HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations (HBR Guide Series)

Get the Most out of Your Q&A

A Q&A is a powerful, interactive way to address your audience’s concerns and drive your point home. Always allow time for Q&A in a business presentation—trim your talk if necessary. When people leave the room with burning, unanswered questions, they won’t adopt your ideas. Get the most out of your Q&A by:

• Planning when you’ll take questions: Establish early on if you want to field questions throughout your talk or save them until the end. If you need to build a thorough case, ask people at the very beginning to hold questions until the end. But if you’re making a series of points, you can take questions after each one, while they’re fresh in people’s minds.
• Anticipating questions: You can spend hours preparing a ...