Two minutes in, your audience has already decided whether to keep listening.

At one time, we all delivered a presentation that seemed to go well but produced nothing. The slides were excellent, the audience was polite, but the deal did not close. The problem is rarely the information or content. The problem is that information by itself does not create action.

An informative presentation explains what your product does and how it works. A compelling one explains what changes for the customer, what it is worth, and what happens next. Here are nine adjustments that turn your informative presentations into ones that produce action.

1. Start with a piece of paper, not PowerPoint. Write the objective first. Introducing your company is not an objective. Securing an agreement from the operations director to run a sixty-day trial on line three, with a start date before the end of the quarter, is an objective. An objective requires a verb, a person, and a date. Every slide then earns its place in your presentation.
2. Consider the needs of each individual in your audience. The plant manager is thinking about downtime, the CFO about return on investment and payback, the engineer about compatibility. Ask your champion about who attends, what each person is measured on, and who signs.
3. Build around three claims you can prove. Support each one with evidence the audience can verify. Use numbers they supply from their operation, or a calculation they can verify.
4. Win their attention in the first ninety seconds. Company history spends your most valuable minutes on your least valuable content. Open with the cost of their problem, then share where the presentation is going and what you will ask for. However, be ready to briefly tell them the story of your company if they ask.
5. Deliver outward. Customize your delivery for your audience. Pressure pushes presenters toward the script and away from the people they came to persuade. Vary your pace, pause rather than fill the silence, and read the room. Are people paying attention? Are they involved or looking at their phones?
6. Ask for feedback during your presentation, not after it. 30 minutes of talking followed by questions addresses objections too late. After each major claim, ask for buy-in that cannot be answered with a yes or no.
7. Finish with a request. Name the next step, the person responsible, and set a date. Silence at the end of your presentation is not agreement. It is usually a sign that you lost people a long time ago, or there is a question nobody wants to ask first.
8. Treat remote presenting as a separate skill. Attention decays faster online, and the physical feedback disappears. Keep your camera at eye level, interact every couple of minutes, and be proficient with the platform you are using.
9. Practice often, because merely reading about presentation skills changes little. Delivering your own content, watching the recording, taking honest feedback, and delivering it again makes you better.