What's wrong with this picture? Where would you even start making it better?
Steady. I feel a rant coming on…
Last week the sales team in my company was working on revising our core sales presentation.
That frustrating experience made me think of a little-known idea that I believe is one of the most important points both Cliff Atkinson and Garr Reynolds make in the books I mentioned in a prior article.
This article shares the highlights with you.
The authors say each presentation should consist of three separate components:
- the slides you show your audience
- the notes that help you prepare
- the handout document you give to the audience after your presentation.
In my experience, nearly everyone in sales and marketing tries to smash all three components into a single set of slides. Reynolds calls the result a “slideument.”
Frankenstein Lives — Probably in a Place Near You
A slideument is the Frankenstein of PowerPoint presentations. Like the poor monstrous creature that Dr. Frankenstein gave life to after crudely stitching together body parts of multiple corpses, a slideument is a really bad combination of elements that don’t belong together.
Slideuments are most often the result of ignorance, laziness, lack of time, or the demands of a knucklehead conference organizer.
After you’ve read this rant, scratch ignorance off your list of excuses for creating them.
Make Your Visual Images More Powerful
Slideuments are bad because they’re ineffective. They compromise your audience’s experience of your presentation.
The purpose of your slides is to engage your audience visually and emotionally without distracting them for what you’re saying while they absorb the content of your slides.
On your slides, images are more important than words. To reinforce the points you want to make as you present, strive for a powerful and memorable combination of words and images.
This means your images should be large and visually and emotionally compelling.
You should use only one dominant image per slide. The viewer’s eye should know instantly where you want it to look first.
The Problem of Too Many Words
To boost the power of the images you use in your slides, use text sparingly.
For clarity and interest, each slide should make only one point.
Your slides probably contain too many words and too many points. An excess of text on your slides confuses, distracts or bores your audience as you speak.
You want your audience to listen to what you’re saying and to absorb what you’re showing. It’s impossible for them to read the words on your slides while they’re listening to what you say.
People can either read or listen. They can switch quickly from one mode to the other, but they can’t do both at the same time.
If you doubt this, try talking and writing at the same time. Or try writing while you listen to a talk show on the radio.
The Problem of Too Few Slides
Have you ever heard a presenter say to her audience, “Don’t worry. I have only five slides”? She then goes on to present for an hour while showing her five horribly overloaded slides.
There is no virtue in using a small number of slides. Say it out loud three times. Please.
You should be concerned only about the risk of failing to achieve the purpose of your presentation. The surest way to fail at that is to make your presentation boring or confusing.
It’s OK to have a lot of slides as long as you move through them quickly enough to keep your audience interested. A faster pace is more energizing.
For a 20-minute presentation using slides, you will be much more effective using 40 good slides than five bad ones.
With the 40 good slides you’d spend an average of 30 stimulating seconds on each. With the five bad slides your audience has to suffer through four dull minutes of each.
Your audience counts slides only if they’re bored.
The best number of slides and pace of your presentation will vary with your audience, of course, but most audiences are more likely to prefer the faster pace with more slides and simpler, more interesting images.
Don’t Try to Use Your Slides as a Teleprompter
Don’t design your slides to prompt you on all the key points you want to make.
You should know what to say next because you’ve prepared properly and rehearsed your presentation several times before you give it – not because you’re taking cues from the text on the screen.
If you just repeat the text that appears on your slides, much of your audience will get bored very quickly. They’ll either read ahead of you or will tune out. In either case, they won’t hear what you’re saying.
The Problem of Too Few Words
The purpose of your notes is to help you prepare to deliver your slides effectively.
You never share your notes with your audience.
A slideument is a poor tool for preparation because it contains too little information. It’s no substitute for an annotated script.
Good preparation notes should remind you of all the key points you want to make as you present each slide. They should contain all the words and details you need to tell a story completely and compellingly.
If you’re preparing presentation notes for someone else to use (as you would do if you’re preparing a presentation for another sales person to give, for example), state all your ideas in complete sentences. Make your ideas flow in a sequence that makes good logical or emotional sense.
Your presentation notes should also explain in detail what to say about each of the charts, graphs, diagrams and illustrations shown in the slides.
Your notes might also include stage comments and annotations, including ideas on where to stand, where to emphasize a point with your voice, and how to use inflection.
Finally, good presentation notes should clearly indicate which points are essential to make if you’re pressed for time. It should subordinate the remaining points (such as supplemental statistics) you can use if time allows.
Great Slide Presentation = Terrible Handout
The purpose of the handout document is to help your audience review and remember the key points you made in your presentation. The handout is what you give to people who say “Can I get a copy of your presentation to share with the people I work with?”
For this purpose your handout must be complete enough to stand on its own. If you prepare it properly, anyone who reads will understand your full presentation even if they haven’t heard you give it. The only thing they’ll miss is the emotional experience of seeing and hearing you present it.
Your handout must make it easy for its readers to absorb all the key ideas you communicated to your audience.
Readers shouldn’t have to struggle to fill in missing words, ideas, explanations, details or examples. They shouldn’t be made to decipher the meaning of pared-down bullet points.
While text may often be less important than visual images in a powerful slide presentation, the written word is by far the more important element of a good handout.
The handout should restate the flow of your ideas clearly and completely. It should contain complete sentences rather than shortened phrases.
If your handout reproduces images from your presentation, they should be just big enough to be legible.
OK. All that bottled-up energy is dissipating. I’m feeling much better after my rant. Thanks for letting me blow off steam.
Will you please give these ideas some thought? Don’t be a lazy-butt presenter. Never make another audience suffer through another really bad PowerPoint presentation. Especially if there’s a chance I’ll be in it.
Stay fresh.
–Scott Silverback