Planning a Great Presentation of Research Results

(part of Chapter 9: A Successful Presentation)

 

Think of your project’s final presentation as more of a performance. Assigning roles and specific duties to individuals keeps the presentation organized and engaging.

You want the audience to be attentive, so it’s important to include them. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or start dialogue. Read on to learn about the basics of a great presentation.

 

Roles at the Presentation

Finally! After all of your hard work, the findings are ready to be presented. This is your opportunity to make sure the research will have real impact. Preparing an excellent presentation experience—not just a great slide deck—can be critical to the success of your project.

To some extent, you will have to act as a stage manager, deciding who stands or sits where, who queues whom, and so on. Like any good performance, the roles need to be defined and assigned. Of course, depending on the scope of the presentation, one person can handle multiple roles. Also, the agency can handle some roles (if you are using a full-service agency), but I strongly suggest you make this perfectly clear ahead of time, and assign the following roles:

• Context provider. Someone must be prepared to serve as the project’s salesman. Why are we here? What prompted us to spend real money for this research? Why should anyone care?


• Executive endorser. Presentations, especially those that may have controversial findings, need an executive endorser present to show that (a) the results are important enough that even he or she is in attendance, and (b) there is an expectation that the research will be used.
• This role gets completely squandered if an executive comes in, makes an opening statement, and then leaves to attend to something “more pressing.” Make sure your endorser is committed to stay for the meeting.
• Research design expert. Someone needs to have project details memorized and relevant documents handy.
  
  This includes familiarity with the questionnaire or discussion guide. If an audience member asks how Question 23 was worded, you must able to answer immediately. Other likely questions will come up around sample source, sample size, quota distributions, and data collection timing (how fresh is this data?).


• Scribe. One person should be responsible for taking notes, documening questions, and keeping a list of follow-up actions.


• Timekeeper. If some of your most important points are in the second half of your presentation, you need a timekeeper to make sure you get there.

 

Engaging the Audience

As with any presentation, the last thing you want to do is have someone read the slides out loud. Boring. Instead, use these tips to avoid the standard reading of slides.

1. Be sure that there are opportunities for people to participate, especially if the presentation is going to be more than 40 minutes long.
   
   No matter how fascinated you think the audience members should be, most people lose interest after 40 minutes. Give them an opportunity to participate by having a Q&A break or actually be involved in doing exercises.
• What type of exercise? Let’s say you’re doing an MR study on market segmentation, and you’ve just presented three customer groups that have been identified by the research as having varying levels of interest in the product category in question, and having different types of behaviors and characteristics based on demographics, hobbies, psychographics, and so forth.
  
  You could stop in the middle of your presentation and ask people, given what they’ve heard so far, to jot down ideas for naming those segments. It’s often helpful to infuse a little humor and encourage people that there are no wrong answers. The crazier the better, because often a memorable segment name will actually be used more than a boring descriptive name would.
  
  Have a few people share their names, and you’ll likely find an interesting conversation develops. That’s just one example of something that can be done in the middle of a presentation to give people a break from hearing someone drone on and get them involved in applying what they’ve just heard.
2. Ask your MR supplier to infuse examples of other customers into the presentation.
   
   So, for example, if it is doing a presentation on product concept testing and it’s had a particular type of unexpected result, it should—if it’s a company that’s been around for a while—be able to talk about other cases with similar types of results and how the client chose to use the research, validate the research, or otherwise take action based on the results. Actually being able to talk about real case studies during the presentation can bring it to life for people, and make it sound a lot less academic.


3. Stop and ask for feedback. A good way to keep people alert is to stop from time to time and ask questions. “Is this result surprising to you? How do you think you could use it?”
   
   Also, if appropriate, you can ask: “Is this result something we could share with our customers? Might they find it interesting? Is it something we could share with our channel partners? Could it help them understand our market better?”


4. Don’t be shy. If I have an audience member who looks grumpy, I ask, “It seems like you might be uncomfortable with some of these results. Do you have any questions or concerns I can help with?” Usually it’s because he or she is not really mentally present. Letting this person know you will put him or her on the spot will get attention.


5. Ask for the audience’s help. I will sometimes display a chart, share my interpretation of its implications, and then ask, “How about the rest of you? Do you have a different interpretation of this finding?” or, “I was surprised at this finding. Do any of you have any experiences that might shed light on why so many customers think this about us?” Engaging the audience lends credibility and energy.

 

This is an excerpt from the book, "How to Hire & Manage Market Research Agencies," which is available on Amazon. Published by Research Rockstar LLC. Copyright © by Kathryn Korostoff. All rights reserved.