Time limit: 10 minutes
The opening and closing of your presentation are critical components, and the only parts I suggest memorizing. Your opening is the first impression and your closing is the final impact. By memorizing them, you will sound and feel more confident.
You want to open in a way that gets the audience’s attention, has them leaning forward with anticipation, and lets them know where you are going to take them.
3 Ps:
- PEP—Get their attention with a thought-provoking question, a story, a relevant quote or a startling statistic.
- Promise—Promise Specify the benefits to your audience
- Path—preview the points (or indicate how they will get the promise, today you will learn how to use 3 tools)
For the conclusion you can reverse the 3 Ps
- Path-summarize points (review)
- Promise—Revisit the promise
- Pep—typically a call-to-action. What’s the ONE next thing they can do?
If you have a question and answer session, plan on having a second, pre-planned close to control how your presentation ends.
Practice your opening and closing several times. At least your first 2-3 and last 2-3 sentences of your presentation should be memorized so that they flow off your tongue.
This is the sixth of 9 posts with the steps to take plus 10 delivery tips to be ready in an hour to “wow” your audience! The steps only take 50 minutes, which gives you time to read the information before doing the step.
The course includes the material in the 9-part post sequence, plus worksheets for each step, and brief video instructions from me!
