5 ideas for memorable presentations

How to make better presentations making use of the two systems of the cognitive processes.

A group of former entrepreneurship students told me recently that one of the main impacts of the course was in the way they have done their presentations afterwards. This made me think that it might be useful to share some of the ideas we introduce to the students.

The first idea is that the presenter is more important than his presentation. An investor always gives more value to the team than to the project and the entrepreneur can not afford to not be the center of attention. This idea applies to any presentation, where the most important thing must be our presence. In order to have that focus we need to look at the audience rather than the slides and convey more information than what is written there. What is in the slides is an illustration of what is being said and not the other way around. Despite the importance of the presenter and his team, it is increasingly more common not to present them in the beginning of the presentation. Let’s see why.

The third idea is to expose a conflict that will help us to make the message more clear. The protagonist, or hero, who may be a person, an idea or a concept that we think is good, faces one or more antagonists that represent what opposes us or something that we want to change. For example, the protagonist may be a new result or a new solution to a problem and the antagonists are the existing solutions or previous results. The division between good and bad, the basis of the plot of many stories, can help us bring to the audience to our side.

The end of the presentation is usually the main memory that the audience takes home. It must, therefore, be designed in a way that makes the message memorable without conflicting with what has been said previously. Here it will be important to convey to the audience active phrases and calls to action.

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