Rule 3: Visuals Matter

This is a continuation of The Rules: Create & Deliver Effective Presentations Every Time, providing detail and depth on the third rule – Visuals Matter (but not how you think they do)

Picture and a Thousand Words

If you’re worried about following the presentation design guidelines – five bullets per slide, no more than ten words per bullet – you’re doing it wrong. Seriously, stop it.

If your slide deck is edge-to-edge words, you may as well tell your audience to read the proposal, or article, or hand out your notes and be done with it. Because reading is what they’ll be doing anyway, right before they nod off.

Text-heavy slides and bad visuals are where the death-by-PowerPoint meme was born. Endless, bulleted text on presentation slides are a crime against humanity that needs to stop.

Rule 2: Know Your Audience

This is a continuation of The Rules: Create & Deliver Effective Presentations Every Time, providing detail and depth on the second rule – Really knowing your audience, and what they actually need, is the foundation of your story.

Let me Tell You Your Story

 “Well, what should we tell them?” 

This is frequently the first question asked at presentation kick-off. When we insist on having an established story before building a slide deck to illustrate the message, it's sometimes asked with some tension...or shouting. The answer is actually simple – so simple it can seem difficult.

You know what story to tell by knowing your client, knowing what matters to them most, and then using that knowledge to tell them their story.

First, you need to understand the problem or challenge you’re trying to solve, then you can articulate your solution and its value for the client. You may not always be focused on solving a problem, but you do need to figure out what your audience cares about.

Why would they want to sit and listen to what you want to say?

Answers include: because it’s about them, it’s about a topic that concerns them, they feel emotionally invested in the outcome, or you’re telling them how you’re going to solve their challenges.

Rule 1: Story First

This is a continuation of The Rules: Create & Deliver Effective Presentations Every Time providing detail and depth on the first rule – Story is Everything (and it comes before visuals)

What Does that Even Mean?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a sales professional say, “Just send me a standard deck and I’ll figure out how to fit what I want to tell my client into the slides.” Um, no.

Without a compelling story, all you have is cool wall paper.

There were times we were forced to accommodate this type of request and it never ended well.

The aftermath resulted in two scenarios. Either a panicked call from the sales team one day before the presentation because they realized during the group practice session that they didn’t actually know what they were supposed to be saying. Or, in the final week leading up to the client meeting, the team would begin making extensive edits to the “standard deck” as they tried to manipulate the content into something that would appeal to their client. By the time they were up to version 15, the slide deck was a mess, and they still didn't know what they were supposed to say.

Both scenarios involved a lot of stress, last minute scrambling, blame and recrimination. So, bad things leading to bad presentations.

The Rules: Create & Deliver Compelling Presentations Every Time

For more than seven years, my team of Presentation Specialists and I supported client-facing presentations for a national organization of some 300 individuals. Over that time, we created thousands of slide decks. Conservatively speaking, at least half bombed.

No, I’m not confessing to being bad at my job or criticizing my team. They produced clean, professional slide decks with accurate grammar and clean formatting that met brand standards. Yet, at least half of the presentations were, subjectively speaking, bad.

Why? How? What could we have done to fix it?

At the time, our control over presentation development was limited to providing strategy input, building slide decks, editing content and coaching presenters. Our impact on the final product varied based on the quality of engagement with the team delivering the presentation. As much as we wanted to ensure everything was great every time, success relied on the people who stood in front of the client – how well they prepared, worked together and executed the presentation.

The moral is this: even the tightest, best looking slide deck is just nice wall paper if the presentation flow, content and delivery are off. Also, a really bad deck can ruin your presentation (we’ve all seen it), but the best-looking deck out there can’t save a presentation that is otherwise bad.

So, how do you ensure your presentations are compelling, effective and successful? For that matter, how do you know if they’re even any good?

Are They Buying It?

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There are 5 million* marketing books, articles, blog posts and tweets espousing the value of a compelling brand story – a powerful narrative that explains how your company solves problems, delivers solutions or is the best at whatever it is you do. Good storytelling is vital to customer capture and marketers use it because it works. (*estimate)

Subaru uses emotionally-engaging stories centered around their cars in their TV ads – I get choked up watching them. Now I own a Subaru because their compelling narrative is backed up by real-world performance, but it was the story that got me in the door.

So, you’ve developed your story, and you’re getting positive public feedback. That’s good! But wait, there’s a critical piece of this whole storytelling thing you have to get absolutely right or it’s not going to work.

You need to find out if your employees believe it. No really, do they?

In Defense of Little Data

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If you have a pulse and you're active in the business world you have, inevitably, heard of the incredible power of big data – how it can reliably predict outcomes, provide insight, solve problems and will soon rule the world. Big data has saturated business, and also sports, politics and even the US Olympic team uses big data to improve athlete performance.

Big data is game changing for anyone able to harness its awesome power.

But, what if you’re too small for big data? What if big data and its corresponding big price tag are out of reach for your business, department or project? Do you gamble on your instincts, go with your gut and give it your best guess?

I’m not doubting your experience, acumen or business instincts, but please don’t do this. Ever.

Too many variables affect your results, and decisions made without data analysis can have unexpected and significant costs.

Change is not Progress

I bet you've heard this one before. Yet, there are still leaders who don't seem to embrace the bedrock fundamentals behind this homily. Change for the sake of change – trying something to make it look like you’re going somewhere or random change with no underlying purpose – is not just a waste of energy and resources, it can sink your entire enterprise.

Clearly-articulated goals supported by effective data analysis are minimum requirements for making progress instead of endless, futile change. But, how do you get there?

Or, rather, how do you ensure you're going to get somewhere better?

The Secret isn’t Actually in the Sauce: What Makes a Great Mentor

One of the more challenging things to do as a tenured professional with advanced skills is mentor or train a novice – sharing the "secret sauce" behind their excellence often stumps the experienced veteran.

Some people attribute their struggle to train a novice to a difference in natural talent, better motivation, or the rigor of their work ethic. They're not necessarily wrong about the natural talent thing, but frequently the trouble starts when they leave out the most critical part of transferring their expertise; that is, the most basic part of how they got to where they are – the secret really isn’t in the sauce.