Best practices for your presentations and presenting!

Best practices for your presentations and presenting!

Your Text is Too Small

28

18

Minimum Points for Headings

Minimum Points for Text

Can people in the back row read the text? If not, why is it on the screen?

Sentence Case vs. Title Case

Titles Need to Be in “Title Case”

• Title case basically means to capitalize every word with the exception of articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, or, but,...), and (short) prepositions (in, on, for, up,...).
• Use www.titlecase.com if unsure
• No period at the end required.

Text should be ”sentence case”.

• Don’t forget the pronunciation.
• Only the initial word of a sentence, proper nouns, and a select few other words are capitalized when using the sentence case method of capitalization. The remaining words are written in lowercase.

Bottle Images

• Bottle Images need to be full size.
• Include close ups of the label.
• Remember: your audience may have never even seen the product in real life.

Why so small?

The bottle should take up the full height!

Images

When in doubt, use images instead of text. Let the images serve as a background or illustration for your talking points. Take the audience on a trip to the Maison via stories and photos on the screen.

Images

An aside… Never use this common stock photo that every winery tends to use. These are not wine grapes.

Templates

Create your own Powerpoint Layouts

1. Helps you to create consistent slides.
2. Makes updating and editing far easier.

You don’t have to use the built-in templates – it’s easy to make your own.

Your Key Takeaway

Is this key takeaway relevant commercially? Will it help sell? Will a normal person say this out loud? Is this something repeatable? Will the distributor say it to the buyer who will say it to the staff who will say it to the consumer?

What is your key takeaway? What is the one fact or phase that you want stuck in every attendee's head when they leave?

Your Key Takeaway

Adults need to hear something

times

Repeat your Key Takeaway

for them to remember it.

You are going say that one phrase a minimum of seven times.

Three is the Magic Number

For each brand as well as each product, distill the story down to three points. No more. No less. Not ten points. Not eight points. Three.

Change Up Your Delivery

Every five minutes, make sure to change up your tempo, volume, or style of speaking.

Embrace the Silence

Pauses are your friend. You don’t need to fill the space with sound. Embrace silences. Avoid the “ums” that we often use to fill the space when thinking.

The silences can break up the tempo and grab your audience's attention.

You can’t Know Every Answer

Take questions from the audience, but also come to terms with the fact that there is no way to know the answer to every question. It’s easy to pivot from difficult questions. This pivot can allow you time to form an answer.

“Ah, great question. Let’s circle back to that at the end.” “Oh, that’s a big question. Let’s chat together about this afterwards.” "You know, I have to admit – I've totally forgotten that stat. Let's chat afterwards and I'll get you the answer."

Be Nervous

Jitters before going on stage are normal. Do you know the information? Do you love the topic? You’ll be fine!

Tech Tips

The Zoom "Black" For presenting on Zoom, set your slide's background color to match the standard Zoom background color. Set the background color to the custom HEX code #242424 and your slides can blend in better with the Zoom interface.

Tech Tips

Update your PowerPoint! If presenting via Zoom/Teams (or maybe in person) you can stream your camera onto your actual slide. You can appear on the slides! Choose “Cameo” from the Insert tab. If it doesn’t exist, call IT! Get your PowerPoint updated!