Are your business's pitches, meetings, and presentations effective? Here is the key to creating innovative presentations at your company.

Ready to create sparks in your industry? If so, here's a question: if your company's products or services are innovative, shouldn't your presentations be?

The answer, of course, is yes. So, are they? Or are the presentations delivered on your company's behalf to customers, prospects, stakeholders, and internally basically like all the others that are given in your sector? 

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There's an easy way to judge quickly if your pitch or presentation is up to snuff. Ask yourself, "Would this presentation impress me if I were in the audience?"

For those times when the answer is no, below are five ways you can truly engage and inspire listeners. Remember: for your ideas to stand out, you must stand out. Don't be afraid to make a splash, to be different!

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As a start, here are some suggestions:

5 Ways to Create Innovative Presentations 

1. Think about how this topic has been dealt with in the past. Why did previous speakers handle it that way? What particular advantage or disadvantage did those approaches have? Can you go with something different instead?

2. Try "suspending your expertise" in your business or field of knowledge. Imagine that you're new to all of it, i.e., look at the problem from a neophyte's point of view. Issues which were too close and familiar for you before may come sharply into focus for the first time.

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3. Come up with an interactive exercise for listeners during your talk. To many audiences this will be a revolutionary concept. So, revolt! With a large audience, this may not be possible. Instead, ask them to do a brief mental exercise or solve a puzzle or problem in the industry (or at least think about it). And with big audiences, ask rhetorical questions (and then answer them). You will begin to have more of a "conversation" with listeners as they think about your question.

4. How can you shake up your audience's notion that they can be passive observers? Relying too much on PowerPoint slides, for instance, creates harmful passivity in audiences, if it doesn't make them comatose. Make it clear that passivity will not be allowed during your presentations. Again, ask questions . . . and this time, expect answers.

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5. Consider every obstacle—technological, physical, intellectual, or emotional—that comes between speaker and listeners in this type of talk. Lecterns, seating arrangements, and a failure to establish common ground are some of the usual suspects. What can you eliminate or include for the first time to overcome these hindrances? A simple one, for instance, is when you're the one speaker at a conference who doesn't stand statue-like behind the lectern. Instead, you opt for a lapel mic while using the whole performance space and body language effectively. 

You may not need to deploy all of these tactics in every presentation. But once in a while, take a different route. Whatever happens, it will be a more interesting journey for all concerned!

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Gary Genard is an actor, author, and expert in public speaking and overcoming speaking fear. His company, The Genard Method offers live 1:1 Zoom executive coaching  and corporate group training worldwide. In 2022 for the ninth consecutive year, Gary has been ranked by Global Gurus as One of the World’s Top 30 Communication Professionals. He is the author of the Amazon Best-Seller How to Give a Speech. His second book, Fearless Speaking, was named in 2019 as "One of the 100 Best Confidence Books of All Time." His handbook for presenting in videoconferences, Speaking Virtually offers strategies and tools for developing virtual presence in online meetings. His latest book is Speak for Leadership: An Executive Speech Coach's Secrets for Developing Leadership Presence. Contact Gary here. 

Main photo credit: Matt Palmer on unsplash.com.