#154: Business Presentation Tips Every Lawyer Needs

[00:01:16] Well, hello, hello everybody. Welcome back to the Life & Law Podcast. This week we are full of practical tips. We are going to go through my top 15 tips for giving business presentations, making them more compelling so that they create more credibility and trust.

But they do even more than that because regardless of the topic, regardless of the place you know where you’re giving it, regardless of the people or even the purpose, there are some steadfast presentation tips you need to know.

Here’s the truth…And this is something I’ve seen again and again and again as a lawyer business coach. Most lawyers are making costly business presentation mistakes that can be avoided. These mistakes start with your approach and go all the way into your slides and how you even prepare for the presentation itself.

Why Learn These Business Presentation Tips?

And they are costing you business because you are not just there to show that you know the law, okay? You’re not just there to show that you’re credible in the law. You are there to showcase how you can help them. And by the way, that means your focus is on them, not you. You are there to serve them, not you. So it starts with the very beginning and how we even plan for the business presentation itself. And that’s where a lot of people make the biggest mistake, because the planning portion is what determines what you put into it and your entire approach throughout it.

So, we’re going to get into 15 business presentation tips that will make your presentations more compelling to your audience. That is:

• Their eyes are not going to glaze over.
• They’re actually going to lean in and want to hear what you have to say.
• [00:03:02] You’re going to create the credibility and trust you want, but not just by showcasing that you know the law, by the way.

Because let’s just say this, okay, this may not be the case for everybody. It really isn’t. But the fact of the matter is, they’re going to assume. They’re going to assume that you are credible, that you know what you’re talking about, that you understand the law. You’re not there to show them that.

Take Action (You Want Them To Take)

[00:03:30] You’re there to get them to take action. The action you want them to take. And no, I’m not saying there’s some magic formula to get every single person you give a presentation to to hire you or take whatever action you ultimately want them to take. What I am saying is that you are going to speak directly to your perfect-fit clients in a way where they will remember you in a good way, in the right way.

[00:03:57] They will note you. They will think of you as not just the expert, not just the person who’s credible on a topic, but hey, they seem like the right kind of person to help me if I have this issue.

[00:04:10] So that they have the takeaway they want to take, like, the overarching theme, the lesson, the goal that you want them to go do for them, and they remember you for the future as well.

Establish Yourself As An Expert Your Perfect-Fit Clients Trust

So that in, you know, if and when they have that issue, that problem, they actually think of you.

[00:04:30] Oh, yeah, there’s that person who a month ago gave me a presentation and they were so great, and they knew what they were talking about, and they understood the business aspect and I understood their style and how they worked. That’s what you want them to remember. So that if they’re your perfect fit client, they think of you. And let me just be clear.

[00:04:52] Not everybody’s your perfect fit client. You’re not out there to get everybody, okay? Just your perfect fits. Now, every single business presentation has an overarching point, but an underlying point to it as well.

[00:05:08] And the overarching point is the theme, the topic, the takeaway, the thing that you’re trying to teach them. If they leave with nothing else from that presentation, that’s what they learn. You want that. And that’s what these business presentation tips are going to help you with.

They’re going to help you with ensuring that your audience does take away the thing that you want them to take away, that overarching big picture goal, or topic or theme or whatever it is you want them to learn. Right? And by the way, it’s not every single thing you talk about. It’s if you learn nothing else, I want you to learn this. Okay? You want them all to walk away with that. So every single business presentation has that as one of its main points, but it has an underlying point, too. It’s so that they, the audience will see you as the person they want for that thing you covered.

[00:06:01] And how do we do that? That’s the question. And this is where we make the biggest mistakes.

[00:06:07] This is where most lawyers go wrong. They don’t do that piece.

[00:06:13] We want the impact of that business presentation to be that thing for your perfect people.

