Do you struggle to keep your talk on track when you present to executives? Perhaps you lose control of the conversation, and get taken off topic. In this episode of Perfect Presentations Podcast, we’ll explain what you might be doing wrong, and share techniques for establishing order from the start, and retaining it as you present.

Presenting to a group of strong-willed executives is no easy task, whether they are equals or superiors. But you can win the day and ensure your message is heard.

Discussed in this episode is a Global Executive Study from quartz.com. You can find it here.

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It’s episode two of P3 — the Perfect Presentations Podcast. It took me all of one episode to want a shorthand for Perfect Presentations Podcast. P3 seems a pretty good fit, so we’ll see how that feels. One thing I’m enjoying about the podcast is the flexibility to change and I expect that to continue as I hear feedback from clients and others about what they—and you—find most valuable about learning better presentation skills.

Today’s topic is How to Present to Executives. I suspect that were it not for the feedback we get from clients I probably wouldn’t have prioritized this topic, but it’s become sort of a greatest hits request. We get asked this at every training session, even before we bring it up. Recently we were in California training a team of financial executives. When we asked what kind of challenges they face, one executive spoke up immediately and said he never got more than 2-3 minutes into a presentation before the executives in the room derailed his conversation and took it over. And more often than not he never got back to his point. He had to follow them down the rabbit hole because he lost control and couldn’t get it back.

Something weird happens in meetings that doesn’t happen in most of polite society. Imagine you were out to dinner with a group of friends and you start to tell them a story about your kid’s baseball team, or the crazy wedding reception you went to last weekend. At what point during your story would one of your friends interrupt you and start talking about how they’d rather hear about your vacation instead of the wedding reception. Uh, never! And if they did, everyone’s jaws would drop, right?

But there’s a power dynamic at play in meetings, with leadership at the top. There’s an expectation that they may interrupt and take you off track. There’s that saying that we serve at the pleasure of the king. That dynamic is very much at play in a meeting.

In our first podcast we talked about understanding your audience. That will be very helpful to understanding how to present to executives, so if you haven’t listened to that, it might be worth your time. Every leader is different. But you’ll see one common thread throughout the leadership ranks. They tend to challenge your ideas. To test and poke at the premise you put forth. That’s part of their job of course. Even if you’re a trusted lieutenant they’re going to do their due diligence, because they’re evaluating your ideas against the lens of making the right decision for the company. That’s never a small task.

There’s also a conventional wisdom that says that you need to keep it short. Keep it short! Cut to the chase. Executives are busy and won’t listen to anything but the key takeaways. We’ve seen a titanic shift in marketing recently toward short-form content. In a world of social media and YouTube videos, no one has patience to sit through anything long anymore, says the conventional wisdom. The website Quartz recently published a global executive study, what they describe as – what’s it say here, just a sec–a study of the media habits of the word’s smartest, busiest people. I’ll link to it in the description. They interviewed more than 1,300 execs across the world. If you’re at all interested in this kind of thing, it’s a really fascinating view into media consumption for this audience. And one thing really stuck out to me. The most shared form of content among executives were long-form articles, at 84% The second most shared were charts and graphs at 47%. That’s a huge gap.

I was surprised by it, I’ll admit. If you think about what it means to share content, you’re taking time to send it to someone else because you think they’ll be interested in it as well, obviously. But the conscious act of sharing is a statement. It’s saying “I took the time to read this and I think this is important.” What does that tell you? It says that if the content is compelling, interesting and important enough, executives will devote time to it.

How does this play into your own efforts? Well, it would be naïve to say that you’ve got the one story or bit of information that absolutely deserves his or her attention for as long as you need. But it is a helpful data point to know that the majority of executives like to go deep on a problem.

Which takes us back to understanding your audience. Is that your boss? Or your executive team? Is your topic one that’s been anticipated and therefore you have a bit of leeway? Or is it an update on an initiative and they just want the quick hit from you?

Keep in mind, If you’ve got ½ hour, you’ve probably only got 20-25 minutes between small talk, late arrivals, etc. Think of watching a sitcom on traditional TV. 30 minutes long, but 22 minutes of show and 8 minutes of commercials. If the meeting is an hour, you have more flexibility, but as you’ll see, you should think through how that hour breaks down.

So let’s dive into it. How do you present to executives?

I want to talk about three key concepts. Setting expectations, managing time, and answering questions.

