Are your Presentations Losing you sales (Issue 21, Vol 04)

Last week’s edition of CDCD seemed to hit a nerve, as it triggered quite a few emails from you. Great – it’s nice to know my work is being read and it’s even nicer to know that it’s appreciated.

Earlier on this week, I presented to a mixed group of senior managers all of whom were responsible for creating and/or presenting information on a reasonably frequent basis. I gave them my normal view – which is that the vast majority of business-oriented presentations are boring, irrelevant, and completely forgetful.

They agreed with me.

I find this remarkably sad

We shouldn’t have to put up with this. Time and time again I’ve come across businesses that have fallen at the last hurdle in terms of attracting new projects – projects that they were perfectly capable of doing, yet were unable to convince their customer to proceed.

How so come? Because they did a really bad job of presenting their case. It’s as bald, bad and (sadly) believable as that.

One of the e-mails in response to last week’s CDCD was from a reader who told me about a recent experience of his. In summary, he was telling me how he managed to deliver an excellent presentation with very little notice – and certainly no time to produce any PowerPoint slides – by just standing in front of a whiteboard and speaking (admittedly on a topic that he knew intimately, and in which the audience had a high degree of interest).

The essence of his e-mail was that he felt a bit surprised that he had somehow “got away with it”. The fact of the matter is, that from a presentation perspective, he did exactly the right thing:

 He illustrated his spoken message with diagrams (graphs, etc, not words)

 He drew the diagrams in synchronisation with his speech

This is how all the best presentations should be done – and it is perfectly possible to use PowerPoint in this way if you make use of the Custom Animation feature. In fact I’d go so far as to say that if you are not going to use PowerPoint’s Custom Animation feature you ought not to be using the product at all.

The businesses I referred to earlier that are failing to close projects they really ought to be closing are inevitably delivering sales presentations that are full to the brim with bullet-point lists. These absolutely work against the notion of helping people remember your message, and here’s why:

If you present a bullet-point list you are asking the audience to do two things at once – to both read (the words on the screen) and listen (to what you are saying). The brain cannot do this. The result is very little gets remembered.

The reader who drew and spoke at the same time was doing exactly the right thing.

I feel very strongly about this and to that extent I’m creating a series of videos that explain these concepts further. These videos will revolutionise the way you present information and the first one is available on this link. Others in the series will be coming along in the near future and keep you posted as to when they are available.

In the meantime, make sure you watch the first video and take the first step to Improve your presentation skills now

This post was first published as one of Chris Davidson’s “Competitive Difference” emails. You can subscribe to Chris Davidson’s “Competitive Difference” (CDCD) Via the Active Presence website. You can also contact Active Presence Directly.