The Opening – between ice and cheese

The presentation does not start at slide #1 and end at the 20th slide.  People often miss on a great opportunity by playing with the projector/laptop/screen/lights in the room instead of using the time before the presentation to talk to those who already in the room/ on the call and get on to friendly start.

There is the catch though, you don’t want to start sounding cheesy and salesy by talking too much about yourself/your product. Ideally, you know something about the people in the room (research..) and have thought about a nice chit-chat topic to get the room going. The best way to get a conversation going is to ask specific individuals, questions that relate to something they are passionate about like hobbies, sports, recent trips, family, anything that takes people away from the topic about to be presented into a positive and friendly mindset. The trick here is not to overdo it so that you sound like stalker material or end up pretending you know something about something which is completely foreign to you only to have your cover blown.

If you know nothing about the people and your introduction questions yield no results, you can always fall back on weather and sports just to keep the room from falling into a deathly silence which will make it hard on your ability to get any conversation going through the presentation itself.

If the conversation actually flows, don’t stop it too early and let it go at least until everyone is in the room and if  most people or the relevant people end up engaged in the side-topic, take up to a 1/3 of the time allocated to the meeting to get friendly with the people.

A friendly presentation that ended half way is much better that a ice-cold presentation that ends 15 minutes too early.