Five minute presentations – make them work for you

Our business intelligence officer has identified a recent trend to limit business presentations to five minutes. In this article we examine possible reasons for this and look at what you can do to make the most of it.

Every few years companies take action to recover from the worst excesses of previous years. They call it downsizing. Thousands of people loose their jobs because management suddenly realise they aren’t productive enough and costs are too high. However, in the past, management of these companies have avoided tackling internal sources of waste – like meeting and presentations. These have continued to eat away at their profits. 

Perhaps it’s due to the upcoming economic uncertainty that this is now beginning to change. Managers around the world are starting to limit the maximum time for presentations to five minutes. They hope that this will result in a significant increase in productivity and may also save some jobs.

The advantages of the five-minute presentation are obvious. Instead of tying up a dozen or more employees for over an hour they can all be back at their desks in under 10 minutes. 

There’s also a second, more subtle, benefit. If a presenter wants to make her case she has to prepare it properly beforehand. The audience will get a more focused argument since there is no time for irrelevant explanations. That means that they’re more likely to understand and remember the key points and make better decisions.

Of course there are also some disadvantages to the five-minute presentation.  Since there’s little time for questions or discussion it’s possible that some decisions will be taken without full consideration of all the possible pitfalls.

So how can you get the most out of this situation? How can you develop and present successful five-minute presentations that will always achieve their objectives? 

You should begin your preparation for every five-minute presentation by asking two questions:

• what do you want to get from the audience ? 
• what do the audience get from you?

The answers to these questions will help you identify the key points you need to raise during the presentation. 

Now let's look at the timing of the presentation. You’ll need one minute to introduce your topic and explain how the audience are going to benefit from it.  You’ll need another minute at the end of the presentation to summarise your arguments and remind the audience – again - of your key points. 
You have only three minutes left for the main body of your argument and that means you can only present three key points - at most.  You’ll need to explain those points in just less than a minute each.

If you think you can't do that then you’ll need to reduce the number of points. It's better to have a single key point and explain it properly then do a bad job explaining three.

The five-minute presentation will be a challenge at first. The answer is to prepare carefully using the simple guidelines above. The hardest part will be the need to limit the number of points - but this requirement is actually a good thing because it’ll make it easier to persuade the audience.