The hybrid presentation opportunity – are you ready?

Hybrid events offer the best of both worlds – and have a potential for breadth and depth the professional services sector has never had before. To pull this off, though, your speakers will have to be up to the job.

The hybrid presentation opportunity – are you ready?

Hybrid events offer the best of both worlds – and have a potential for breadth and depth the professional services sector has never had before. To pull this off, though, your speakers will have to be up to the job.

Gavin Brown, Director, Speak With Impact

gavin@speakwithimpact.com

Question one – are all your clients going back to the office full-time?

Question two – are all your clients going to work from home full-time?

If the answer to both of those questions is “no”, you are already on the foothills of hybrid working.

This is likely to be the norm for most people. And as hybrid working becomes mainstream, hybrid presenting is sure to follow. It is a discipline you will want to (and have to) master.

Hybrid presenting is a major opportunity for professional services firms to shine. Pre-Covid, most presenting events (for example a thought leadership event) were in person. This led to networking opportunities before and after the event, many of which were valuable and could lead to significant business breakthroughs.

Then, almost without warning, all events went virtual. We lost those networking opportunities.

But we also gained with higher numbers attending - and from a wider geography. Potential clients and customers who’d never been on our radar suddenly positioned themselves front and centre, on our computer screens and on our client lists.

Now hybrid events offer the best of both worlds – the chance to get high numbers and the chance for networking and engagement. It is a potential for breadth and depth the professional services industry has never had before. To pull this off, though, your speakers will have to be up to the job.

Start by viewing your audience as your “presentation clients” – everything you do is done for their benefit.

As a priority, you need to take both segments of the audience – those in the room and those dialling in – and get them on the same page from the start. Because until you start to speak, your two audiences have had two very different experiences.

In the room they saw some familiar faces, met some new ones, had a cup of coffee and soaked up the atmosphere. Meanwhile at home, your other audience were less able to engage. They had to brew their own coffee, they got much less sense of the atmosphere and they missed out on rubbing shoulders with friends, colleagues and potential associates.

They may even have other distractions going on, both on their screen and in their own unique environment, whether that’s home or another workplace.

When you start to speak, both audiences are suddenly hearing the same thing together for the first time. That’s why you need to create a shared experience as soon as possible. Design a plan to get everyone feeling like they are in this together and implement it without delay. Don’t think the job is done at that point – you need to keep the momentum going.

“Hybrid events offer the best of both worlds – the chance to get high numbers and the chance for networking and engagement. It is a potential for breadth and depth the professional services industry has never had before. To pull this off, though, your speakers will have to be up to the job.”
“Hybrid events offer the best of both worlds – the chance to get high numbers and the chance for networking and engagement. It is a potential for breadth and depth the professional services industry has never had before. To pull this off, though, your speakers will have to be up to the job.”

Getting them all on the same page is one thing – keeping them there is another matter. On a regular basis throughout the presentation, you need to create a shared experience where both audiences feel equally engaged.

One way to do this is to use an app or plug-in for your platform (although the technology is developing all the time). There are a number of options, but three that I have used commonly with clients include Slido, Kahoot! and Mentimeter.

In this scenario, your audience will log into the app using their smartphone (ensure they download it in advance, by the way). Then when you ask the question, get them to open the app and respond accordingly.

All the results are seen in real-time by all the audience – either on the big screen or their individual computers. They do the same thing at the same time and see the results contemporaneously. This leads to a shared experience.

There are other more traditional materials you need to get right too. The use of slides is nothing new, but hybrid presentations have opened-up fresh challenges in relation to the effectiveness of their deployment.

They need to work seamlessly for people in the room and for those joining remotely. There can be a significant difference between the type of slides that work on the big screen and the types of slides that work on a laptop or tablet.

I’ve seen it too many times where something which works fine in the room is, in contrast, a real challenge for those watching on a small computer screen. This can have a severely negative impact on your presentation.

Before you get anywhere near final rehearsal, do a ‘slides only’ run through. What does this entail?

Go through your slides briskly, without necessarily presenting. Get one person to sit at the back of the room to observe. Ask another to sit in a different room, observing from a laptop or tablet. Invite them both to provide feedback on how the slides came across. Was there anything to flag up regarding readability or understanding?

There will be at least one slide that failed the test – probably more – so make a note of all comments and adjust accordingly.

Hybrid presentations bring a fresh opportunity that you can really embrace. Not many organisations are doing them well at the moment - and many more are doing them poorly.

There is a big chance to stand out. You can give your clients the choice of attending in person or remotely. You can give them presentations that really engage them, wherever they are.

Hybrid presentations are coming. And they will be with us for the long-term.

Gavin Brown is a former Member of the Scottish Parliament and previously worked as a litigator in a large commercial firm. He helps people prepare and deliver great presentations across the world.

speakwithimpact.com