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When One Picture Equals 62 Slides

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When we have a big presentation, why do we reach for the slide deck?

Isn’t it funny how distasteful we find PowerPoints to be when we’re on the recipient end, but how intriguing and inviting they become when we’re the ones giving the presentation?

I was speaking with a potential client the other day and asked them what their typical process was when a customer called and wanted information. He sheepishly said that they went out and gave a slide deck presentation.  When I asked how many slides there were, he responded, “62 – and growing.”

Sixty-two slides and growing!?  “Yes,” they said.

They began presentations a few years ago with a deck of 12 slides, but the Marketing Department and the subject matter guys were always wanting to add slides to be more specific about the results that a customer can expect. And now it’s up to 62 slides.

The Antidote for the 62-Slide Deck

Yes, there is an antidote for this slide deck disease and that is the Cornerstone Slide.

This is the one slide that you reveal at the beginning of any presentation that depicts the typical pain the customer will go through in the absence of your solution.  Preferably, it has no words on it, but instead, a graphic illustration or a drawing of your customer’s problem.

This could be a stick figure illustration or a high-end graphic illustration, but regardless, when a customer sees the slide and hears your explanation, they should be able to pinpoint exactly what their issue is.

We’ve watched organizations do away with the 61 other slides and just use the Cornerstone Slide because it’s the thing that engages the prospect at a deeper level of the brain than a slide with 1,000 words on it.

So rather than continuing to add slides so that in two years it becomes 102-slide deck, go back to the basics and do one really good slide up front.  You may find the rest are irrelevant.

Caution: Your marketing people may not like that (they actually will NOT like that), but your customers will and probably will buy more.

Three Tips for a Modern Presentation

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Last week a client asked us into his office to review his presentation on a massive project he was bidding on.

He told me upfront that he didn’t do a lot of these presentations so he was a little bit rusty.

As we watched him go through the presentation, I could tell that there were some presentation principles that he’d missed. No fault of his. He just wasn’t skilled in this area.

So I wanted to give you a recap of three tips that he used that tremendously improved his presentation to his prospects.

Tip 1: Pictures speak louder than words

Always, always, always have a visual diagram or illustration of the value that you bring. Perhaps it’s a circle divided into five components or a pentagram that is divided up into easy segments but you need to have a visual representation of the process you take people through or the value you bring.

Tip 2: Always start with a story

People love stories. You’re presentations will be remembered a lot longer and will be a lot more compelling if you can weave personal stories of tragedy and triumph into the presentation. Perhaps you can start with the standard “story of woe”. That’s the story of a prospect who was struggling and came to you for a solution. You can tell your audience what they went through, what some of the problems were and the process you used to help them alleviate the pain. Make it real and make it compelling.

Tip 3: Make sure you’re answering the real question

Throughout your presentation you will have questions from the audience. A mistake we see salespeople make is they answer the question that’s posed instead of getting to the real question before you submit an answer.

A good way to test this is if you answer a question and nobody says anything, chances are you’ve not answered the right question. A good way to clarify the question is, “To help me answer the question better, I would like to understand a little bit more about it and about why you asked it.”

This wasn’t an exhaustive list of all the points we recommended he changed but I thought these were three of the most important that can help you make a more modern, compelling and convincing presentation to your prospects.