P3 - The Perfect Presentations Podcast

As we hit the one-year mark of the pandemic, it’s a good time to see where we are, and what we expect moving through 2021 into 2022. Will we see a return to normalcy? What have we learned about how to successfully execute virtual events? Will we go back to in-person like we saw before the pandemic? Virtual events are endlessly complex, and no two are the same, but there are some universal lessons from the past year. Join us for this episode to hear three key takeaways we think apply to every event going forward.

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So here’s where we are, one year in. The hope that by this time we’d be back to in-person events has faded, even as the news about vaccines and a return to more normality keeps getting better. Because events take so much preplanning, most 2021 events have announced they will stay virtual this year, with hope for a return in 2022.

2022? My god, we’re living in the future. I have a robot cleaning my house, a TV that sticks to my wall, and a machine that makes me a really decent cappuccino with the push of a single button. But some of that future has become exhausting. I remember years ago taking hours using these really primitive IRC apps to try to set up a video call with my parents so they could see their grandkids. Now we’re on video every day with clients, co-workers, friends. And just like we used to get dressed up to fly on a plane but now it’s flip flops and tank tops if you’re lucky, our Teams and Zoom standards are eroding as well. I used to have what I called my Emergency Shirt next to my desk. If I had a meeting that required video I’d grab that nice shirt and put it on so I looked presentable. My last Teams call was a hoodie and some strong uncertainty about when my last shower was.

The client was dressed the same.

I’m not sure if it’s better or worse, but I do know I’d really love to take a shower, put on some nice clothes and go out to dinner looking like I cared what I look like.  I’m guessing some of you feel the same.

Let’s talk then about where we are and where we go from here. Because while much continues to change, you should consider — and plan for — a new normal in how you approach events. The world shifted on its axis in our event world, and we need to shift with it or be permanently out of sync with what our audience wants and expects.

I’m going to go over 3 things we think are most important right now

First, Live virtual events are hard. Like, really, really hard. You see it whether you turn on the Golden Globes and see an at-home winner give his acceptance speech with his mute button on, and on most events you may have attended that featured technical glitches, crappy sound, poor connections or all of the above.

We recently did an event for 500 people where I personally did an announcement between sessions, and although I triple checked my video feeds setup, I still managed to have one button wrong and caused an echo so bad no one could understand me. We’re all trying our best, but every live element adds one more point of failure. Since we are all remote, you’re coordinating speakers and sessions across different geographies, with people who have differing level of comfort and skill with technology, not to mention the issues with technology and connections themselves.

I’m more convinced than ever that pre-recorded sessions, often played during the event as if they are live – what is often called simulive – is the best solution for almost every live event situation. We produced an awards ceremony for Microsoft for the second year using 100% prerecorded segments, from the introduction, entertainment, awards announcements and executive thank yous. It even included a special performance from three Broadway stars, something the client produced separately but which integrated perfectly into the show. The awards show ran a very tight 42 minutes from beginning to end, and the feedback was tremendous. Not one person commented that they were disappointed it wasn’t live.  They loved how well-produced it was, and said it really respected the audience with great content and attention to their time pressures.

On the other end of the spectrum, while we were helping another client, they piped us into an event that another division was conducting. Their entire awards ceremony was live, with two announcers in a studio, and nominees on-screen over zoom from all over the country. It was a disaster, with people freezing, winners being announced only to have the wrong video of one of the losers come up full screen. In one moment, I watched four nominees on screen along with one black box for a fifth nominee that couldn’t log in. When the winner was announced one of the losers logged off in an obvious huff. My heart screamed out for the technical team coordinating the event. I’m sure they were doing everything in their power to make it work, but the complexity was just too enormous. It’s easy to look at that and think “I’d never do something like that,” but it’s not a big leap from there to leaving a mute button on when the CEO starts his talk.

As I’ve said before, the power of pre-recording sessions is the ability to significantly up your production game. For our Microsoft awards we interviewed sixty nominees, all remotely. We used a remote-capture application that allowed us to shoot crystal clear video by using the interviewee’s phone camera. It’s really slick…it doesn’t compress the video like Zoom or Teams, so you get the benefit of that sweet phone camera. With some creative direction we captured gorgeous videos, and edited them down so all we needed to do was press play.

But simulive comes with its own set of challenges. For one, your planning calendar changes significantly. Speakers especially need to understand that they are actually ‘presenting’ 3-4 weeks before the event date when their session is recorded. Most presenters are in the mindset of waiting until the last minute to finalize their slides. That wasn’t optimal during the days of live sessions, but it’s absolutely not possible for virtual.

This leads to my second point. Creating engagement and community. I can hear you saying that no one just wants to watch a video for hours. And you’re right. An event should create a sense of a shared experience. When you see a wow moment on stage, or laugh out loud, you naturally look to the person next to you to share that moment. And you may have questions you want to ask. The closest we have with virtual events is group chat, and we use it liberally. If it’s a technical discussion, we may moderate questions to be answered in the chat. Sometimes we’ll have a live Q&A session directly after the simulive session, with the presenter able to answer questions live while a slide is onscreen so we don’t have a jarring moment of seeing our presenter in a different environment. We did an event for a sales group of about 500 people and learned that they typically held fun and lively events with lots of participation from the audience. So we encouraged that in the chat, and the audience delivered. They posted hundred and hundreds of comments, reacting to fun moments, cheering announcements, sharing their experiences and on and on. It was a large discussion room and showed that people can follow the content while also participating in what others are saying. A good lesson as you think about your events.

