PowerPoint Tip: Radio station WIMTT
Have you been listening to radio station WIMTT lately? What? You aren’t familiar with that station? Worried that it doesn’t broadcast in your local area? Well it is available in every local radio market in the world and it is the single most important station for presenters to listen to. The programming is key to effective presentations, but far too many presenters ignore the valuable content it provides. What is station WIMTT? It is a radio station you don’t listen to with a traditional or satellite radio. It is a station you listen to with the radio in your head. The call letters WIMTT stand for “What It Means To Them”. The focus of your presentation is the audience, and if you aren’t listening to their needs and desires, your presentations will fail. Don’t spend your time thinking of what you want to say, spend your energy thinking of what your points mean to the audience. Look at things from their point of view, not your own. Excited about a feature of your product? They don’t care. What they want to know is what benefit they will get from that feature. Jazzed to tell the audience all the background data you’ve worked so hard to prepare? Sorry, they don’t care. They want to know what it means to them and the key decisions they will need to make. Too often presenters fall into the trap of thinking that just because they feel the data or information is important, so will the audience. This leads to presentations that end up being nothing more than a deluge of data that the audience has no hope in figuring out. And if you are presenting to decision makers, they certainly won’t be making the decision you are hoping for. Next time you sit down to create a presentation, tune your mental radio to station WIMTT. You’ll end up with a presentation that is far more effective and your audience will appreciate it. If you are relatively new to presenting, this tip is one that will cause you to rethink the approaches you might have observed from others. Once you have developed your key messages based on what the audience will want to hear, the next step is to create PowerPoint slides for your presentation. My book “Guide to PowerPoint” will help you create effective slides with both design and “how to” guidance. Check it out at http://www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com/guidetoppt.htm .