495: How to Give Presentations to Your Team

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to give presentations to your team.

Internal presentations are very common in the startup world. And while these presentations can be very boring and packed with data, it doesn’t have to be. Learning how to make your presentations exciting will help a long way in communicating your message to your team.

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about some mistakes people make when they give internal presentations, examples of good presentations, how to improve your presentations and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About the topic of today’s episode

00:29 Why this topic was chosen.

01:23 A big trend in internal communications.

03:20 How to present your data.

03:56 Why your presentations should have context.

04:27 How internal presentations are similar to speaking at conferences.

05:00 An example of how to create good presentations.

07:14 How to improve your presentations.

07:45 How the best presentations have stories in them.

09:10 What teams need from presentations.

3 Key Points:

Internal communication is a very big topic.People are not used to presenting.People are overwhelmed by with too much information.

[0:00:00]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about something that plagues every company at some point. And Steli had an experience that I haven’t heard yet, or some experiences, so I’m dying to hear them and talk about this. But it’s basically the idea of how do you communicate internally inside your company? Steli, take it from here. Lead out.

[0:00:26]

Steli Efti: Yeah. There’s obviously the internal communication is such a big topic. The one thing that I’d like to zero in on, because we are going through this and I’ve just personally had to go through this a couple of times and I’m currently working with leadership at close on this, is when people who are leading teams are giving presentations either for those teams or company-wide. And this could be a monthly report, hey, let’s a summary of what happened last month and what we are projecting or our goals for next month. It could be a big project that was concluded or that is planned. Any kind of communication where somebody that is responsible for a project is sharing the learnings, pros and cons, or what has happened, or what is about to happen with people. One big trend that I see, one thing that I’ve seen again and again and again, is that people will go through the, this is a general communication challenge, they’ll go through the simple work of just collecting information. So let’s say I’m running a sales team. February concluded, so I’m doing a summary of what happened in February and it’s a slide, and let’s say there’s six bullet points and it goes, we had a, whatever, 20% conversion rate, we closed this amount of customer, our goal was this revenue, but we only had that hit that revenue, with this one audit that affected closing two deals. Just reporting on a bunch of information, a bunch of numbers, a bunch of random events that happened. Just [crosstalk 00:02:12]. Yeah, go ahead.

[0:02:14]

Hiten Shah: No story.

[0:02:15]

Steli Efti: No story whatsoever.

[0:02:17]

Hiten Shah: That’s what you’re trying to get at, right? No story.

[0:02:19]

Steli Efti: Yes. You’ve instantly got it.

[0:02:21]

Hiten Shah: I was like, wait, I’ve heard this before.

[0:02:23]

Steli Efti: So you look at this and basically as an audience, as the sales team, or let’s say the company that is getting this presentation about the sales results of last month, as a team member, or as an employee of the business, I look at that slide and now I am burdened with doing all the hard wor…