168. Boris Hristov: How to Improve Your Tech Talks

Boris Hristov is the Founder of presentation agency 356labs and a PowerPoint MVP. Boris has years of experience as a trainer, mentor and consultant and he and his team are working with companies like Deutsche Telekom, KPMG, Renault, VMWARE, adidas and a many more to help them write, design and deliver truly effective tech talks and presentations. His agency is also the only presentation agency in the world speaking at Microsoft Ignite – the biggest yearly event of Microsoft, and this year they are the company behind the industry-leading presentation skills conference – Present to Succeed. From an IT Person to a Presentation guru Boris started his journey very young by attending presentations in the tech industry. But soon his curiosity and passion for presentations lead him to analyze and replicate the techniques he saw on stage and to develop and improve his own methodology for creating presentations. Shortly after that he started making workshops for groups of people and that lead to the next step by creating his own business: the presentation agency 356Labs. How to improve your Tech talks Boris’ top piece of advice to improve your tech talks is: Develop and build outstanding Presentation Design skills. Besides all the rehearsals an preparations about delivering the talk one of the lowest points is still the design of the slides. To take time to create a great design for your slides makes the difference between an average and an outstanding talk. One of the most important senses of human beings is the visual sense. Use it on your favor! Challenges of presenting virtually. How to deal with it. Presenting virtually and presenting in person is very different. And doing it virtually is more difficult, believe it or not. The first thing you have to do is improve your hardware. Invest in the best microphone or camera for using in presentations. The way you look and the way you sound is your first impression. Second, you have to improve the engagement.  As you cannot see your audience, getting feedback is really hard. In a Tech Talk prepare your delivery for making questions, ask for reactions via chat, ask people to raise hands and share their opinion. You have to plan the right way to incorporate all this to your presentation in a natural form. Third, take care of the design, your slides have to be able to fit many different fo...