Podcast Episode Details

Create Content for Impactful Presentations with Ella Marks

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ella Marks, Senior Marketing Manager at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about the keys to creating a great presentation, how to prep, and how to always nail your ending.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ella Marks.

Presenting is a core skill for admins

Presentations are an important part of every admin's life. And I'm not just talking about speaking in front of your local user group. Admins present every time they go in for a budgeting conversation, or demo a new process for their users.

That's why I'm so excited to bring Ella Marks on the pod. She's presented on some of Salesforce's biggest stages, like Dreamforce and several World Tours. So I wanted to hear her tips for how to put together and prep for a great presentation.

The cool thing is that no matter the format or venue, Ella uses the same core principles to prep for every presentation.

Know your audience

Ella's first step is to identify the audience that you're presenting for. Who's in the room? What do they already know, and what are you going to teach them? Your content is going to be very different if you're presenting to a room full of admins versus a room full of new users.

There are several situations where you might not know exactly who's going to be in the audience or what their level of expertise is. Ella's trick for this is to just ask them, for example, "Raise your hand if this topic is new to you."

Experienced presenters will be able to use the information they get about their audience to change things on the fly. If this sounds daunting to you, Ella recommends that you start small. Pick one slide or part of your presentation that you'll adjust based on the answer to your question. That gives you a manageable way to practice thinking on your feet, and you'll soon find yourself getting more comfortable with improvising.

Make an effective outline

The next step is to make an outline. For Ella, that's listing out everything she could say about the presentation topic in a big list. This gives her the chance to move things around, pick out some themes, decide on a call to action, and then start editing it down.

When she's ready to start creating her slide deck, Ella uses a technique called "blue boxing" to make a rough draft. Essentially, you use blue boxes to map out what you're going to put on each slide. So a slide might have three blue boxes that say:

• Title about why this is important right now

• Text of the most important point I'm going to say

• Image to illustrate the point

This allows you to visually sketch out what each slide looks like and how the presentation flows as a whole. Variation is what keeps your audience engaged, so we want to make sure that we have a balance of slides with more text and slides with more visuals. Blue boxing lets you make these decisions before you spend time hammering out the specifics of which image or which bullet point you're going to use.

The trick to nailing your ending

Conclusions are always tricky. Ella recommends asking yourself three questions:

• After my presentation, how do you want them to feel?

• After my presentation, what do you want them to think?

• Published on 1 year, 9 months ago