EYN#043: How To Drive Action From A Presentation

In my experience people are pretty bad a driving action from a presentation. They treat it as an afterthought. But actually the next action is the whole point. If your educating people, you want them to use the knowledge after. If you're selling to people you want them to buy the thing after. If you're convincing people, you want them to make the right decision after.

Driving action and harnessing the energy you created in the presentation is so important. Often the presenter just sends a link to the 80Mb PowerPoint file they used. But great visual aids are not great documents and great documents are not great visual aids. Bad plan.

If you're not thinking about what happens after, you're missing the point, reducing your effectiveness and doing your audience a disservice.

Begin With The End In Mind

One of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “Begin with the end in mind”. We need to think about what happens after the presentation before we even start to deliver it. Mr Covey knew what he was talking about.

So if we're agreed that the next steps or call to action is really important, how do you do it? Well, here's my approach. Plan them in advance and make the next steps:

• Easy
• Valuable
• Accessible
• Complementary

Easy

People will take an easy step. But if the step is too much effort they won't (unless they are super committed and most people won't be super committed … yet.) So give them an easy next step on the journey.

What sort of next steps are easy? Well it depends on your situation. But things like attend another event, join a community, watch a video, book a more in depth meeting.

Valuable

The next step needs to help them in the journey towards their destination. It needs to be valuable to them. It needs be of benefit for them. It needs to be relevant .

Your job is to communicate that value with them so they're highly motivated to take the next step. You can actually seed that next step throughout your entire presentation. Then when you finally reveal how to take the next step they're genuinely excited.

Accessible

Make the next steps accessible and simple to find. People will not take the steps if it's hard to find them.

My favourite approach is to build a website landing page that has all the next steps in one place. Then I share the link to the page on the slides by both address and QRCode. 30 seconds on their phone and folks have completed the next action. I've had follow up meetings booked in my diary by customers before the presentation is finished using this approach.

You could do this on an internet page, a blog platform, or your main company website if you have access. Here's an example landing page.

Complementary

There's lots of things you can't do in a presentation. For example you can't go into detail on every situation or you can't get people hands on with the tech to have a play. But that's how lots of people learn, make decisions and take action.

So complement what you say by giving them access to the detail that complements what you've said. That could be:

• Hands on labs - People love to actually play with the product.
• Specifications - You can't cover every use case in a presentation. Make the detail available.
• Data - Your insight might be based on data. Share the data for people that want to ratify your opinion.

People can't take everything onboard from just watching and listening. So make the next actions complement and reinforce what you've said from other angles.

Well there we go. "Begin With End In Mine". Use your presentation to drive action and help your audience reach their destination.

I hope this helps.

Cheers

Ben

-------------------------------------

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

• Podcast:  The latest episode is "Could Apprenticeships Solve The Digital Skills Gap?" with Luke Smith. Check it out on the Elevated You website,  Apple, Spotify, YouTube or Amazon Podcasts.
• Technical Storytelling Essentials: Accelerate your career, increase your impact and influence people.  Affordably priced, world-class course digital course for individuals.
• Technical Storytelling for Organisations: Programs designed to increase the impact of your team.  Inspire, develop and motivate your team to influence key stakeholders and generate action with your customers.