HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations (HBR Guide Series)

Ask yourself, “What new beliefs do I want them to adopt? How do I want them to behave differently? How must their attitudes or emotions change before their behavior can change?”

The people in your audience came to see what you can do for them, not what they must do for you. So look at the audience as the “hero” of your idea—

Speak sincerely to your audience, and people will want to listen to your message and root for and contribute to the success of your idea.

Say you’re presenting a new product concept to the executive team, and you know you won’t get their buy-in unless Trent, the president of the enterprise division, gets excited about the idea, because they always defer to his instincts on new initiatives. Appeal first to Trent’s entrepreneurial nature by describing how exciting the new market is—whi

Plan content for 60% of your time slot: If you’re given a full hour, take no more than 40 minutes. That will leave time for Q&A, a panel, or some other form of discussion. It’s hard to keep people’s attention for much longer than 40 minutes unless you’ve built in interesting guest speakers, video clips, interactive exercises, and such. As Thoma

Your big idea is that one key message you must communicate. It’s what compels the audience to change course. (Screenwriters call this the “controlling idea.”) It has two components: Your point of view: The big idea needs to express your perspective on a subject, not a generalization like “Q4 financials.” Otherwise, why present? You may as well e-ma

How can you solve their problems? How are you going to make their lives better? Point to benefits you know they’ll care about. What do you want them to do? What’s their part in your plan? Make sure there’s a clear action for your audience to take. (See “Build an Effective Call to Action” in the Message section of this guide.) How might they resist?

But how do you resonate deeply enough to move them toward your objective? Figure out where you have common ground, and communicate on that frequency.

Present Clearly and Concisely to Senior Executives Senior executives are a tough segment to reach. They usually have very little time in their schedules to give you. Though that’s true of many audiences, what sets this crowd apart is that they need to make huge decisions based on accurate information delivered quickly. Long presentations with a big

Trim your slide deck: If you created an hour-long presentation and want to deliver it in 40 minutes, cut your slides by a third. You can work in slide-sorter mode in PowerPoint, dragging slides to a “slide cemetery” at the very end of the file. Don’t delete them, because you might have to resurrect one or more at the last minute, when you’re answer