[00:06:22] Okay? So as we get into my 15 business presentation tips for more effective presentations, note that there are, I think, like three main phases for preparing yourself properly when it comes to giving a presentation. Whether the presentation is a CLE presentation for in house counsel, whether it is a presentation presentation at a conference that is or is not CLE related, whether it’s a presentation for current clients where you’re just trying to, you know, update them on some things that they need to know in the hopes that they will continue hiring you, especially for this thing, whether it’s for a pitch. You have:

• The planning phase.
• The asset prep phase that’s kind of like the outline, the putting the information together, making it pretty into slides and any other like PDF’s or things that you’re going to have them leave with.
• And then there’s the actual practice phase.

So three phases. And I do find that we don’t often think of it in this way, and so we short shrift some of the stuff. So I want you to think about, okay, there are three very distinct phases.

You always start with the planning phase. And I will tell you, this is the phase that tends not to be thought about nearly enough. And it is the most important in the sense of it determines your entire approach. If you start off wrong, on the wrong foot, with the wrong thing, with the wrong theme, topic, goal, even in your planning stage, the rest of it, it doesn’t matter whether you follow all the rest of my tips. When it comes to asset prep phase and the practice phase, you’ve lost already.

[00:08:08] This is the foundation. So pay attention to this. Okay?

Business Presentation Tip 1: Know Your Audience

So number one, who is your audience? Know your audience.

[00:08:18] Think through, okay, where am I presenting, to whom am I presenting and for what purpose? As defined by the event organizer? Because a CLE for a specific CLE credit might be different than a lunch and learn for current clients, which would definitely be different than a topic for a panel that you’re a part of. And you’re only giving a piece of something very specific, which is going to be very different than pitching, going in for a beauty contest and having a proposal and a presentation related to that. Right.

So you need to understand who your audience is, where you’re going to be, to whom you’re going to give it, to whom is very important.

I have a client who gives a very similar talk to three different types of people. Sometimes it’s in house lawyers who really don’t have the ability to hire him and don’t have the ear of anybody. And it’s specifically for Cle credit. Sometimes it’s to in house general counsel. They are the people that either would hire him or would have an ear of the person who is hiring him. And then sometimes it’s more for bigger conferences where there’s a lot of private practice lawyers that some of them don’t do because he has a very niche practice and there’s not a lot of people who do what he does.

And so he has to take a different focus, a different way of talking about it based on who his audience actually is.

Okay. So know your audience, get really clear, and write it down.

Tip #2: Identify Your Goal For the Presentation

Your goal, not the goal that your audience wants to walk away with. Okay. That we get to next.

What is your goal for this specific presentation? What do you want to get out of it? What’s the, what we would say in the marketing world, what’s the call to action? What do you want them to do afterwards?

Now, maybe it’s not the obvious call to action. You’re not telling them, but sometimes it is. If you are giving a pitch to somebody, you want them to hire you. You clearly are trying to convince them to hire you. That’s going to have a little bit of a different flavor to it than a CLE presentation.

So what is your goal for the presentation? What do you want to get out of it?

Business Presentation Tip #3: Identify What Your Audience Needs & Wants

And mind you, needs and wants aren’t always the same thing. In fact, they’re often different.

So what does your audience want out of this type of presentation? Are they there just to get CLE credit? Are they there to get CLE credit but they’d also love to know more about some specific topic? How does it relate to them? How does it relate to who they are, the role they play within their organization. What do they come in knowing and not knowing, and what do they think they want? What do they think they know? And then what are their actual needs?

Now, needs can be different than wants because they don’t necessarily know enough about the topic. You are the expert. So what do you know that they also need to know? They may want to know something, but they need to go a little further, and they need to know something else. So identify that, because this is your theme. This is going to set the tone for what you’re actually talking about and how you talk about it as well.

[00:11:55]

Business Presentation Tip #4: Identify What Your Audience Things They Know vs. What They Actually or Likely Know (& Don’t Know)

So this is identifying the gap. Again, you’re the expert. They’re not.

Based on your expertise, based on your clients and the experience you have in the industry and the clients you actually work with, typically speaking, what does your audience actually know?

[00:12:25] What do they think they know, not know?

Those are different things.

Think Through Objections

[00:12:30] This is going to help also with your approach, and I want you to also think through when thinking about this, what would their objections be?

What do I mean by this?

