Technology Presentations Top Five Messages

Now that you define what your actual goal is you’ve got a brainstorm on messages that are going to motivate people to do what it is you want them to do.

You could come up with 50 ideas 100 300.

You can have fact sheets 20 pages long.

That’s fine.

But then you need to put them in priority.

And here’s the hard part.

Emotionally this is tough to do.

You got to throw away everything that isn’t in your top five or at least put it in the PowerPoint that you’re going to e-mail or hand out to people later.

But not what you’re going to talk about in your presentation.

Now I hear something.

So T.J. That’s ridiculous I’m a technologist.

Of course I have to walk people through all those.

No you don’t.

That’s simply not the role of a presentation.

Now if you’ve got an engineering team they want to come figure how to take it all apart and they’ve got two days.

Yeah you’re gonna have to really go into detail but a technology presentation that is less than an hour.

You simply do not have the luxury of going into every single detail you’ve got to put a spotlight on the top five reasons that would motivate someone to do what you want.

And you got to spend time doing it.

So for example when Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air he didn’t just go into all the steps of how it was created all the specs of how tiny every screw is how much each little part weighed.

He didn’t show slide after slide after slide of this layer in this layer in this layer.

Now what did he do.

He had an envelope brought out on stage and said How then is this computer thin enough to fit in this on below.

He carries the envelope across the stage.

He slowly undoes the envelope.

He slowly pulls it out of the envelope.

People go.

He was in no hurry whatsoever.

He then holds it up and shows how light it almost bounces on one finger.

He shows how thin it is how light it is because he figured that was what would motivate people to buy that laptop.

The idea that is simply thinner and lighter than any other laptop that was his message.

So he was more than happy to spend a lot of time making that message come alive.

The theatrics of the arm blow the prop of the envelope.

It all worked beautifully.

So that’s my challenge to you now figure out what its top five messages are going to be in your technology presentation and really make sure they’re messages that are important to your own.

Not important to you your engineering team may think it’s really important to them that everything is made out of titanium.

Consumers might not care.

So you’ve got to really narrow the focus down.

One of the top five message points that you really want to convey in this technology presentation do it now.