When a business presentation is too rigidly structured (with strictly ordered slides and a one-size-fits-all script), there’s no room for adaptability. Presenters are forced to wade through slide after slide of superfluous topics to reach the stuff that’s relevant to a particular customer. With a shift in approach, you can easily turn presentations into dialogues that are collaborative, dynamic, and engaging enough to keep viewers tuned in from beginning to end.
Instead of telling a story slide by slide, conversational presenting can be achieved using a single space. This space can be explored in new ways each time, just like a digital map. Imagine your entire presentation laid out with an infinite variety of route combinations to get from Point A to Point B, or Point C, or Point Z. Rather than committing a sequence of information to memory, this map-like arrangement encourages you to learn the parts of your story individually and move through them at will. You’ll feel more confident and more prepared and your audience will sense this, too.
No matter how terrific your content, it will fail to have an impact if your audience can’t remember it once you’ve gone. If you want to make a lasting impression, you need to deliver a message that’s memorable. Conversations do a good job of sticking with us because when we exchange dialogue with someone, our brain activity literally begins to mirror theirs. Science calls this process neural coupling, but in business you can think of it as being on the same page.