Let me be honest with you. I’ve sat through hundreds of presentations in my career — project kick-offs, stakeholder reviews, solution walkthroughs, board updates — and most of them were forgettable. Not because the content was bad, but because the delivery buried it.
Since the past year or so, I’ve also been on the other side. Early in my career, I thought a great presentation meant having every slide packed with data and reading my speaker notes with confidence. Someone pulled me aside after one session and said, “That was thorough, but I zoned out halfway through.” That stung. But it changed how I think about presenting. And then started a journey understanding and learning how to present.
If you’re a functional analyst, business process consultant, architect, or part of any IT delivery team, you’re probably presenting fairly regularly to clients, to executives, to cross-functional teams. You’ve got something valuable to say. This guide is about making sure people actually hear it. And also a milestone for me to re-visit every time I have to prepare and give a presentation.
First, Understand What You’re Up Against
My first step of preparation is to understand the following: your audience isn’t neutral when you walk in. The chances are high that they are stressed.
Research confirms what most of us already go through daily (specifically in the IT domain). Professionals in back-to-back meetings operate in a near-constant state of cognitive overload. They’re checking Teams, half-thinking about their last meeting, and mentally drafting the email they need to send after yours. Neuroscience calls this a “survival” emotional state: fight, flight, or freeze.
And to make the presenter’s life difficult further, even when they’re paying attention, audiences typically retain as little as 10% of what they hear on a busy workday. That’s not an insult to your audience. It’s just how the human brain works.
So if you walk in and start with three slides of background context, you’ve lost them before you’ve begun. The game isn’t about covering everything you know. It’s about making one thing land.
Step 1: Know Who You’re Talking To (Really Know Them)
Before you open PowerPoint, stop. Ask yourself: what does a typical Tuesday look like for the person in that room?
This isn’t a soft exercise. It’s strategic. When I’m prepping for a senior stakeholder presentation, I map out their daily pressures:
- Are they context-switching between five workstreams?
- Are they worried about budget or delivery risk?
- Do they care deeply about this topic, or are they attending because they have to?
Then I ask: what do they feel, think, and do right now in relation to my topic and what do I want them to feel, think, and do after I’m done?
Let’s call this the current state vs. desired state gap. Here’s an example for a HR service delivery workshop:
| Current State | Desired State |
|---|---|
| The team uses a legacy system with a lot of manual copy-pasting when transferring cases between teams. They do this as a workaround to circumvent GDPR security rules. | They see how automated case creation eliminates duplication, and they’re ready to champion the new process to their teams. |
Filling in that table before you write a single slide changes everything. It keeps me focused on their problem, not the solution.
One more thing: don’t overestimate what they know. If you assume a high baseline and open with technical jargon, you’ll lose even the ones who were paying attention. Introduce your topic quickly, explain why you care about it, and give them a reason to care too.
Step 2: Lead With Your North Star
Most presenters save their main point for the end. Don’t.
Borrowing from journalism — never bury the lead. Your North Star message is the single most important, compelling statement you want your audience to walk away with. And it should be the first thing out of your mouth.
Something like: “We’ve found a way to reduce case resolution time by 40%. I want to share three ideas that I believe could protect over €1 million in service delivery costs over the next 12 months.”
That’s it. That’s the whole job of your opening. Not a title slide read-aloud, not a lengthy agenda. A statement that makes the person in the room stop thinking about their inbox.
There’s a neurological reason this works. Surprise, genuine and relevant surprise, is the only emotion that can shift an audience from a stressed, distracted state to a curious, receptive one. A bold North Star creates that moment.
And then, you say it again at the end. The primacy effect (we remember what comes first) and the recency effect (we remember what comes last) are your best allies. Use both.
Step 3: Build Sticky Moments
You’ve got your North Star. Now you need key messages that support it. In my experience, Three is a good number to limit.
But what makes the moments stick is that the messages are stated, not felt. And things we feel, we remember.
