I’ve hired more than 2,500 professional speakers in the past ten years and I’ve boiled it down to two main things the good ones all have:

1) Excellent Delivery Style – they know how to engage an audience. The focus is on the attendee, not the presenter.

2) Excellent Content – they have at most 3-5 major points that serve as the anchor of the presentation. Stories, examples, details all support those 3-5 main points.

In my opinion, delivery trumps content any day. Who wants to listen to a boring, data-dump content laden lecture? No one!

Here’s a mantra I use:
A) Presenters with good content and poor delivery fail.
B) Presenters with bad content and good delivery usually succeed…for a while. (We’ve all been in a presentation where the presenter is a master at motivating the audience and then we walk out and say, “That was fun, but what was the point.” It was cotton-candy motivation, sweet at first yet full of air.
C) Presenters with good content and good delivery always succeed.