Ending your presentations with impact

This vlog talk is all about ending your presentations in a way that will make sure your audience remember you.

How to end your presentations so that you’re remembered for the right reasons

Here’s the summary about the ending your presentations with impact video if you don’t have the opportunity to watch.

How presentations typically finish

Let’s just think about the end of presentations, shall we? There’s often a very conventional way of finishing off a presentation, and it goes along the lines of…

In summary, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Are there any questions? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then…

Well, that’s me then. If you’ve got any questions, email me. Here’s my telephone number.

Or a variation of that.

A wasted opportunity?

And I would argue that is a real wasted opportunity. Because if people in the audience know that the end is coming, then they tend to perk up their level of interest and pay more attention.

And so do you really want them to go away remembering your email address in a sort of traily way?

Question time

And there’s something even worse that can happen sometimes, which is when you end on question time where somebody has asked a question and you’ve really struggled to answer it for whatever reason.

And at the end of that, you don’t take any more questions.

But, that’s the last thing that the audience will hear you struggling with. Their lasting impression of you and even their takeaway from the talk is this rather inarticulate, possibly quite nervous (and maybe very badly answered in some cases) question.

And that again is a wasted opportunity. So you need to think about making sure that your presentation ends with impact and with a bang. And that is what I would call a final thought.

What’s a final thought?

The second thing is that a hook creates curiosity. What’s the one thing that will keep people listening? Curiosity.

If they think they know it all, if they think they’ve heard it all before, then there is no curiosity. There’s no reason to listen. There’s no reason to engage.

Your hook can create curiosity through a story, an imagine, a statistic, or a fact, for example. And once your audience is curious about something, then they will be primed to set up to listen to everything else.

Create certainty when ending your presentations

Now, not necessarily a Jerry Springer final thought, unless, of course, you’re doing a Jerry Springer type of presentation. A final thought is a statement that’s being really thought through very carefully but being delivered with as much muster as you possibly can.

So, it is very clear to your audience that you’re not going to say anything else. And it’s clear because of the way that you stand, the way that you sound and the energy that you put into delivering that very deliberate final thought.

That way, people remember the last thing that you say, and because you’ve carefully chosen it and carefully crafted it, it will be influential in what they take away from your overall talk.

Start strong, finish mightier!

So we start strong with the hook at beginning and we finish even stronger at the very end as well.

If you’d like to know about using hooks, this video explains them in more detail.

Have a go and let me know how you get on. And of course, if you need any help, please get in touch.