10 Minutes To A Great Presentation

As a business presenter, you are always faced with deadlines to create your presentations. How can you create good quality presentations quickly? Here is a simple three step process:

1.       Start creating a mind dump:

It is very tempting to spend time waiting to get inspiration to start creating your presentations. A cup of coffee to ‘get you in the mood’ turns into a chat on the phone that goes on forever. Alternatively, many presenters open up their presentation software, select a standard presentation template and wait for a flash of inspiration.

Stop wasting your time, and realize that there is no shortcut to great ideas. You need to generate a lot of ideas for your presentations reject the poor ones and go ahead with the good ones. There is no way to bypass this process. 

So, when you need to create your next presentation, here is what you do. Get a piece of paper and start noting down all your ideas on the sheet. Do not ‘think’ at this point. Just focus on exhausting all your thoughts on the subject. 

Soon, you will reach a point where you either start repeating your points or draw a blank. That is the time to pause and take a look at all the thoughts you have noted down. 

2.       Club related ideas under various headings:

You would see that a number of points in your thought dump are related in some way. Start clubbing them together by giving each group a headline to represent the nature of the points. For example – features like push back seats, ample leg space and thick cushion can all be clubbed under ‘Seating comfort’. 

3.       Arrange the headings into a coherent story:

The last step is to arrange your various headings into a coherent story. This story is the ‘outline’ of your presentation. Start noting down the relevant data and the images you need to explain each heading. Once you have the outline, it doesn’t take much effort to convert it into slides. 

This method helps you to see the big picture first, before you start creating your slides. So, your presentation will have a clear flow.  I recommend you use professional presentation templates to reduce your time even further. BuyAPresentation.com is one such site that provides templates to help sales and marketing presenters to reduce time. 

You can crash the time for creating your presentation, from many hours to a few minutes.

The additional benefit is that you can get all your approvals for your content based on your outline, instead of your slide deck. Thus, you avoid the painful rework of your presentations. 

Hope you found the method useful. Happy presenting!