Presentation Skills Checklist:15 Tips for Impact & Influence

Great presentations don’t happen by accident. Behind every confident speaker who holds the room, there’s a well-thought-out plan, deliberate practice, and often a reliable checklist. When the pressure is on, a simple list can be your best friend: it brings structure, calms nerves, and helps ensure nothing vital is missed.

Whether you’re pitching to investors, delivering an internal report or update, or standing on a conference stage, our Strategic Presentation Skills Checklist is your roadmap to delivering with clarity, confidence, and lasting influence.

Let’s dive in.

Why Use a Presentation Checklist?

A checklist will help you to:

• Stay organised
• Build confidence through preparation
• Avoid common pitfalls
• Focus on what matters most
• Deliver with consistent quality

Think of this as your personal coaching tool to review every time you present.

The Strategic Presentation Skills Checklist

✅ 1. Start with the end in mind

Ask yourself: What do I want my audience to think, feel and do after this presentation? Clarity of outcome and defining your presenting goal sharpens your content and it clarifies your central message.

✅ 2. Craft a captivating opening hook

Grab attention fast – within the first 30 seconds. Use a question, statistic, story, or bold statement to draw them in. If you don’t hook them immediately, you never will.

✅ 3. Know your audience inside out

Who are they? What do they care about? What is their problem or pain point? Adjust your storyline, tone, personality style and language to match their world. Also, present from their frame of reference.

✅ 4. Structure your message clearly

Follow proven structures like:

• Problem → Solution → Benefit
• Past → Present → Future
• Challenge → Choice → Outcome

✅ 5. Use visual slides

Slides are visual reinforcement aids – as well as your script. Aim for clean, uncluttered slides with strong visuals. Limit yourself to one key idea per slide.

✅ 6. Rehearse out loud, on your feet

Run through your presentation at least twice, standing up. Rehearsal builds familiarity and fluency and helps you notice the weak spots.

✅ 7. Time yourself

Respect your audience and the meeting agenda. Practice with a timer and edit ruthlessly to stay within your slot. Remember that with audience interaction and questions, your presentation is likely to take much longer than when you rehearse solo. Build in interaction time.

✅ 8. Warm up your voice and body

Before presenting, do vocal warm-ups and some movement to free and warm up your body. This helps you project better and feel more present and energised.

✅ 9. Make eye contact and pause

Shared and sustained eye contact helps you to build trust. You need to build a strong relationship with your audience and that is largely done with eye contact. Engaging eye contact creates the vital emotional connection with your audience. Remember – you can only deliver your ‘download’ once you are plugged into them!

Deliver your information in ‘sense phrases’ to help your audience to process what you have said. Pausing will also help you to emphasise your key messages and give your audience space to absorb and process what you have just said.

✅ 10. Use open illustrative gestures and movement purposefully

Be 100% present and own the space. You have an opportunity to showcase yourself, so shine.

Don’t fidget nervously. That draws negative attention and destroys your credibility. Be focused and settled and move occasionally to signal a change of thought and theme. Keep your body language open, relaxed and expansive.

✅ 11. Tell stories that connect

Stories humanise your content. The reason for this is that our brains think visually, and stories are imagined and remembered. We can all relate to stories as every aspect of life is a story in itself. An appropriate story, well told, will stick far longer than a dry data point.

✅ 12. Handle questions with confidence

Don’t fear Q&A’s. This is where you audience really gets to find out answers to their burning questions. Q&A sessions are also where audience engagement is at its highest and where you can consolidate your proposal argument.

The good news is that you can actually prepare for likely questions. They usually arise around risk-related areas. For each of your slides, ask yourself what risk-related areas come up. If caught off-guard, stay calm, acknowledge the question and questioner, ask for clarification, and then make a plan to deliver the answer to the question.

Avoid negative phrases, like “I don’t know”, or “I am not sure”, or ‘I never thought about that”. Such phrases destroy your credibility and your ability to win much needed trust.

✅ 13. End with impact

Don’t fizzle out at the end. Finish on a strong note with a clear summary, and an essential call to action. You never cross the finishing line of a presentation unless you actually ask for something.

✅ 15. Record and review yourself

Video reveals what practice hides. Your video recorder can be your best teacher as you get to see what your audience will experience. Watch yourself presenting to improve your connection and engagement, your overall impact, as well as your body language and vocal delivery.

✅ 14. Perform dry runs in front of your peers

The best presenters and top sales teams always perform dry runs in front of their peers, who are in themselves subject matter experts. Ask someone you trust to assess you during your dry run. Ask them to reveal your blind spots. What’s unclear or weak? What should you leverage and what should you eliminate? Technical checks are always advised.

Bonus Tips for Lasting Influence

If you want to increase your impact and strategic influence even further:

• Use the rule of three (audiences remember trios best)
• Vary your pace, pauses and pitch to hold interest
• Use dramatic pauses to drive emphasis
• Deliver energy and enthusiasm, but stay factual and authentic

📄 Download Your Free Checklist PDF

We’ve turned this checklist into a printable format you can use before any presentation. Pin it to your wall, keep it in your laptop bag, or share it with your team.

[Click here to download your free Presentation Skills Checklist]

✉️ Ready to Take Your Team’s Presentation Skills to the Next Level?

At Communication Guru, we teach professionals how to present with clarity, impact and influence. Our presentation and communication skills programmes are always psychologically safe, extremely practical and immediately useable.

Email john@johnfrench.co.za to find out more or to book a customised session.

You have the message. Let us help you deliver it.