B (4:02)

Yeah. When I present for the company, for a client, or for a public conference, and we do ground rules, I have a ground rule called reciprocity. Obviously, you can't do that when you're giving a presentation at an industry conference or even at another company. But reciprocity means the way I say it is, hey, when you guys ask me a question, you expect me to talk verbally, Right. And of course, the audience doesn't get it. They're like, yeah. They nod their heads. I'm like, okay, I just asked you a question. So when you ask me a question, you expect me to answer verbally, right? And then people go, right. And then I say, so reciprocity is when I ask you a question, I expect you to answer verbally.

A (4:45)

So.

B (4:45)

So if I ask a question and nobody answers, it's not rhetorical, I'm going to think that I'm off track or that I didn't ask the question. Right. So give me some feedback so we can have a good exchange here.

A (4:56)

Yeah. And. And last point on this one, folks. Smile, please. Smile, for goodness sake. Just do it. Just do it. It's good. They. They will like you more.

B (5:06)

I don't care that you're not comfortable smiling. This is not about you. It's about the audience and their comprehension. And smiling is a universally accepted way to connect with people. And there's one of you and 250 of them, so you better be smiling an awful lot. Next, questions. Find out from your organizers how questions are going to be handled or how they recommend that you handle them. In some cases, they're fine with you taking questions as you go. And this is absolutely our recommendation every single time. If you make people wait until the end of your talk, many will forget their question, some will see no questions as a chance to have a longer break, and your presentation will end with a thud. So it's better to get questions in line. By the way, an audience who understands they can ask a question of you and you can handle the question and pick right back up where you left off. They love that. They think, well, this person's totally prepared. Whereas the person who says, oh no, I can't take any questions till the end, you'll lose part of the audience for that because they'll assume that you're not as knowledgeable as they have been led to believe in that you're speaking to them.

A (6:21)

Yeah. And folks, if you're wanting this interaction throughout the presentation and you're worried you may not get it, there would be nothing wrong with having a plant. I mean, presumably, worst case, you've gotten there the morning of and you were having breakfast, at least with the attendees. Talk to some people, say, hey, I really want my presentation to be interactive. Would you mind chiming in early on in the presentation? I'd like to get the conversation started, get someone to break the ice. I don't know if you remember me doing this, Mark, but when we were preparing this year for the MC Conference and David Booth's presentation, it was a business case. The first time we'd ever done a business case at the EM conference. And I was worried that not enough people would chime in. So I said to Mark, hey, start chiming in early and often if people aren't talking so that they get the point. We should be talking more during this presentation. So, yeah, have a plan.

B (7:15)

Yeah. In fact, I can't imagine another conference without another business case. They're hard to do. But David Booth of Gallo just absolutely killed it. And we were talking about whether to invest $35 million at headquarters or $80 million in another state. And we had to look at sales volumes and sales growth and the effects of various worker Laws on one state versus another. And of course, the audience didn't realize, probably not having been exposed to the case study mentality, that what you're supposed to do during a case, during a business case presentation, is ask questions, particularly around things that haven't been said because you don't have time to learn everything the presenter knows to help you. Help the presenter give you more information rather than just doing a data dump on you. It was really, really good. One of the things that I do, if I'm presenting, let's say I'm presenting in the afternoon or oh, by the way, if the organizer says you can have your choice of slots, I'll tell you what I say. I say give me the last time slot of the day because I'm going to light them up and I want more chance to talk to people when the day is done and then go into dinner with them and have people come around and want to talk to me about what we do and how we do it and so on. I'm not worried about being the last presenter of the day. Now, you may be, that's okay. But if you really want to go for it, ask to talk at the end of the day.

A (8:43)

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Now, the one thing that might throw a little bit of a monkey wrench into this dialogue throughout that we just mentioned is if the organizer is recording video. Now, if the organizer is recording video, they may need to have microphones throughout.

B (9:01)

The audience to capture questions on the audio with the video.

A (9:05)

Yeah, exactly. Otherwise the questions can't be heard on the video itself. Which means that before anybody ever asks a question, they're gonna have to get their hands on a microphone.

B (9:14)

Exactly.

A (9:14)

Which is gonna slow down the energy of your talk. So be aware, know in advance that this is going to happen so that you can prepare for this outcome. There's nothing you can do about it other than repeating the question and answering it quickly and emphatically.

