PowerPointless
Your biggest marketing opportunity is free and tragically neglected.
I have spent a good chunk of the past 15 years sitting through mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations. I am sure I’m not alone in this, right? Sadly, the owners of these incredible performances continue to this day, gleefully laboring over slide after slide, logically putting one damn bullet point after another until they feel satisfied their victims (the audience) are thoroughly beaten down by every factoid the presenter could possibly share in a single presentation. Now tell the truth: you have done a few of these numbers yourself, right? I have, and I have the glazed stares (and lost sales) etched in my mind to prove it. The lost opportunities and wasted time due to bad presentations every day is incalculable.
What do I mean by bad? Little or no real connection to the audience, too much information going too many directions (the infamous data dump), a presenter who reads content seemingly unconnected emotionally to the ideas presented…the list goes on and on. And this is very sad for most businesses. Why? Because the biggest deals – the most critical, life-altering decisions in a business – usually happen in some sort of presentation. That makes upping your presentation game a huge marketing opportunity.
The costs of a great presentation may involve getting some professional help with your template and information graphic design, and getting help with content planning and editing, and throw in a little presentation coaching for the big critical presentations. All of this is a fraction of the cost of most advertising, marketing or branding initiatives and the impact can be far greater because you can’t beat having instant feedback right in front of your customer. If presentations are so powerful yet so cheap, why do people continue to put audiences well into REM sleep, leaving the thier moment of decision unmoved? I don’t know. But my guess is most people think of PowerPoint as…well, PowerPoint. The less confident the presenter the more they want to read bullet point after bullet on slides. Because so many people do this totally ineffective “bullet point hypnosis” practice it seems normal, so it goes unaddressed. It would be far more productive if you thought of your presentation as The Moment of Decision (which it so often is), or at least a blank canvas where you can paint a picture that moves the minds and hearts of your audience. If you thought this way, your last instinct would be to plop in one bullet point after another because you would know that is not how you say something important. Here are five things that will make sure your presentation will move your audience instead of hypnotize them:
Ninety Seconds take away:
1. Start with the end in mind: Don’t build up to your point. Lead with it and then recap at the end. You save your audience a meandering data dump. What do you want them to think, or do?
2. Make it visual: Cut down on words and pull as much of your message as possible into a single information graphic that plots your points in a single view.
3. Practice your delivery: When your slides are done, you only have your content. To connect with your audience, YOU have to deliver it well.
4. Get rid of endless lists and just tell a story: Presenters love lists; audiences hate them. Stories move mountains; lists are forgotten before you’re done reading them.
5. Connect yourself personally to the message. YOU are the speaker. If you don’t have personal conviction or a stake in your message, you would do almost as well emailing your slides to your audience.
Need a quick confidential review of your presentation? Send it to me. I’m happy to give you our 5 Point presentation assessment which will give you pointers on how to make it better (it’s free.)
Tags: bad powerpoint, great presenting, presentation skills, presentation training, sales presentations
