In my 25+ years leading strategy across a range of advertising and marketing roles, I have now pitched solutions with a combined value of several hundred million dollars to global and local clients, sat through thousands of sales presentations. And I’ve seen great ideas fail to connect when the presenter and the idea get lost in the slides more times than I care to remember.

When it comes to landing that idea, selling a solution and convincing others to take action, there is one major mistake that can set a presentation up to fail from the very start.

No reason to care

It all begins when the audience isn’t clearly defined, and a need they have isn’t placed front and centre of the narrative. What then follows is a presentation that inevitably focuses only on what the presenter wants to share.

This self-preoccupation leads to an introspective narrative. Instead of drawing the audience in, the presentation can trigger a mindset of seeking to find flaws, agitation as they try to make sense of what this means, and even outright rejection of the idea or concept being shared.

The workings of the brain dictate that we are intrinsically drawn to narratives that involve us. And the earlier that happens in the story, the better. When a story is relatable, we add our own thoughts, reinforced through the emotions we associate with the experience. This all aids our understanding and recall.

Solve something that matters to them

A presentation without a problem to solve is a presentation without a purpose. You are essentially presenting your ideas and hoping to find a problem they might solve, and if you don’t, your ideas will have no value.

To take the audience on your journey, showing how you solve their problem, you don’t just need to know what the high-level problem is -- you need to understand what it means to them, what the impact is of having this problem and what could be at stake if it isn’t solved. This fundamental understanding is core not just to how your presentation can be crafted around a compelling story but how stories are structured to bring a reader in. This understanding does more than provide a nice way into your story. It is critical to how you establish the value in your ideas for your audience and how you curate the content to make this clear to them.

Dale Carnegie makes his view on this very clear in his classic book on interpersonal persuasion, How to Win Friends and Influence People:

‘You are interested in what you want...the rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want. So, the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.’

Starting with a clear understanding of your audience and the change you see as being possible for them means you can take them on a journey with a narrative addressing how you help shift the current reality of your audience and take them to a better place.

Checking for balance

With your content organised around this narrative, you can perform one final check of the overall balance to ensure your presentation connects and delivers the much-needed engagement to move the audience to action.

This critical balance is achieved when you have what and how in combination with why this matters.

Within each section of your content, you should review your main points and ask yourself, is it:

• What or how you do something – which is about you.
• What it does for them (benefits/impact on their problem) – which is about them.
• Clearly demonstrates a benefit and how this is achieved – a combination of you & them.

What are you looking for? The first obvious one is that all of your content is not just about you; the spotlight shining on just you for an hour and 60 glorious slides. The second check is that you don’t take too long to reach content that is about them; you don’t want to be halfway through your narrative and still not have landed something that demonstrates some form of benefit to them, giving them a reason to pay attention and care about your content.

Ideally, you would get to this in the first few slides. And then, across all of your slides, you want to achieve a reasonable semblance of balance; that is, there are as many “about them” slides as there are “about you” slides, or, put differently, the majority of your slides deliver the what and why. Finally, you want to see how the content flows between you and them. You don’t want 30 slides about you and then 30 slides about them.

Strategic storytellers start with a clear audience in mind. They picture the change they see as being possible and use it to craft a compelling story that takes the audience on a clear and concise journey.

Then they check that throughout the presentation and the narrative that the what and how is in balance with why this matters. This is what it takes to create a winning presentation that won’t just engage; it will change minds and leave a lasting and powerful impact.

David Fish is a business strategist, record-breaking pilot, and author of What it Takes to Create Winning Presentations