Brand Insight Blog

How to sell your ideas and improve your presentations.

Every year at the Mac Expo, Steve Jobs unveils some fantastic new, game-changing technology from Apple. His presentations are always outstanding, both for the content and for entertainment value. This week he pulled their tiny new laptop out of a 9×12 manilla envelope. Brilliant! 

It’s not just natural charisma that makes Jobs an effective communicator. It’s his ability to convey ideas in simple, concise ways. He uses honest demonstrations. Stories. Theater. And yes, some Hollywood special effects.  But never Powerpoint.

PowerPoint is the antithesis of Apple.

A few months ago I dropped several thousand dollars to attend a two-day branding conference down in Austin, Texas. The keynote speaker was a notable pro who speaks and teaches professionally. He had an assistant with him, as well as tech support from the conference facility.

Three hours into it and he’s still fumbling around with his Powerpoint Presentation… Lights on. Lights off. Sound’s way too loud. Sound’s not on. Sound’s out of sync. Slides are out of order. How many times do we have to look at this guy’s desktop?  What a disaster.

But to be fair, even if the computer had behaved itself his presentation would have fallen flat. Because his ideas were totally scattered. His slides were loaded with text that he read verbatim. His facts were questionable. And his speech wasn’t really a speech at all. It was more of a walk-through of the slides.

Thank God, I’m not a middle manager in a big corporation where I’d have to endure daily doses of that crap.

In “The Perfect Pitch,” Jon Steele says, “most presenters start with the slides, and then treat what the are going to say simply as an exercise in linkage. The unfortunate consequence of this is that the presenter is reduced to a supporting role. To all presenters, I say this: YOU are the presentation.”

That’s easy to say if you’re Steve Jobs.  But you don’t have to be famous to put on a gripping and persuasive presentation. You just have to change the process, and forget about Powerpoint until you’re three-quarters of the way through.

Instead, think of yourself as a storyteller — in the old-fashioned, verbal tradition of story telling.  Stories are way more compelling than slides. And no matter how boring the topic may seem, there’s always a story buried in there somewhere. So tell the story. Write it down. Flesh it out and practice it before you ever open Powerpoint. Then use the software to create visual aids for your verbal points. Not the other way around! You’ll be amazed how focused your message becomes.

Back in the day, before PowerPoint was ever conceived, you had to send out for slides. And they were expensive! So you were forced to think long and hard about the content of each and every one. You had to plan the flow of the presentation. You had to know what the most important points were. And you were forced to boil it down until there was nothing left but the absolutely most powerful, relevant points. Then you’d cover the rest of the stuff in your speech.

Powerpoint makes it too easy to add slides and overwhelm people with charts and graphs. It’s like a crutch… Got an idea? Just jump right into PowerPoint and start creating slides.

Another unfortunate side effect of PowerPoint is lousy, truncated writing. People think they have to limit their words to fit the slides. And what they. End up with. Is choppy. Confusing. Information. That doesn’t. Communicate. Much of anything.

If you write the script first and then use PowerPoint slides as visual aids to drive home the main points, you won’t have that problem. You’ll be speaking from a coherent, written script, not reading random bullet points right off the slides.

I suspect that much of the problem stems from the fear of public speaking. And that’s understandable. People with that fear like to hide behind the PowerPoint slides. They can become almost invisible.  But that’s not how you’re going to make a sale, further your career or build a successful business. You have to suck it up, and put yourself out there.

Truth is, if you want to improve your presentations you’re going to have to get comfortable with public speaking. Join Toastmasters. Buy some videos and watch how the pros do it. Find a good mentor… Salespeople are usually the best at it, so if there’s someone really good at your company offer to be an audience as they practice. Watch, listen, and learn. And forget about mastering all the technical bells and whistles of PowerPoint. That will just distract you from the main objective.

Another option is to hire someone like myself to write and produce the presentation for you and coach you through the delivery. Do that a couple times, and you’ll either catch on or you’ll decide that it’s just best left to professionals.

Either way, you’ll end up with an effective, engaging presentation, even if you’re not introducing the latest, greatest invention from Apple.