Great Practical Tips for Presentations
Rands has a good article on presentations:
I agreed with all of it, especially ‘practice’ and ‘improvise’. They really need to play off of each other: practice so that your general pacing is established and you have something to go with, improvise to keep things fresh, try new stuff, and adapt to your audience.
We did a pitch in January, and one of our guys had a tendency to woodenly repeat the same memorized pitch over and over again. After a few passes I got him to drop the script and work on the basic principles instead, and then the pitch got a lot better.
I like bulleted lists that are more like references than sentences. They give a bit of shape to what I’m saying without saying it for me, so I don’t appear to just be reading the sheet to people (a major pet peeve of mine). Also, it gives people an instant rough outline about what you are going to say and also gives them an immediate recap before the next slide.
But the bullet points should just be a loose outline of what you are actually talking about.
Most of the actual meaning of the pitch should come from the dialog and the figures.