So, for example, I have a client who works in the compliance industry. I’m not going to get into the specific compliance, but he does a lot of compliance, and he gives presentations on why companies need to comply with certain regulatory requirements that most companies put a little bit into. But they, in his mind, should be doing more, and they should be doing more because it’s going to save them time, energy, money, and potential criminal liability in the future.

But their objection is this takes too much time, energy, money, resources, and I have all these people in different areas that would then have to change the way they do things. And I get all this, you know, pushback, and then I have to deal with that, and it’s just too much of a headache. So, yeah, we’ll do a little bit, but we’re not going to go as far as you think we should.

So those are the objections. Too much time, too much energy, too much pushback. I don’t have the energy for that. I don’t have the time for that. I don’t want to have to deal with that. You’ve got to convince them. So what are the objections to the thing you need them to do or know and the reason why they might need to even come to you?

[00:13:54] You definitely want to know this because, again, it’s going to help you determine what you’re talking about and how you talk about it. It’s going to help you with what stories to include, to showcase and highlight your pushback, your arguments as to why this matters.

[00:14:12] So all of this is the prep work before you even start putting an outline together, okay? You need to understand what’s the audience, what do I want them to take away from this? What do they need to know? What are their objections? What do they think they know?

[00:14:34] And start brainstorming. Okay, what does that mean? I need to actually address here and how I need to address it.

[00:14:44] Now, this gets you into the next phase, which is probably where most attorneys spend most of their time, right? It’s creating the outline, creating the slides, getting any handouts that we might have, PDF’s together, that kind of a thing.

[00:15:00] And it’s probably still going to be where you spend most of your time. But I will tell you, you will spend less time on this if you do phase one properly. So be sure to do that.

Business Presentation Tip #5: Create A Simple, Concise Outline

[00:15:13] Okay, so this is the asset prep phase. And the assets really have to start with your actual outline. And although that is not an asset for other people, it is what creates all the other stuff. It’s how you come up with your slides. It’s how you create your flow. It’s how you decide what handouts, if any, you’re going to give them. So you want to create your outline, and I like to do something really quick and dirty, create a very basic outline.

This is tip number five.

Include the Main Legal Issues/Points/Lessons (3-5 Maximum)

With all of the legal points, like what are the main points? What are the one to three to five top things that you’re going to teach in this presentation? Now, some of this is going to depend on how long the presentation is supposed to be. Sometimes we are told we have 20 minutes or 30 minutes. And that includes questions, right? Well, you’re probably only going to have one, two or three very quick points. Maybe just one main point.

Sometimes we’re going an hour. It’s going to depend. So think through. Okay? Again, who am I talking to? What are the time constraints? What is the event organizer telling me they want and need, and how do I address that, given all this other stuff I’ve already planned and create a very basic legal outline of the things they need to know.

[00:16:30] Make this simple. It should not be long. It needs to be very concise. This is the dirty, kind of like quick and dirty outline.

Business Presentation Tip #6: Connect The Legal-Business Dots (Inside Your Outline)

[00:16:44] Now you start connecting the dots.

[00:16:47] Why do they care? You need to ask questions. Why should they care about what you’ve already put down? What did they really need to know about this. How might this make their life easier? How does it reduce risk? How does it save them money? How does it save them time in the long run?

[00:17:04] Go through their objections that you noted earlier and think about the arguments that they’re making and what your argument back would be and what would be compelling to them, and think through. Okay, where did these things, as I’m connecting these dots of why should they care? What do they really need to know? What were their objections? How would this make it easier? All of that. Where do these points need to go? Into your presentation and the outline you’ve already created. So now you expand upon that outline a little bit, right? And you start noting these things.

Business Presentation Tip #7: Identify Your Stories

[00:17:39] Business presentation, tip number seven.

[00:17:42] Next, you identify the stories.

The stories that highlight the main points, the theme, the walkaways, and also help to bust through objections. So past client stories, things you’ve observed, well-known industry cases or events, all of those can be utilized as stories. They don’t have to all be based on your clients. Okay. What supports the argument you’re making, the case you’re making, the points you’re making, the takeaways, the things you’re telling them they need to be doing in this presentation? What supports that?

