Tips for Presenting to Senior Executives

Successfully winning over an executive requires helping them organize their thoughts around your proposal. To achieve this, you must first understand their mindset. What do they care about most? What do they need in order to act quickly on your request? Many presenters forget this fundamental step. They are too busy thinking about their presentation from “their” perspective and not from that of their audience.

To process any one request, executives need to be fed relevant, organized data and facts. They also require you to be flexible and responsive to their questions in the moment and have the relevant data to hand.

Like I said before, senior executives have very limited time, since their schedules are filled with a wide variety of responsibilities to attend to. Therefore, get to the point quickly; summarize up front and be clear regarding what is the purpose of your presentation. Senior executives need to know exactly what your call to action, solution or recommendation will be.

If possible, take less time than you were allocated. So, stay on topic and try to state in one sentence what your audience will get out of your presentation. Chose meaning over details, if the executives need you to analyse those, they will ask you to.

Senior executives will have questions, they will ask them, and they likely won’t wait until you announce that it is time for Q&A. They will want to explore the current and future context, your understanding, and the consequences of your recommendations. So, my tip is to manage this by setting expectations at the beginning of your presentation. For example, you could tell the audience you will spend the first 5 of your 30 minutes presenting your insights into the topic and then spend the remaining time on discussion. Most executives will be patient for 5 minutes if they know that they will then be able to spend the rest of the time asking questions and exploring the topic in more detail.

Also, make sure you prepare summary slides where you develop a clear, short overview of your key points. After you present the summary, let them drive the conversation. Executives may want to go deeper on some points that will aid their decision making, so, create a series of complementary slides where you offer more in-depth details and insights to help them in their decision making.

Presenting to senior executives can be a nerve-wrecking task, so make sure to give yourself plenty of time to prepare your presentation. Research what they know and believe about the issue, what they value, and the criteria they use in making decisions.

Another tip is to rehearse your presentation several times and ask a colleague to give you some feedback. Seek out colleagues who have been successful at getting ideas adopted at the executive level. Is your message coming through clearly and quickly? Does your summary include all the necessary key insights? Are you missing anything your audience is likely to expect?