The final part of your presentation is probably the single most important part of

your presentation.

It's far more important than the middle.

So if you're out of time, either during preparation or during delivery,

skip the middle part, but don't skip the ending.

Do the ending bit and do it right.

They say begin with an end in mind and well, for example, Pixar,

which is essentially a story-telling company, they say,

come up with your ending before you even figure out your middle.

Endings are hard, get yours working right up front.

So, the thing that works for me is, I start with a draft.

The first thing I do is I draft my ending.

Then I do the middle part.

And then I see what I was really trying to do and

I revisit, re-edit the ending.

So, things you can do in the end.

There are two things which I think are obligatory and

two things which I think are optional but could be nice.

Thing number one would be to restate your main point.

Number two would be to summarize your key arguments.

This, I think, pretty obligatory but three and four are optional.

You can do the moral bit, I'll explain in a minute what I mean, and

get back to the beginning.

So thing number 1, restate your main point.

Your main point being, of course, if we are in this or that situation,

we should do this or that, otherwise bad stuff will happen.

This is your call to action.

Ask the audience to do something for you, make your suggestion.

And I think you have to end with things like that.

What do we need to do after your presentation?

If you're a salesperson, well, things are easy.

You don't even have to say buy my stuff.

It's pretty obvious when you list the price,

people understand what it's all about.

If you're a lecturer, for example, it's kind of not that obvious.

I end my lectures with pictures of books because this is what I'm selling,

essentially.

I am selling homework.

The time of my lecture is very limited,

while the time of your homework is far less so.

So I'm trying to sell you as much homework as I possibly can.

Because I'm trying to be a good teacher.

I think the time that you spent on your own investigating the subject is far more

valuable.

I am just a messenger but you have to do your homework and

it will be far more educating, the things that you do on your own.

Thing number 2, do a recap, do a summary, do a resumé.

I hope you understand what I mean.

Have a slide listing all the things that you've said, I mean not all the things,

but the most important things that you've said.

This works for a product presentation.

Once again, this will be probably the busiest slide in your whole presentation.

Which is okay because before that,

you walked your audience through all of those points.

Thing number 3, what's the moral of your story?

Not obligatory.

Doesn't quite work in small audiences, but works great in movie theaters.

When you have 500 people in front of you, I think this is what you should be doing.

This is where you get applause.

Slide like this.

This is not a concrete call to action, but rather a general wish.

But this is the audience's favorite slide.

This is the slide that people photograph when I show this presentation to them.

People like this kind of stuff.

Could be tricky, maybe too much, should I say pathos?

But it really, really works for larger audiences.

I've recently seen a charming presentation of an IT guy at the bank,

who was arguing that we should have a backup line,

a backup customer service line.

He said yes, we do have two phone lines, but they are with the same provider.

And what that means that we are keeping all our eggs in one basket,

which we shouldn't be doing.

Because if a provider goes down, both our lines go down,

and customers could not reach us.

So, we should be doing stuff like this.

We should have two providers and two backups.

And here, he gets his round of applause and deservedly so.

And thing number 4, you can get back to the beginning.

Which, once again, is a charming trick, not obligatory but kind of nice.

Elon Musk, in his solar roof presentation,

he started by saying that, you see the problem with electric cars was that they

didn't look good, they had low range, they didn't have good performance.

And something similar needs to happen to solar,

it needs to become as appealing as electric cars have become.

This was his opening, he finished by saying,

you want to call your neighbors over and say, check out that sweet roof.

Which, of course, is an allusion to, check out that sweet ride.

Thing people usually say after they bought a car.

So you see, it's almost the same.

This is an example from Steve Jobs.

There's something in the air.

Then he shows his product line up.

We do MacBooks and MacBook Pros, and then we see this gap and

MacBook Air fits right in the middle.

Then he does this whole presentation.

And in the end he does resume, he does call to action,

he does a tiny little bit about environment and

the he gets back to the beginning.

So MacBook Air joins the family of MacBook and MacBook Pro.

Once again it's like Frodo, it's not enough to throw the ring into volcano.

You have to come all the way back to Shire to be the real hero.

So you can try that as well.

To conclude, things you can do in the end.

Restate your main point, summarize the arguments and

those two things I think are obligatory, you have to do them.

And there are two things that are optional.

Do the moral part and get back to the beginning.

Ending

Presentation skills: Speechwriting and Storytelling

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