[00:18:21] What are your stories? So, for example, I recently helped a client with his proposal. Again, it was compliance.

[00:18:30] Same person I mentioned earlier, he had this lovely slide that primarily had the legal stuff, the statutes, the regulations, all that stuff. People’s eyes are going to glaze over. Right. So we rejiggered it a bit. We took out all of that stuff and instead just put some basic concepts. Okay, here’s what you need to know. Here’s what you need to do. Here’s why we ended up putting all that other stuff, the supporting citations, the regulations, the statutory, the case law, in a handout that he can hand out. If people want that, right, that’s the backup. They don’t need that in the actual, when you’re talking to them. Right.

[00:19:10] What they need to know is the basics. Here’s what you need to be doing. Here’s why, here’s how it helps you. Here’s an example. That’s where the stories come into play, the examples. And there was a very specific thing that he was talking about where he gets objections and pushback of. I can’t do that, compliance, because, you know, we’ve done this and we’ve done that, and I get so much pushback, and I don’t, I don’t have the time or the energy to fight back and it’s like, yeah, but here’s the impact. Let’s look at this scenario. Scenario 1, life event. They did what you’re doing, the bare minimum. Here’s the result.

[00:19:50] And it was massive as far as the financial result with potential criminal liability of some of the officers of the company.

[00:19:59] Now here’s a similar situation. Same problems happened, but they had a more robust compliance plan, which meant they caught it earlier. They were able to, you know, stop some of the issues before they got too far. They then reported it as, as they were supposed to. And guess what? Because they had that in place, they saved themselves not just money, but all of that potential for criminal liability. Connect the dots and use stories, items six and seven again to highlight the why? Why is this important to you, the audience?

Business Presentation Tip #8: Take a Break

[00:20:37] Okay. After you do this, my next tip is to, if you have time, this is somewhat going to depend on your timing. Sometimes we are told a week in advance and you don’t have this, but try to take a break up to a week if possible. If you’re preparing for a speech that’s three months in, I highly recommend that you prepare this early, early, early on. Do not wait till the last minute. And then take a week or two after you get this full, robust outline together and come back and look at it fresh.

[00:21:11] This is going to get you. When we get too in it, like with anything that we draft, we forget things. We don’t think through things clearly. Sometimes we, for, we don’t. We see a flow when it doesn’t exist. This is what that gives you. Take a break and if you don’t have that week, take at least 24 to 48 hours. If you can take time to get away from it, do other things, not think about it, completely disconnect from it and then come back.

Presentation Tip #9: Cut It Down (Even More)

[00:21:39] All right, tip number nine.

[00:21:42] When you review it, you’re going to come back after that break. Cut it down.

[00:21:49] The biggest mistake I see that a lot of attorneys make is stuffing their presentations and their slides and just everything with two much stuff and you lose people because there’s a saying in marketing confusion. If you confuse them, you will lose them. It’s true.

[00:22:12] Don’t overwhelm them. It is better to have just one or two main points and have them walk away with those than try to have five and then they forget all of them. Go for clarity over length. Go for clarity over too much information.

[00:22:30] Make sure that you don’t have too many stories. Highlight the stories that matter. One story to make the one main point, another story to deal with an objection. All right…

Business Presentation Tip #10: Take Another Look At The Flow

[00:22:48] Really question the flow. Does this make sense?

[00:22:55] If I were an objective observer who knew very little about this specific topic, if I was not an expert, would this make sense? Here’s my biggest tip here. To ensure it does.

Get somebody who is not an expert in this area to take a quick look at your outline. And I do highly like, highly, highly recommend this before starting the slides process, because your slides will come from your outline. And if you wait until after that, then it’s just a mess because then you have to rejigger everything. And we all know that making slides takes way more time than it really should. So do this before you start putting it down into slides.

[00:23:34] So before moving into my last five business presentation tips, where we’re going to get into the visuals and how to best prepare yourself, I want to talk real quickly about business development.

[00:23:46] Something that goes hand in hand with business presentations. Because most of our presentations are for business development purposes. Right.