B (9:30)

Okay. All this said, even though inline questions are better for you, they're better for the audience, they're better for comprehension, they're better for energy. The audience may have been told to wait, to ask questions at the end. We don't like it, we don't recommend it, it's fundamentally wrong. But it happens. And in many cases it happens because the organizers think they're protecting the speakers, because the speakers need to not be interrupted, which means they're not good speakers. Be ready for this if you're told that's the way it's going to be by not taking your full hour and leaving perhaps 10 minutes for questions. And by the way, if you get no questions for the record, you didn't do well. Sorry.

A (10:16)

And it could be a byproduct of the fact that they had to wait and they forgot their question.

B (10:20)

Yeah.

A (10:20)

And then they didn't write it down. And now it's unnecessary. All these things. And folks stick around in the room afterwards. If there's a scheduled break, great. Go outside the room. If folks want to talk and ask more questions, don't present last of the day and then have to jet right and take off immediately. You want to stick around. You want people to want to interact with you, network with you, connect with you. Maybe all of those things are good things. Remember all of our conferences, the effective manager, effective communicator, effective hiring manager, effective senior manager, and even the effective executive conference are available not only as public offerings, but can be brought to you and your organization. You need us to make some changes? Yes, we can customize the material for your team. Just send us an email and ask us how to customer service@manager-tools.com and we hope to see you at your office.

B (11:21)

Next on the agenda is room, the room you're going to be presenting in. So ask about the setup of the room. Will it be theater style, which means there's no tables, or will attendees be seated at round tables? By the way, if they do have round tables, usually for presentations, they will seat people in what is known as half rounds with only chairs available on the half furthest away from the speaker so they don't have to turn their back on the table they're sitting at in order to watch you.

A (11:52)

And folks, what I would say of that is, again, it's not, not all events are going to seat people at half rounds. Rather, they might have people all the way around the table. It's a poor planning mistake, but it'll happen. And you're going to want to take that into account when you're preparing for your presentation because you're going to need to know that a bunch of people are not going to have tables in front of them and if they have to take notes, they're going to have to be taking them on their lap. And that could change your presentation and how you want to deliver it. Additionally, know that the bigger the audience, the more likely it would be that it'll be a theater style audience. And for theater style handouts is problematic, just like it is when you're at a full round and and your back is to your table. Sometimes rooms with half Rounds make it hard for moving among the audience tables. As we said earlier, we encourage you to get off the stage if you have a lav mic and walk around in the audience. So you're going to want to know that because it's going to be trickier for you to navigate that room, you may need to stay near the front.

B (12:57)

If your room is set up classroom style with everyone at rectangular conference tables and long rows, there'll be aisles you can walk up and down, but we don't recommend you try to walk down one of the rows of seats and tables. That's just. I've seen people try to do it and it's crazy. So. And make sure folks, when you get to the venue to go immediately to the room. If it's locked, find a hotel houseman and ask to be let in. Tell them you're a speaker for the event. I'll also add, you may have heard this phrase before. In hotels there's something called front of the house and back of the house. And in virtue, for every conference room at that hotel, there is a place, a swinging door rather than a locked door, where you can go into the back of the house. Now, if it's 8 o' clock at night, you shouldn't have a problem. If it's busy, bustling day, it may be a problem. They'll say, can we help you? And you're now in the back of the house where you're not supposed to be. But I do this all the time. When we get locked out of the front of a room, I'll go to a side door, find where the swinging door is. That gets me into the kitchen area and the support area and the storage areas. And I'll walk down a back corridor, normally just with CMU lined with CMU block and tables stacked and chairs stacked and rolling tables and all kinds of stuff. And I'll find the back door entrance. It's very rare that the back door entrance to a room is locked because they assume they don't have to lock it for hotel staff. And so that way you can get in. If you can't do that, go to the front desk, explain, they'll call security and somebody will get you in. It'll take a half an hour of your life, but it's worth it to see the room before you walk in the morning of and then realize, oh, this is not the room they told me it was. How am I going to adjust? Do the adjusting the night before. Don't be surprised the day of or an hour before. Heaven forbid.

A (14:53)

Yeah, exactly. All right, that takes us to video. And we touched on some aspects of video earlier when we were talking about microphones. But ask the organizer if there's going to be a video taken of the event and. Or your presentation for one. You might want a copy of your video for your own professional development. But there are also a few other reasons. First, sometimes when video is taken, presenters are asked to stay on stage, which again, violates your ability to be able to walk down on the ground, but also means that you need to stay fairly static in what amounts to a 10 foot by 10 foot box because you're staying within this range. Makes it easier for the videographer.

