Innovative Presentations For Dummies
Book image
Explore Book Buy On Amazon

How do you go about reimagining, reinventing, and remaking your presentation to ensure you have an innovative presentation? There are four basic steps to do it. These steps outline the innovation process and are followed by several examples.

[Credit: Illustration courtesy of Ray Anthony and Barbara Boyd]
Credit: Illustration courtesy of Ray Anthony and Barbara Boyd
  1. Set innovative objectives.

    Every presentation should involve the basics of analyzing your audience, the situation you’re dealing with, the likely competition you’re facing, and the goals you set for getting your intended results. After you do that, you can figure out just how innovative your presentation needs to be to reach your goals.

    Innovative presentations often take more time and resources to be effective. Why use a sledgehammer when a light tap will do? If you stand little initial chance of winning your audience over, you have nothing to lose if you engineer a bold and daringly different presentation.

  2. Determine the ideal characteristics of your presentation.

    Take a look at the various combinations of characteristics you need to reach your goals. Essentially all good presentations should be clear, concise, and convincing, right? But, what if you’re giving a sales presentation for an important deal, for example, and you’re going against two brutal competitors who have an edge to win the deal?

    That’s when you also have to communicate in a captivating, compelling, and ultra-credible fashion to make your presentation blow away your competitors. If you’re giving a motivational talk, you may have to ramp up the inspiring, amusing, and entertaining characteristics to engage your audience and get them committed to your advice.

  3. Mix creative ideas with technology.

    Here is where you brainstorm what creative ideas, tools, strategies, and approaches you can use with what technology.

    If you determine that your technical topic (to a non-technical group) needs to be simplified and clear, understandable, and captivating, you may want to use 3-D animations to show the audience how your topic unfolds, clever metaphors to give your topic a common ground of reference, and perhaps 3-D printed props or models that show people what your topic is about.

    Say, for example, that you’re leading an important team presentation located in your company’s meeting room to close a big deal with a client involving building a planned community. You may decide to decorate your room with customized signs and presentation boards to impress your prospective buyer.

    In terms of talent, you may ask one of your company’s most senior executives to give a five-minute talk on your company’s commitment to the prospect. And you may want to create customized videos and virtual flyovers and walkthroughs to show your company’s impressive design for the planned community.

    Each innovative presentation involves integrating a mix of creative ideas and approaches with different technologies. Some have more creativity and less technology, others have more technology and less creativity depending upon how you perform Steps 1 and 2.

  4. Design and deliver for desired outcomes.

    This is where you actually develop, put together, and then deliver your presentation for specific results. You combine content, visuals, handouts, and resources from your creative ideas and the technology you chose to use to meet the goals you developed in Step 1. Your planning and execution of it pays off in this final step.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

Ray Anthony has helped Fortune 500 clients close multi-million dollar deals by designing and developing extraordinarily innovative, solution-selling presentations with superior value propositions for his clients. Barbara Boyd has worked as a marketing and technology consultant for more than 10 years and is the author of several books.

This article can be found in the category: