How to make a great impression when speaking to senior leadership

“What the hell am I looking at here?”

We were only 5 minutes into our meeting with the CEO when things started to go sideways.

I was the newly hired Sales Trainer at a software company, and my boss and I had prepared a comprehensive plan for training an incoming wave of new sales recruits.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get very far in our presentation before the CEO and the Head of Sales started ripping it apart. We left that meeting defeated and went back to the drawing board.

The lessons I took away from that C-level meeting — the first of many in my career — totally changed the way I think about speaking to senior leadership.

Here’s the weird thing: The plan itself wasn’t actually the problem. The real problem was:

• We spent a lot of time making the plan
• And zero time thinking about how we would communicate and deliver the plan to our executive audience (sound familiar?)

Here I share what I’ve learned about speaking to senior leadership, so hopefully, you can avoid the pain that I felt on that day.

5 tips on how to present to executives

Before you start any presentation, always remember to conduct an analysis with your audience. Try out our free Audience Needs Map™, but in any setting, you need to know:

• The makeup of your audience
• What your audience cares about
• What drives them to action
• What frustrates them

In the case of any CEO, they typically have very busy schedules, and if you ever take the time to calculate your CEO’s time on an hourly rate … it’s quite the astronomical figure to us peons.

But the point of that exercise is to know two things:

1. Time is money (literally) for them
2. Get to the point, fast

Outside of that, I’m going to share more tips on presenting to executives. After all, we’re Duarte, a persuasive communication firm and design agency. It’s kind of our bread and butter.

1. Show up with confidence

If an executive is going to endorse your recommendation, they want to know that you’ve done your homework and that you can defend your ideas. So it’s important you project a confident presence. And confidence is best forged through preparation.

2. Know your opening inside and out

When speaking to senior leadership, make sure you’ve memorized your most important points, data, and stories. Maximizing your presentation rehearsal time is imperative here, and make sure to end with a stirring call to action. And practice, practice, practice, until you can jump in and out of the presentation without skipping a beat.

If you’re not comfortable with your content or with your own speaking ability, the chances of your presentation being effective go way down. Lucky for you, public speaking is a skill that can be learned.

We specialize in helping everyone communicate better, in every scenario. Check out our Captivate™ training, an award-winning workshop designed to improve everyone’s public speaking delivery and confidence.

3. Don’t bury the lead when presenting to executives

If you’re speaking to senior leadership, it’s probably because you want them to take action on something.

• Perhaps approve a new initiative?
• Grant a department more resources or budget?
• See the value in XYZ for the company?

They understand this dynamic, so don’t beat around the bush.

I think about it in terms of journalism.

When young journalists are learning to write news stories, most of them learn the “inverted pyramid” method, which teaches you to begin your article with the most newsworthy information (i.e. the lead), then prioritize the rest of your material in order of its relative importance.

We should use the same principle when speaking to senior leadership.

Do you need a decision? Are you asking for more budget? Do you have urgent questions that need to be answered?

State those things up front, so everyone is on the same page and can move toward a decision quickly.

How you structure your presentation is important to your delivery. And our Resonate® workshop hones in on your presentation structure. It recommends a persuasive framework to help you communicate your best.

4. Demonstrate your reasoning to executives clearly

One of the trickiest things about presenting to executives is knowing how much detail to provide.

Some leaders want A LOT of data before moving forward with a decision. Others might make snappy judgments based solely on your agenda slide.

A good rule of thumb is to have two or three solid points for every pillar of your recommendation. But the real key is to know your audience well and construct a presentation that’s empathetic to how they process information.

In the example earlier, our CEO had low patience for anything he already knew or agreed with, but he would dive deep on a topic if he wasn’t yet convinced about it.

So the second time I presented to him, I gave him an executive summary with four main points, then stored additional data in an appendix that I could easily access if he wanted to drill down.

If you’d like a free and fast way to get started on your next executive summary, try our Slidedocs® templates.

5. Be honest about gaps when talking to leadership

After years of getting pitched half-baked ideas, most execs have a pretty good B.S. meter. (In fact, our own CEO shares how to present to senior leadership as well!)

Acknowledging holes in your data or weaknesses in your argument can be intimidating, but it’s also a great way to show you’ve done your due diligence and it creates trust with your audience.

In fact, most senior leaders are enthusiastic problem solvers and will gladly volunteer ideas or resources that you haven’t thought of yet.

When in doubt, train up

After we botched that first meeting with the CEO, we were lucky that we got another chance. We made a few adjustments to the plan itself, totally re-worked the strategy for communicating the plan, rehearsed it ahead of time, and then knocked it out of the park in the second meeting.

Of course, you won’t always get a second opportunity when speaking to senior leadership. While following the steps above can help in most instances, some scenarios are more high-stakes than others.

In those instances, don’t leave your presentation to chance. Presenting to executives shouldn’t be daunting! Train up with Duarte DataStory® for data-heavy presentations, or Resonate® for persuasive communication, and Captivate™ if you need to brush up on your public speaking skills.

This article was originally published on August 13, 2020. It has been updated in July 2024 for relevancy.