A NOTE About ELEVATE Attorney Business Growth Mastermind

So if you’re a private practice attorney who is looking to make partner, or anytime soon, or is a partner, or has your own law firm, you know, business development is something you need to be doing. And yet there’s probably not enough time to do as much as you’d like. You might even be thinking, you know what, there’s so many things I can do. How is it that I can figure out what’s best for me to actually be doing right now, I have a limited amount of time. What will be most effective, and also, how do you distinguish yourself from your peers?

[00:24:26] So if any of these questions, or maybe all of them, have gone through your head, you’re not alone. I hear these questions again and again, and it’s why I created my mastermind. Elevate.

It’s an attorney business development mastermind specifically to help you, one, uncover the exact right strategies, business development strategies for you. Two, create a very simple strategic business development plan of action that you’re confident in and feel good about so that you will be consistent. And three, to give you the support you need, both from me and your fellow mastermind members, so that you will take consistent action and so that you can brainstorm. Because guess what? Things happen along the way. You learn new information. You might have some issues that you run against that you weren’t expecting. Nice to have that support to brainstorm through them. The mastermind is designed to help you create the foundation you need to grow a thriving book of business that’s sustainable for the long term.

Now, elevate is actually not currently open. You’re probably saying, okay, why Heather are you mentioning it? The doors will become open before you know it this fall and you can join the waitlist.

[00:25:36] Joining the waitlist will actually give you some big benefits. First off, you’re going to find out as soon as the doors reopen and there are limited spots available. Secondly, it will give you access to some bonuses that only those on the waitlist will get access to, including some earlier access to me and some additional meetings with me, and also a payment plan that nobody outside of the waitlist will get. The other bonus to joining the elevate waitlist is that you will get immediate access to the client development blueprint, which is my five step business development blueprint, so that you can start enacting some of these things right now.

Okay, moving on, let’s get into the slides where we spend way too much of our time. So the good news is slides really shouldn’t take as long as they probably have been taking, and I see a lot of big mistakes made here.

Presentation Tip #11: One Idea Per Slide

[00:26:34] One idea per slide. No more than six to eight lines per side. No more than 30 words per slide.

[00:26:40] Don’t even have full sentences. They should be sentence fragments.

[00:26:44] Bullets are your friend. Space is your friend. Okay? And please note, you do not need, nor should you include everything that’s in your outline in your slides. Everything you’re saying to the audience is not going to be in your slides.

[00:26:59] Your slides should only have what is necessary for them to kind of pull the main point or theme from what it is you’re talking about in that moment.

Business Presentation Tip #12: Use Representative Visualizations, Flowcharts and Graphics (where it makes sense)

[00:27:21] Sometimes we tend to do this too much. Sometimes we don’t use them at all when we could or should. Right, so you don’t want a lot of complex graphics.

[00:27:30] Any graphic flowchart, photo or other visualization needs to relate to and enhance. And that’s important. Enhance the specific point of that slide.

[00:27:43] And when it comes to graphics, be sure that you use the same style throughout the entire presentation. Right. This is a branding tip. You don’t want it to look different. You want everything to look very similar, very cohesive.

Business Presentation Tip #13: Pay Attention To Colors & Font (Yes, They Really Do Matter)

[00:27:58] Tip number 13 make your slides visually appearing by paying attention to the colors and the font. So the font needs to be legible. The colors cannot be jarring.

[00:28:13] So to test the font, you want to stand back about 6 to 7ft from your monitor and see if you can read the slide.

[00:28:20] The rule of thumb is 32 point font or bigger for titles, 20 point or bigger for text.

[00:28:28] This, by the way, helps you with the bullets and keeping that other tip of no more than six to eight lines per slide. No more than 30 words per slide. If you have a bigger font, you can’t go more than that, right?

[00:28:42] It should be light color font over dark backgrounds, or vice versa, darker fonts over light backgrounds. Now there’s a warning here. A really dark background and really bright font can be very difficult for some people to see correctly. So use that sparingly and be careful of that.

