For the first few moments of a presentation you are guaranteed the attention of your audience.

See it as a gift.

If you work at it you’ll keep their attention for the rest of the time but even if you lose it, those first few moments should not be squandered. So don’t waste it, and kill your presentation before it’s even started, by doing the following:

• talking about background and history of the subject area
• describing your organisation with charts and names
• talking about your experience with more than one item from your CV
• describing your organisation, “all about us”, to outsiders. They want to know what you can do for THEM
• telling a joke or anecdote. It’s hard to do this well and often just keeps the audience waiting. So even if the joke is relevant, wait until later and just get the talk started
• describing your organisation…
• apologising for being late, for equipment not working properly, for not preparing enough, for not really being an expert (!), for bad slides etc
• describing your organisation…
• fumbling around with notes and trying to think of something to say to start
• Uhh, did I mention describing your organisation?

Sorry about the rant, but I just sat through another of those endless company descriptions. The speaker ran out of time at the end when we got to the benefits of their service. Would you believe it? Such is life in corporate presentation land. Hope you’re having better luck out there.