The Presentation Lab

Learn the Formula Behind Powerful Presentations

Simon Morton

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118891773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

Revealing the difference between great slides and great presentations

Based on a proven process from one of the world's most prominent presentation consultancy and design firms, The Presentation Lab challenges everything you thought you knew about creating and delivering engaging business presentations. Author Simon Morton shares his unique Presentation Optimization methodology and takes readers on a journey of evolution and revolution to discover what makes an effective presentation (and you may be surprised to know that great design is thelastthing you need to worry about).

Using practical tips and drawing on Simon's experiences working with companies around the globe, The Presentation Lab will help everyone who ever needs to present by revealing what works, what doesn't and, more importantly, why. The Presentation Lab tackles "Death by PowerPoint" head on by dispelling presentation myths, examining the latest presentation innovations, exploring new concepts for audience engagement and delivery and challenging to status quo of today's business presentation landscape.

It might seem like a simple question, but it’s very easy to get the wrong end of the stick. Content to many people is the information you place onto a PowerPoint slide (normally in bullet point form!) to get your message across.

But it actually goes deeper than that.

Content is the information you need your audience to know to help drive the message forward.

This means that, dependent on your audience, there are likely to be large chunks of content cluttering up your slide that the audience either doesn’t need to know—or, more likely, is already completely au fait with and doesn’t need you to remind them of.

It’s useful to see content as the logical building blocks of your presentation. If you don’t share salient content in a structured way, you’ll never get to your goal of a completely understood, engaging and remembered message. As such, it’s also a great way of building empathy and rapport with your audience by ensuring that the content you use addresses their questions, concerns and needs. Content that engages them and takes them on a personal journey is a lot more valuable and compelling than sharing fact after fact about your business and how impressive it’s growth has been.

The Curse of the Credentials Presentation

Ask a business-to-business (B2B) salesperson to name their most used sales tool and they are likely to pat their laptop proudly and utter the words, “Our creds PowerPoint deck.”

For the record, this tends to send shivers down my spine. This infamous and usually monstrous file is often a living example of all that is bad about corporate presentations. Let the record also state that this is not the fault of anyone in particular; the original deck is likely to be the lovechild of the product team, the marketing team and, at a push, the sales team. Each will have gone into this with the very best intentions:

The Product team wanted to ensure that all the latest specifications for the product were present, from the running speed to the size of the processor—and much more.

Marketing wanted to ensure that the deck was on brand, that it introduced the company in such a way that no one could sue for misrepresentation, and that the competition couldn’t learn too much about them should the deck fall into their hands.

And Sales wanted to ensure the deck made them stand out from the competition. So they added cool animations, some humor, and extra text, allowing any new sales rep to grab hold of the presentation and hit the ground running.

Not a recipe for success—and, what’s more, that’s just the start of it. You see, those who use the deck at the “coalface” (i.e., the sales team) have likely made further embellishments over time. They will have created a few extra slides to help explain some of the more complex or esoteric parts of their proposition; they may have swapped out the template for a cool new one they downloaded from the internet or saw used at last year’s company conference; and, heaven forbid (but almost guaranteed), they’ll have added their own images and clipart—including holiday snaps of them on the beach by way of introduction.

All of these are major crimes and have a hugely detrimental effect on the overall quality of the presentation. But perhaps more than that, they add more and more valueless content to an already busy presentation. It’s valueless because the vast majority of this content—both the original and the recently added—will have little or nothing to do with the audience’s needs. It’s more of the same “me, me, me” content that makes creds PowerPoint decks the epitome of presentation information overload.

If any of this rings a bell . . . keep reading!

So What Content Do I Choose?

The problem with presentation content is normally a nice one to have: There’s simply too much of the stuff!

It’s very rare that we come across a situation where the presenter is struggling to source sufficient content, despite this being one of their biggest fears at the start of the process. As they embark on the process of creating a presentation, they normally use the Frankenstein approach as a first option. That is, they pull together all manner of facts, visuals, and odds and ends, and then try to arrange them in such a way that begets some semblance of order and process.

And although it seems a natural place to start, it’s often the reason for complete failure later on in the presentation process, for a few simple reasons:

• The content is rarely pulled together to support the objectives (Must-Intend-Like) and overarching message. You simply end up with a patchwork quilt of relatively useful content, but there’s rarely a cohesive message across the entire story.
• You’re likely to be sharing information that the audience is already completely in control of. This runs the risk of being boring or, even worse, coming across as condescending to the most important people in the room— your audience.
• This lack of content focus makes it very difficult to agree on what you should and shouldn’t leave out—and how it all links together. Typically, most people opt for “the safe approach” and leave it all in—just in case.

This issue affects the vast majority of presenters, but as a rule, the groups that suffer most are those from an academic or scientific background, product managers, or what we fondly call the OSMCs.*

Ultimately, the compelling content should not be judged on volume. It’s value lies in how much it supports and contributes to the one thing you are looking for the audience to remember—your message.

*Let me explain a little more about the curse of the OSMC, or “Old School Management Consultant.” Now pretty much a footnote in business history, OSMCs had a very distinct presentation style: They specialized in confusing charts, thick reports, and interacting with a slightly supercilious air. One of the reasons for this poor state of affairs is that OSMCs were judged on the amount of data they produced. The thinking was clear—more data shared, the more comprehensive the study, and ultimately the more valuable for the client.

Unfortunately, we can still feel the OSMCs’ influence across businesses today, as aspiring business leaders took their cue from this inefficient and patronizing presentation style. To make matters worse, many OSMCs made the leap from running big-ticket projects to running entire companies—making cluttered, overly complex slides the cultural norm in many corporations across the world.

Putting It to Music

Strange though it may sound, we often reference music when looking at content. Beautiful music works in a magical way by adjusting tempo, sometimes being dramatic, sometimes being subtle and gentle. For there to be a real (and ideally, emotional) connection with an audience, a presentation needs to follow much the same way.

As great jazz pioneer Charles Mingus once said . . .

I love this quote so much that I have a huge poster in my office so as to constantly remind me of the importance of simplicity in terms of content. I’ve also lost count of the number of times I’ve sent pictures of it to customers as a g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Element A: Introduction
• Element B: The Basic Tools for the Job
• Element C: The Base Elements of Your Presentation
• Element D: Creating Compelling Content
• Element E: Delivering the Final Results
• Element F: Putting the Theory into Practice
• Element G: In Case of Emergency . . . Strategies for Dealing with Last Minute Deadlines
• Element H: Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement