If you’re giving an innovative presentation to a large group at an association meeting, convention, or trade show, your presentation can be sequential and tightly structured. However, if you give a presentation where you expect a lot of questions or requests for more specific information, such as in a sales situation, your content and visuals need a flexible organization so you can quickly and smoothly respond to changing conditions.
What would you do if you find out just a few minutes before beginning an important presentation that instead of having the scheduled 45 minutes, you now have just 15 minutes? In that kind of situation, you must re-engineer your presentation. With some careful planning ahead of time, you can quickly adjust.
By preparing the following three levels of information, the more time you have, the deeper you go, whereas if your time is cut short, you cover the first level and pick and choose appropriate information from the other two.
Level 1: Summary: Communicate your main points and critical highlights. This is the distilled essence of your presentation and can stand alone as a presentation if necessary.
Level 2: Planned: This level contains the talk you originally planned for your allotted time with content at the appropriate level of detail to fill the allotted time. With less time, choose the most salient points to add to Level 1.
Level 3: Extra: Prepare more detailed or tangential content and visuals that you use to answer specific questions from the audience.
Most presentation apps let you create hyperlinks, which can be graphics or text that you click to jump to other, non-sequential, visual content in your presentation. Hyperlinks make your presentation impressively interactive because you can swiftly go right to the information or visual you need rather than click through slide after slide until you get to it.
Don’t let extra information go to waste: Consider preparing handouts or publishing the information on your website.