I glanced out the window of my flight to San Diego just as the plane pounded into the runway as if the pilot miscalculated the wheels touching down by about fifty feet. It was jarring. As I walked off the plane, I heard the tall, red-haired woman who sat next to me on the flight, say to whomever she was talking to on her phone, “That was a terrible flight.”

Actually, the flight was fine. It was a terrible landing, not a terrible flight. but it underscores how important the final touch point is with your audience—whether that’s an audience of passengers on a flight or an audience of professionals you are making a presentation to.

People remember the last thing they experience, especially if it is jarring or uncomfortable.

A bad close to a presentation is like a bad landing. It’s what people remember, and they will frequently take a bad close and refer to it as a bad presentation.

Here’s how to avoid that from happening to you while improving your presentation skills.

Rethinking your Q&A.

Avoid ending your presentation with a Q&A, a question-and-answer segment. Here’s why: If you do a great job with the presentation, you may have an audience that has no questions. When you ask for questions and there are none, you have nowhere to go. There’s an awkward silence leaving you with nothing to do but sheepishly thank the audience and slink out of the front of the room.

Instead, put your Q&A segment ahead of your close. If you get good questions, terrific. If you don’t, it’s no big deal because you still have a strong close to go to. It’s one of the strongest presentation strategies you can implement for immediate results.

Your close should have three parts to it:

1. Recap the big idea of your presentation. This is a one sentence recap.

2. Call to action. Tell the audience what you want them to do with the information you have given them.

3. Drop the mic. Use a line, wrap up a story, give an insight that makes it crystal clear you have done what you came to do and is more impactful than a simple, “thank you.”

Use Multiple Q&A’s

The second approach is to think about your Q&A as micro-sections you come back to multiple times during your presentation. Three or four Q&A mini-sessions can be far more effective than one, 15-minute Q&A section at the end, or just before the end, of your presentation.

Multiple Q&As allow your audience to ask questions while they are fresh in their mind. They may have a question about something you cover in the first five minutes of your presentation, but by the time they get to your Q&A at minute 45, they have forgotten the question—another reason for the lack of raised hands in the Q&A. It’s more effective to have a Q&A mini-segment 10 minutes into the program. You’ll get more questions that way.

More engaging presentations are more effective presentations.

Having multiple, short Q&A sessions throughout your presentation also keeps you dialed in to what your audience is—and isn’t absorbing. It gives you a frequent pulse check on your audience and it gives your audience multiple entry points to get involved in your presentation. Let’s face it, minute 45 is a little late to create audience engagement. Create it early, create it often.

By rethinking and restructuring your Q&A section, you create better audience interaction, you get real-time feedback from your audience, and you avoid having the kind of landing that my pilot had in San Diego: a miscalculation, a rough ending to the time together and the misperception that the entire experience was negative.

And when you use this approach, you don’t have to tell attendees to leave their seatbelts on until you reach the terminal. They’ll already be on their way out of the room, ready to tell others about how good your presentation was.