B (15:37)

Yeah, the videographer doesn't have to swing the camera around. And it costs to have a videographer standing there swinging the camera around.

A (15:44)

Absolutely it does. But it's also very bad for the presenters, the ones that are smart enough to move around anyway. And again, you want to be moving around to increase that energy in the room when you're the only one moving around. Also, if they're videotaping, then it's likely. Again, questions from the audience are going to require audience members have a microphone in order for their questions to be picked up on the video itself. And again, it really slows down the energy that you're hoping in your presentation to instill in the audience. And regardless of whether or not they have microphones, we recommend you repeat the questions that you are asked and then answer the questions.

B (16:30)

Okay, next item on the agenda. Screens. Ask about how your slides are going to be presented to the audience. Sometimes it's one screen, often centered on the stage, but sometimes there are two separate screens placed roughly at either side of the stage. It's particularly true for bigger rooms to have two screens with more attendees. Right. Though it is also meant to address rooms that are less deep but more wide. And so it may not be that big a room. But if we're presenting on the short axis and the wall behind us is only 30 or 40ft behind us, but the walls to our sides are. Are 80ft away, they're probably going to have to have two screens. By the way, if you're presenting in a. A wide but not deep or short room, it's not good for sound or for project or projecting energy. But you don't get to make that decision. And plenty of organizers aren't aware of acoustics and so on.

A (17:38)

Absolutely. And folks, be ready to adjust where you stand based on where those screens are. You can easily stay in the middle if there are Two screens, one on either side of you. But if there's one, you may want to spend most of your time on one side or the other of the screen, essentially switching back and forth, walking across in front of where your slides are so that most of the audience can see your slides on the screen.

B (18:07)

And.

A (18:08)

And depending on again, the size and the makeup of your room, you can make eye contact with everyone in the room. Yes, because that's part of the problem. I'm going to say the risk with having only one screen is that people are having to crane their necks and they're having to choose between presenter and the slides themselves. And you moving around puts you more likely in their eye shot.

B (18:32)

Yeah. Also, this is another reason why they shouldn't have podiums on the screen on the stage, because the podium blocks some people from being able to see one or both of the screens.

A (18:42)

Yeah.

B (18:43)

Okay, now, next item on the agenda. Your introduction. You're going to be asked to submit an introduction for yourself. This is going to be read by someone on the organizing team. For the record, when introductions are read, they are uniformly horrible. The person who reads it won't have studied it, they won't extemporize, they're just going to read it to make sure they get it exactly right. And it's going to be terrible, it's going to be dry.

A (19:15)

So therefore, because you're creating your own pre or your own introduction here, the first rule is it must be short. Most presenters make the mistake of thinking it's better to give their full professional background awards where they're from, a little bit stuff about family to personalize it. And all of these things mean a huge long introduction, which is a huge mistake.

B (19:38)

Red with no energy.

A (19:39)

Yes, exactly. Red with no energy. The more words there are, the more likely they're going to be reading ad nauseam off of this piece of paper. You're the presentation, not your talk and certainly not your introduction. No amount of accolades listed in your introduction unless you're incredibly famous are going to make your talk any better. They're not going to give you any more credibility. But long, poorly read introductions are going to turn your audience off before you even start. And the longer the introduction, the less time you have to present. So if you really, really want to use every minute you've got, if you give a five minute introduction paragraph for them to read, yeah. It's going to take time away from you.

B (20:23)

That's 10% of your time gone in an hour long talk. Your introduction should have your name, your role, your organization and the purpose of your talk, Something simple and direct like. Sarah Horstman is the managing partner of Manager Tools, the number one business podcast in history with over a quarter of a billion downloads. You will learn from her how to pre wire a meeting. That's it. They won't mess that up. Three sentences. Actually, it's only two sentences.

A (20:57)

Yeah. And that's something that is far more likely to be memorized, frankly.

B (21:01)

Yeah.

A (21:02)

All right, let's wrap it up, folks. Presenting at a conference is really great for your career. If you do well, you're going to get more chances to speak in the future. And if you're really good, you might even be asked to, or you might even get paid to do it. But to do it well, you have to master all of these factors. But of course, it starts with the mastery of your materials and rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal. You can't throw it together and just expect it to be great. It won't be great. It won't be. Thank you, Mark.

B (21:37)

Thank you, Sarah.

A (21:38)

Thanks so much for joining us, folks. We hope this helped you. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only, please. Bye, everyone.