[00:29:01] I looked at somebody’s recently a client. So some of the work I do, both in my mastermind and in my one to one business coaching, is I will look at and give comments to the presentations that they’re giving, whether it be the slides, the graphics, the handouts, and even the outlines as they’re coming up with. And I looked at some slides recently that were super dark. They were black with a lot of white, and it was kind of jarring, to be honest with you. And there’s some yellow in there too, which that was very jarring.

[00:29:31] I don’t recommend that. Okay. You want them to be visually appealing. The other part to being visually appealing is you don’t want to overdo animation. So animation in slides can be really great if they’re used sparingly to emphasize a really important point or maybe to challenge a common objection.

[00:29:52] But if you overuse it, it will be lost. I’ve seen some presentations where practically every slide had an animation. Don’t do that. If you have 20 slides and you just have one or two animations in that whole thing, that’s perfectly fine.

[00:30:06] The other thing I would note before moving on to our last two tips, you don’t need a million slides.

[00:30:14] Okay? If you have a 20 minutes presentation, you might only need ten to twelve slides. You might need less. If you have an hour long presentation – most of my presentations are in the 45 minutes range with ten to 15 minutes of Q&A – most of them are between 20 and 22 slides. It shouldn’t be more than that. Okay. You don’t need a slide for everything you’re saying. Remember that.

[00:30:38] All right, now we get into my last two tips, and these are my best tips for you. How to prepare you for the presentation itself.

Business Presentation Tip #14: Practice

[00:30:52] Practice giving the presentation.

[00:30:55] Practice standing. Try setting up your space similar to what you will have if it’s the first 1st time you’re giving this specific presentation.

[00:31:05] Then consider giving it to others and get their feedback. Practice, practice, practice. And don’t just do it once or twice. You need to do it numerous times. Now, granted, if it’s the same presentation that you’re giving over and over, you’re not going to have to practice as much. But I do recommend. I will tell you, I have a couple of presentations I do a lot. Every time I get hired for it a couple of days before I practice and then I practice again the day before. I practice at least two or three times because we forget and you want to be really fluent and you want to be able to seem like you’re having a conversation with your audience. That’s what this really is, right?

[00:31:46] Final tip…

Business Presentation Tip #15: Record Yourself

And this one, a lot of people skip. But I think this is one of the most valuable when it comes to you being able to give a really great presentation. Record yourself.

[00:32:01] This will help you get more comfortable without needing to always look at your slides for too many cues. Most of us do.

[00:32:08] It will help you watch for filler words and learn how to use silence. Silent space is actually your friend. You don’t want a bunch of ums and ahs or, you know, some of us have what I just did. You know, you don’t want a bunch of that. It’s fine if you do it once or twice in a 30 or 45 minutes presentation, but the constant thing, very, very distracting, and people will stop listening to you.

[00:32:32] You want to pay attention to your body movements. You want to ensure you’re making eye contact with people. Record yourself giving the presentation to people.

[00:32:41] Look around the room. Move around. See how that looks and feels. This is why practice is so important.

Bonus Presentation Tip

[00:32:50] Final tip. This is a bonus tip because I’m beyond 15 and I promised 15.

[00:32:56] When you’re actually giving the presentation, if it’s in a big audience or even if it’s a smaller one. And I learned this early on because sometimes if I may make eye contact with people, it can get me off. Like, forget what I’m saying because I like, connect with them almost too fully. Look at their forehead or the very top of their heads, that you’re still going to look like you’re looking at them without getting caught up in that. Just a quick tip. Okay, so now you know my top 15 business presentation tips for how to make your presentation more compelling, memorable, for the right reasons, and most importantly, effective. If you take nothing else away from today, I want you to remember three things.

[00:33:40] Number one, your foundation is asking the right questions around your audience. What they want to know, what they need to know. Do not skip that part.

[00:33:50] It’s going to create the best foundation. Number two, use stories, use examples. It makes your presentations way more compelling. People will remember you. It shows off your natural skills and kind of your strengths and also your style, so it’s more likely to help you attract the right fit clients.

[00:34:13] And number three, practice, practice, practice. All right, that’s it for today. We will be back next week. Bye for now.