So how do I prepare for these sticky moments? I do it as with my toolkit:
- A story or anecdote. A real customer turnaround. Or a moment where the old process failed someone. Stories activate the brain differently than data. Use them.
- A striking visual. Not a wall of text. A photo, a diagram, a metaphor made visual — like a leaky bucket to represent revenue loss, or a relay race baton to show how work is handed off between teams.
- An interactive moment. Pull up a live dashboard. Change the data in real time. Let your audience see the impact rather than being told about it.
- A surprising data point. Lead with the number they didn’t expect. Let the room sit with it for a second.
- A pause. Seriously. Silence is underrated. A well-placed pause after a key point gives people time to absorb what you just said.
The research on this is consistent: emotional engagement is what converts a presentation from something people endure into something they remember and act on.
Step 4: Design Slides That Help, Not Hinder
Here’s a principle I learnt after my manager pulled me aside and said: information is only interesting once.
When you put a paragraph of text on a slide and then read it aloud, you’re making your audience receive the same information twice, simultaneously. It feels repetitive. It feels like you don’t trust them to read. And the moment they sense you’re reading to them, the connection is gone.
Your slides aren’t your speaker notes. Your slides are for your audience. They should:
- Show the takeaway visually, not list the reasoning in bullet points
- Use imagery and metaphor to make abstract ideas tangible
- Leave room for you, the slide frames the point, you make it land
And sometimes the right slide is no slide at all.
Step 5: Deliver Like a Human Being
Let’s admit one thing, delivery matters more than content. I know. It’s uncomfortable. But it’s true.
A few things that make a real difference:
Eye contact. You don’t need to scan the whole room constantly. Instead, find five or six friendly-looking faces in different parts of the room and speak to them directly, as if you’re catching up a friend on something interesting. For virtual presentations, turn your camera on. Always.And look into the camera. Not to your side screen, not to the notes.
Body language. Keep your lower body still. Swaying or shifting your weight reads as nervous, even if you don’t feel it. Use your hands naturally within a comfortable range in front of you. On camera, think of an invisible square in front of you — keep your gestures within it.
Don’t read. Use bullet points as anchors, then speak naturally around them. The moment you start reading, you lose the room. I know this from personal experience — I used to write out full speaker notes and deliver them almost verbatim. Someone told me it sounded robotic. I recorded myself to check. They were right.
Q&A as a feature, not an afterthought. For senior or high-stakes audiences — executives, clients, steering committees — consider keeping your presentation to 10 minutes and letting a Q&A session carry the rest. It gives them agency and often produces more value than another 20 slides.
Nerves are fine. Your audience expects them, and they’re actually rooting for you. Showing a bit of authentic vulnerability often draws people in rather than pushing them away.
What Not to Do (The Short List)
I’ve made most of these mistakes myself at some point:
- No central idea. If your presentation doesn’t have a narrative spine, it’s just a collection of slides. People leave unsatisfied.
- Too much content. The impulse to cover everything is real. Resist it. Less, deeper, is always better than more, shallower.
- Making it about yourself or your organization. Audiences care about ideas and stories. They don’t want a company highlight reel or a list of your achievements. Focus on the problem you’re solving.
- Jargon overload. If you’re not sure whether your audience knows a term, assume they don’t. Explain it simply or drop it.
- Over-rehearsing or Winging it. There’s a valley of awkwardness between “winging it” and “performance.” You want to land in the space where you know your content well enough to speak naturally, not recite.
The One Thing to Take Away
If you do nothing else from this guide, do this: decide what one thing you want your audience to remember, and build your entire presentation around making that thing stick.
Everything else — the slides, the stories, the structure — is in service of that one idea.
Practice it out loud. Record yourself. Watch it back. It’s uncomfortable the first time. Do it anyway. The gap between how we think we present and how we actually present is almost always instructive.
The good news? This stuff is learnable. Every presentation is a chance to get a little better. And over time, with intention and practice, you stop dreading the room — and start owning it.
Sources: Harvard Business Review, MIT Technology Review, LinkedIn Learning
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