mind, but if you can’t get your strategy recommendations across, you’ve wasted all your time…
I’ve presented to Fortune 500 CEOs, start up founders, board of directors, and different leaders making decisions on their corporate and product brand strategies. One thing I can guarantee is this:
The presentation is as important, if not more important than the strategy
Here are my 11 tips to best communicate your strategy
Approach it like theater
Your strategy presentation needs to evoke emotion. Use the key concept of storytelling - Gaps: show what could be, show the challenges and barriers in the way and watch your audience lean in to hear how you resolve and complete the gap you’ve introduced. Turns, twists, and surprises are all fair game in a strategy presentation.
Embed metaphors and analogies
Metaphors can plant powerful imagery in the minds of the audience, conveying complex ideas simply and in a memorable way. “A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.” - Groucho Marx immediately brings to mind how costly and expensive an empty hospital bed is. Imagine using this as a pre-cursor to an insight that can help a hospital fill their beds?
Be prepared to get off script
You might have every slide planned out, what key points to hit, what conclusions you are driving. But in every presentation, you need to know your stuff so well that if the conversation pivots, you are ready to go there. This tip goes hand-in-hand with the next one.
Read the room
Whether this is a physical room or the “Zoom” room, you have to be gauging what’s resonating and what’s not. Always be open to take their lead on where the discussion needs to go. Along with the previous tip, stubbornly bringing the conversation back so you can trot through the agenda is not only presenting with blinders on, it’s just not cool.
Co-creation is a good thing
Anytime your audience is so enthusiastic about the strategy, they start brainstorming tactics, it means you are nailing it! So instead of telling folks to stop, because that’s clearly meant for a different meeting, roll with it. When the strategy and tactics become their idea, your job is done.
Push your presentation to the top gear
You have different gears in you as a presenter and when you are presenting strategy, you need to get into a high gear. Excited, confident, and charming. If your audience don’t feel your energy, they won’t have energy either. They don’t have to buy your strategy 100%, but they need to know you buy it 100%. That’s what matters.
Vary your eye contact
Eye contact is very important, but you also don’t want to freak your audience out by “staring”. Use eye contact to connect, but also move on. This is obviously much harder on a zoom call, but it helps if you’re looking at the camera once in a while.
Use the silence
One of the most important elements in a presentation, is the strategic use of the PAUSE. It creates anticipation and makes the following point all the more impactful. Pause before you reveal the insight, pause before you reveal the strategy. Don’t rush or fill it with the UMs and AHs. Revel in the silence and anticipation.
Align your verbal pace to your presentation
Don’t be a monotonous presenter. Your verbal pace is the speed of your voice. Go faster when you are building up intensity or challenge, go slower when you are building anticipation or punctuating a point.
Adjust your volume to carry the message
You don’t have to be loud all the time. That’s overwhelming. Your volume can convey excitement, or thoughtful revelation. Use it with the other ingredients of your voice so you can pack a punch in your presentation.
Mind your hands
When you are presenting strategy, it’s usually to a smaller group, so your hand movements doesn’t have to be huge. No exaggeration necessary, but use them to give a visual cue to what you are saying, a simple four finger point can add a visual punctuation to a point being made. Be conscious of your hands, and then forget about them. It will come naturally as you present.
Presenting strategy is much like other presentations, but because a winning strategy is CLEAR & CONCISE, your delivery needs to line up to that expectation, or else all is lost.
Good Luck!
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