Presentation Skills Start With the People, Not the Slides
A few weeks ago, I got an email from a client I've been thinking about ever since.
She had just presented a brand strategy to the entire leadership team of her organization, CEO included, and when she finished… the room applauded.
Applause?!?!? At the end of a corporate strategy meeting?!?! When's the last time you saw that happen?
Here's the part worth paying attention to: that applause wasn't random, and it wasn't because she's "a natural." It was the result of a specific way of building a presentation (one that has almost nothing to do with the slides).
Let me walk you through how to build better presentations that incite applause versus eye rolls.
It starts with two questions
Before we talked about a single slide, we started with two questions:
What is the goal of this meeting?
And who is going to be in the room?
That's it. And it's the part most professionals skip, which is also the part that decides whether your presentation lands or is another “this meeting could have been an email”.
When I watch people prepare for a big meeting, they almost always start with the content. They open a blank deck and start filling slides with everything they know. By the time they present, they've a lot of text, organized in forty bullet points, and a room full of people whose eyes have rolled back into their heads.
The content matters. But it's the second thing, not the first. Build for the people in the room, then build the content to fit them.
In my client's case, the room included every stakeholder in the business: executives, department leads, the CEO she now reports to (thanks to the promotion we worked last year). That's a high-context, senior audience that doesn't want to be talked at. We didn't build a presentation to simply deliver, we built an interactive one that invited people into the conversation.
Here's the exact four-part structure we used -
1. Open with an engagement exercise
Not an icebreaker. An exercise that pulls people into the actual subject of the meeting. There’s a BIG difference between asking people what they had for breakfast this morning and curating a question that is relevant to the meeting AND the goal of the meeting.
For her presentation, we opened by putting a few well-known logos up on the screen — big, recognizable brands — and asking the room to name them. Easy. Everyone knew them instantly. Then the follow-up question: how did you know that?
Because of the brand. That's the whole point. In sixty seconds, the room had taught itself what brand recognition is and why it matters, and they were leaning in instead of checking out. From there, the bridge was made clear: everyone in this room represents our brand, too.
The exercise you choose will depend on your topic. But the function is always the same: make people active in the first two minutes, before they have a chance to settle into spectator mode. A presentation where the audience participates early is a presentation they stay in.
One word of caution: know your room well enough to keep the exercise tight. If you've got a few people who love to turn a question into a fifteen-minute tangent, give yourself a clear endpoint and move on. Engagement is the goal. A free-for-all is not.
2. Communicate your ideas in your own words
This is the part where a lot of smart people hide.
They borrow language from a framework, a consultant, a template (really anything but their own voice) because it feels safer. And it reads exactly as flat as it sounds.
My client built this strategy. The vision was hers, the insight was hers, the work was hers. So we made sure the presentation sounded like her, not like a corporate brand deck she'd downloaded. When you communicate your own ideas in your own words, people can tell. It carries a credibility that polished, borrowed language never will.
If you did the thinking, own the language. That's what makes a room trust you.
3. Tie it back to the mission of the organization
Here's what makes your ideas tangible: connect them to the goals of the business.
It's not enough for your strategy to be good in a vacuum. The people in that room need to see how it moves the thing they're all accountable for. My client tied her brand work directly to the organization's mission so that every leader in the room understood this wasn't a side project, it was the foundation under the work they were already doing.
When you anchor your ideas to the mission, you stop sounding like someone with an opinion and start sounding like someone with a plan. Executives fund good ideas followed by clear plans.
4. Close with an engagement question
Don't end with "thank you" and a blank stare. End with something the room has to act on.
We closed her presentation with a question that handed the strategy back to the people in the room. The goal is to create action and buy-in so that’s exactly what we did. We asked each stakeholder to reflect on what was presented and choose which idea stood out most to them and how they could apply it to their job. That's the difference between a meeting people attend and a meeting people leave with a job to do.
When you end on a tangible takeaway of reflection point for the room, the ideas don’t die right in the conference room as they are taken with each person who moves onto the next task at hand.
When you run a presentation this way, open with participation, speak in your own voice, anchor to the mission, close with a question, you are building an entirely new executive presence skill.
You’ve evolved from being someone who doesn’t know how to communicate your ideas in an effective way and into someone who curates buy-in, ownership, and accountability for it moving projects forward.
That's the difference between an unproductive meeting and one that ends with action.
And when done well, it's the difference between a polite nod and a room that actually applauds. My client earned that one entirely. I just helped her see the structure that was already in her head.
If you're at the point in your career where you're communicating your ideas to a room full of executives, leaders, or clients, it’s time to invest in learning how to build your executive facilitation skills in order to effectively communicate your ideas to a room full of people who are limited on time and attention.
That's where I come in. I work with professionals to build the communication strategy behind the presentation, so you walk into the room prepared to bring people with you instead of talking at them.
If that's the kind of meeting you've got coming up, let's talk.
