Prepping the Presentation

A short-term Spanish School is letting me present Viglo to its students as they finish up with their time at the school. Therefore, I made a PowerPoint presentation, which I went over with my business mentor. What I thought would take more or less 45 minutes turned into almost two and a half hours of improving my presentation! While there were lots of smaller details that we worked on, I’m going to share the errors that I made that would most likely apply to the presentations of other people.

My business mentor started the feedback with a question, "Are you familiar with the ‘curse of knowledge?’" This is when you present knowledge about a topic and include assumptions that are obvious to you, but that the audience doesn't know. For example, I was talking about the benefits of Viglo’s "calls'' in the presentation, but never actually showed or explained what a call in Viglo actually means. I obviously know exactly what "calls" are in the context of Viglo, but my mentor reminded me that the audience doesn’t know when I say "call," that I'm referring to a video chat with a Spanish Guide. The audience might assume that's the case, or they could assume that it's not a video chat at all, or that the call is with AI robots instead. Another time is when I mentioned how Viglo uses ChatGPT, but am I sure that the audience knows what ChatGPT is? Sure, ChatGPT’s popularity is rapidly rising, but that doesn’t mean that everyone knows what it is. This is one reason it’s so valuable to get outside opinions, because they don’t come in with the “curse of knowledge” that you think is so obvious because you’ve worked on the project for so long.

Another big takeaway I got from our meeting, that is applicable to any other marketing campaign, is to remember that the audience wants to know what they are going to get out of the presentation. In my presentation, I began with my vision of creating a world that's mentally tougher, until my business mentor asked me why any of the students, in the context of this presentation, would care about that. What these students want… what my audience wants in this presentation… is a language tool that will move them towards fluency in the Spanish language. Too much of my presentation was about how “Viglo does this…” and “Viglo works to do…” which doesn’t allow your marketing pitch to connect with the audience.

My business mentor suggesting that my final slide be a list of three items that express how Viglo will uniquely benefit the students. This will be the lasting impressions of the presentation. So, we want to make sure we emphasize them at the end to make them easier to remember, while finishing on a positive note. Another benefit of this is that it’s a good reminder of what's important in the presentation and to make sure these points are sufficiently delivered in the presentation. For example, one of my points was how Viglo is able to tailor lessons to fix a student's errors immediately in the call. However, coming up with this point showed me how it was completely absent in the presentation. So this will be a good finish before question and answer time, plus it makes sure that I actually emphasized the important points of the presentation.

The last nugget of advice that my business mentor gave me for presentations is to make sure that I extract as much value out of this presentation for myself as I can. Don’t just give the presentation, end it, say thank you, and then leave. He suggested that I ask the students something like, "Can you see Viglo being a useful tool for you?" And if they reply in the affirmative, this will be basically an open invitation to get them to register for it. But if they reply negatively and don't think Viglo could be a useful tool for them, this is an opportunity to ask them, before you leave, why they don't feel that way, and acquire useful feedback. Oh, and he also emphasized that I don't ask what the students like about the presentation, but rather ask them about Viglo itself.

These insights won't just be useful for this presentation, but are points that apply to any other marketing strategy there is.