One thing that’s challenging with executive presentations is that no two will be the same. If you think back to understanding your audience, you want to think about how your audience wants its information delivered. We trained an executive in one-on-one sessions last year who said he received feedback from the board of directors that he went into too much detail on the financials. He delivered a report in advance of his presentation that had all of the deep dive information. He then did the same deep dive during the presentation. And his audience was telling him—literally telling him—that it was too much…they had the deep dive, let’s talk about what it all means. I consider him very lucky. Most times people don’t get that kind of feedback from their team or their superiors. They just end up wondering why no one was listening, or why their audience was short with them, or why their PowerPoint was hijacked it because they weren’t getting what they needed.

So let’s start with setting expectations. How about that first guy I mentioned earlier, who said he lost control of his presentations a few minutes into each one? We asked to see a few of his PowerPoint presentations, which he shared with us. It didn’t take long to diagnose, because he fell into what I’ll call the abyss of vagueness. His titles, such as they were, were completely generic. Something like “4th Quarter Review.”  What does that mean? Review of what?

We also asked how he set up his meetings. For internal meetings, there was obviously a calendar invite. Did you describe the meeting in that invite? He looked at his calendar and sure enough, it was just a generic name in the invite. So what happens? Everyone shows up, shuffles into the room in the middle of a chaotic day with a hundred things on their mind and no clear idea why they’re here. You better believe that carries over to your presentation.

I have to be careful here because talking about these topics is a bit like pulling at a stray thread on a sweater. You soon find it’s all interconnected and one tug unravels the rest. The yarn I’m pulling on is all about setting up the idea for your presentation, and that’s an entire topic. But for now, let’s say this. Your title needs to be descriptive. It should articulate the point you’re going to make. Not, 4th Quarter Review. How about “4th Quarter Results Indicate Our Social Marketing Campaign is Delivering ROI.” NOW do you know what we’re going to talk about? Absolutely.

A descriptive title immediately sets the audience’s expectation. In fact, one of the good things that could happen here would be someone immediately speaking up and saying “wait, I thought this was about our TV ads, not social media.” And you can say ‘no, Steve, we’re going to talk about Social Media.’ Steve’s the guy who never reads the meeting invites. We suggest you state it right at the start. “I’m going to go over our 4th Quarter Social Media Marketing Campaign results and show how they’re delivering ROI.”

You can go further in setting expectations. Tell them exactly how you want to run the meeting. “I’m going to go over Four things today. First is a summary of our social media campaign. Second, I’ll review the actual creative we used in the campaign, and where we used it. Third, I’ll show where we saw the best and the worst results. And I’ll wrap up with where we recommend going in the next quarter.

Boom. Everyone in that room has a crystal-clear idea of how the next hour will go.

Our second concept is managing time.

We teach several approaches to presenting to executives. Some of it has to do with the hierarchy of your audience. If you’re also an executive and have parity with others in the room, you’ve got some additional leeway. The example I gave you about the social media campaign is probably a good one…you’ll have more control over the pace of the meeting, and the ability to limit interruptions. If you’re presenting to executives who are your bosses, or higher than that, you’ll have much less opportunity to dictate the terms. You may also have less insight into what to expect from your audience. We run into this occasionally when we present ideas to clients. If we’re inside a fortune 50 client, there are lots of times we’ll present at the marketing manager level. They are the people who implement the strategies set at the higher levels of a business group, for instance. They tend to be very collaborative meetings….more of a discussion. But if we’re presenting to their boss or higher, we may have little insight into how that audience wants information presented.

The approach I prefer is to ask for permission at the start of my presentation. It goes something like this. “Thank you for the time today to share the results on our 4th quarter social media marketing campaign. I’m going to talk about four things today (I’ll list them like before). Then I say something like “Each of these sections should take about five minutes. If you’ll allow me, I’d like cover each section, and then stop for questions. That way I can make sure I give you the best information I have before we dive in deeper on additional information you’d like.”

You’d be surprised at how well this works. By simply asking for permission, two things happen. First, you win some small appreciation from the audience by asking them to allow you to proceed the way you’d like…I mean, people like to give permission. It’s human nature to want to control a situation and you’ve let them do it. Secondly, you’ve got their explicit buy in to your approach. Now, if someone interrupts, you’ve got the ability to politely say “great question…I’m going to hold that until I finish this section like we said, and I’ll be sure it’s the first thing we address.” Whereas that might have come across rude without setting it up, here all you’re doing is reminding them of what they all agreed to.

Another way to manage time it to know you simply don’t have the ability to manage it at all. We’ve all been in meetings with the dominant leader. They interrupt early and often. You know it’s going to happen, and no amount of asking for permission at the start will work—and in fact might even backfire. Here, you might need to rethink your entire approach. You can assume you’ll spend most of your presentation answering questions and participating in a discussion that veers away from what you have on the screen or in your head.

