3 Crafting Rules for Effective Presentation Questions

Which makes sense, right?

Instead of talking at your audience, you strategically ask questions to capture your audience's ideas, insights and feedback about your topic.

In a survey I ran, 86% of presenters agreed that asking questions is an effective way to engage your audience.

That said, you don’t want to just ask your audience any question that comes to mind.

Instead, you want to strategically craft your questions to make your presentation more effective.

You can do that use the following 3 crafting rules for effective presentations.

Crafting Rule #1: Use EPF type questions to learn more about your audience

EPF questions are strategic questions you ask your audience to learn more about them during your presentation.

When done properly, these types of questions:

1. Ensure you are talking to the right people
2. Ensure you address your audience’s biggest concerns
3. Ensure you don’t missing something big at the end of your presentation

To learn more about EPF questions (And why you want to capture the results if you can) see the short video below.

Crafting Rule #2: Ask yourself “how will the answer to this question benefit my presentation?”

Time is limited.

You don’t have all day to go back and forth with your audience and still give your pitch, right?

That’s why when it comes to crafting effective questions, it’s important to think about how you will strategically use the answers to build momentum for your presentation.

If you can’t come up with anything good, then ditch that question and evaluate another.

For example, if you want to highlight a national statistic about long working hours, you could set it up by first asking something like this.

Capturing your audience’s results with a live poll, you might find out the following about your audience.

Which you could then compare against your national statistic and comment on throughout your presentation.

Asking your audience strategic questions like this early on in your presentation also gives you the unique opportunity to adjust your messaging if need be.

Crafting Rule #3: Ask revealing questions about your audience.

Your audience is often the decision maker you need to persuade, right?

Persuade them to take an action…

Persuade them to think differently…

Persuade them to consider something new….

Keeping that in mind, the more you can learn about what your audience thinks, values or feels will help you persuade them to take action.

So when crafting your questions, see if you can come up with questions that reveal something about your audience that will help you persuade them.

For example, let’s say your presentation is about a new operating system that you want them to try out.

To build your case, you could ask revealing multiple-choice questions like:

• What do you value most in an operating system (A, B, C or D)?
• What do you find most frustrating in an operating system (A, B, C or D)?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how good would an operating system need to be to get you to switch?

And notice how each of the questions is trying to reveal how your audience thinks and feels, allowing you to make a stronger argument based on their responses.

The more you can learn about your audience like during your presentation, the more effective you can be as a presenter.

If you're interested in finding more about how you can weave EPF type questions into your presentation via Glisser, hit the button below.