If you’ve got a PowerPoint created, take a look at it with fresh eyes. And if you’re still thinking it through, even better. Here comes another tug at the thread on the sweater, because we also give a training session on developing the big idea and I’ll include that as part of a future podcast. Let’s keep it simple: What is the most important point you want to make? Some presentations you might build up to that idea. In other words, the most important point is the payoff at the end of a section of your presentation. That won’t work here. Lead with that point. Make it the first think you talk about. If you’ve built a descriptive title, you’ve got it right there on slide one.  “4th Quarter Results Indicate Our Social Marketing Campaign is Delivering ROI.”

Guess what slide 2 should be? It better show the ROI, right? I went to school for journalism and of course the first thing you learn is the inverted pyramid style of writing. The lead sentence in a news story covers the most important information. If a bank was robbed and the guys got away with a million dollars, you start by saying “Robbers at the 4th street branch of Acme bank successfully made off with a million dollars yesterday in a daring daytime heist.” That’s the lede. When you hear the term “he buried the lede,” they’re talking about someone giving unimportant information instead of what the audience wanted to know. So don’t bury the lede. Work backwards so your third most important point is third, etc.

That way when you’re inevitably interrupted, it’s likely to be focused on these important points and you can go deeper on them at the pace the exec wants to. And when you don’t get through the entire presentation, no big huge deal, you got through the key points.

The last thing I want to cover is answering questions.  

We train clients to reduce, reduce, reduce. The less information on a slide, the better the audience will do at retaining it. We work with them to boil down to one idea per slide, and that idea should support the central point of the presentation, the Big Idea as it were. This is an area of discomfort for most people. It’s VERY hard to get people to cut back copy. I’m working with someone right now on a presentation. He’s been invited to speak at a company’s national meeting. It’s basically an internal company meeting on a grand scale, with some outside influential speakers, of which he is one.

As we started planning his presentation, he kept saying I want it visual. Almost no copy. Well, he sent over his first draft for me to review, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s fully of spreadsheets, and copy blocks and bullet points. I’m like ‘my friend, this is a 180 from what you said you wanted.’ And he’s like yeah, but it’s all important and I need to show it.

Sound familiar?

So here are three approaches to solve it.

First, send out the content to your executive audience in advance. Unless you’re announcing the cure for cancer, or that you’re actually Luke Skywalkers’ father, chances are your audience isn’t waiting for a big reveal. So why not give it to them before you meet? It’s perfect for internal meetings. They can be prepped and you can focus on the discussion they want to have. The downside of this is often the information you send won’t get read in advance. You’ll need to consider if it’s actually something you can be sure will be reviewed, and then provide it in such a way that they can digest it. Sending an excel sheet with no context probably won’t work. Sending a presentation with short explanations of each of those excel sheets is better.

Second, keep the data in your presentation. I don’t think this is the ideal approach, but we’ve run into situations where we can’t remove it. We actually did work for a company that had presentation with 200 words on each slide. And when we recommended they pare it WAY back, they told us they were contractually obligated to show ALL of the data. So we worked with them to built a pace to their presentations that allowed for a LOT of stopping and focusing on a slide content in depth. We also helped them understand how to draw out the most important points visually, something I’ll talk about in future podcasts.  So if you HAVE to show the date, build in a lot of time to stop and discuss. And know that you’re much more likely to lose your audience as they read your content instead of listening to you.

Third, use an appendix. One of the great tricks inside of PPT is the ability to link to other slides. We call it non-linear slide presentations. But basically, you create a hyperlink from a slide to another slide in the appendix. And on THAT slide, you create a link back to the original slide. So as you present, you can keep your own pace, and if you get asked for backup data, you can pop into a deep dive slide. And if you don’t get asked, you can keep going. At worst, if you get tripped up with links, you can always just pop out to the PowerPoint slide sorter view and go where you need. We’re not presenting at the Oscars here and I address things like this very straight forward. I say “let me dive into the appendix to answer your question.” I get out of slideshow mode, go to the slide I want, and go back to slideshow mode. Simple. Don’t get tripped up by having to bounce around. Keep your presentation tight and focused, and have backup to answer questions.

I hope that helps you go more confidently into an executive presentation. Just remember: Set the expectation, manage your time, and be flexible with how you prepare to answer questions.

As before, I welcome feedback and your input. Let me know what’s working for you and what’s not. I’ll talk with you again soon on the next podcast. Thanks for listening.