But engagement is more than just a chat. Whether you’re doing a one-hour awards ceremony or a three-day conference you should focus on moments that make people want to talk about it afterward. That could be the broadway moment I mentioned, or networking sessions that create a break from the work of the day. We’ve had such great success with things like a bagel-making class, mixology, golf instruction, yoga and more. If you’ve got a competitive group, trivia games and game shows are phenomenally fun and can be done with studio-quality hosts.

And here’s my third point. We’re not going back to pre-pandemic approaches at the drop of a hat. Even as we look to planning and executing live events in 2022, there is a strong consensus that future events will follow the hybrid model. The adoption of virtual events has resulted in higher attendance as well as an increase in the number of events that a person attends.

In the past, organization budgets, workloads, project deadlines and personal obligations meant people couldn’t attend certain functions. Budgets, especially, will play a larger role going forward now that people are used to the access of an online event. In the in-person only model we used to assemble calculators and a list of benefits that potential registrants could take to their manager to explain the value of attending a conference. We also would hear from exhibitors and partners that budget constraints meant they had to limit their participation. With virtual — by getting rid of travel, hotel, shipping, exhibit services, food & beverage and other costs — more people can participate. Some of our clients are experiencing record registrants and the ability to extend invites to more team members. All of this results in expanded communication and reach. So, plan that moving forward, if you choose to simply flip the switch back to in-person only, you’re likely to see some drop off from higher virtual numbers, depending on the type of event. As with all business decisions, cost plays a role and it certainly will with event spending in the future.

So how do you balance the in-person and virtual worlds? Well, that’s a topic for another podcast. Thanks for listening.

Enough time has elapsed since the start of the pandemic (and the temporary end of in-person events) that we can make some early observations about trends – and mistakes – we’re seeing in the event space. In this episode we provide some cautions about the current market and offer thoughts about your own events through the end of 2020 and beyond. We are in a time of both uncertainty and opportunity, and only a smart strategy and creativity will prevail as businesses fight to gain your attention and participation.

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Welcome to P3, the perfect presentations podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, vice president of Perfect PlanIt. This is going to be an event-focused episode again, since we’re starting to see some trends develop and this is a good time for a check-in on that.

We’re now 4 months into the pandemic. The country is largely trying to reopen in fits and starts. We’re in that in-between stage where we’re all anxious to get out and reestablish some normalcy, but still reluctant and apprehensive about sitting in a restaurant or getting a haircut. I’m no prognosticator, although I have my suspicions about how this will play out over the next couple of months. Unfortunately, politics is the lens through which so many decisions are being made, and that worries me, so my hope is still that you’re taking precautions and staying safe.

As I said, I want to talk about some of the events trends we’re starting to see emerge, some good, some not so good, and a few that will take more time to be able to evaluate.

I’m old enough to remember the first time I saw the internet. I don’t mean as a kid. I mean as an adult seeing a Mosiac browser showing actual web pages. It was fairly mind blowing to me, but not to my boss at the time who couldn’t understand how it had any advantages over a fax. He wasn’t what you would call visionary. I’m not sure I was either, but I sure as hell knew this was a sea change for our agency’s clients.

What I found interesting was how so much of the early internet was made up of two elements. First, access to information. A lot of it was academic-focused, but companies quickly started jumping in to create their own pages. I remember radio ads—remember listening through those?—where they’d end with “Find us on the internet at HTTP://blahblahblah.com. Man, what a world. The second were the entrepreneurs, trying to create new business models. Everyone knows Amazon was already selling books online, and so that’s what we tend to imagine. But there were plenty of efforts to try to replicate the real world on the internet. The best (or worst) example I can think of were virtual malls. Think for a moment about a mall. A huge building with every kind of store under the roof. Virtual malls were websites that you’d go to and hit a landing page that would in essence be the entrance to a mall. And on that page you’d see a ton of little banner ads for stores at the mall. Shoe stores. Book stores. Clothing. Jewelry. The idea, in as much as it ever could be called an idea, was that you’d go to the mall online just like you would in the real world, then choose your store, and each store was paid for by a merchant who had their store “AT” that mall.  Let’s think for a moment about what a terrible idea that was. A 10-year-old would have asked the same question as an adult…if you want to go to a shoe store on the internet, wouldn’t you just visit the shoe store website directly? You certainly don’t go to a website that has within it a hundred stores and see if they have a shoe store.

I struggle to really convey just how dumb this idea was. And it lasted for the blink of an eye because of course no one thought that way, even in the very earliest days of the internet.

So that’s a good transition to the talk about the first trend we’re seeing with online events, and what we think is turning out to be the first mistake. It’s trying to replicate an in-person experience online, note for note. Now, I don’t want to be wholly dismissive of what’s being attempted here, except to lend a note of caution. Because there are companies that have created online platforms designed largely around the idea of doing just this. They have live video with presenters and keynote speakers. They have virtual booths, and those virtual booths are staffed in real time by companies who know when you’re taking a look, and can start a dialog with you instantly. There are sophisticated tracking metrics and tools for follow up. There’s a large effort to try to create something that has immediacy and a reason to attend. But I remain a bit dubious about how effective these efforts will be long term. I agree that attending these events to hear a speaker or seminar is appealing. But I wonder how much time is being spent in the booths. We have a client who recently participated in one and thought the speaking opportunity was worthwhile. But their fairly expensive virtual booth languished with no real engagement and no leads. The reason I don’t want to be dismissive is because it will take more time to understand the larger metrics, and one client’s experience is too anecdotal for me to reach a conclusion.

Let’s call me cautiously pessimistic, but willing to be swayed. The larger lesson is that just like the virtual malls, you need to carefully consider whether what works in person is a natural fit for online. And I’d suggest that until real numbers start to come in that you tread lightly and use common sense. Zoom parties are a fun way to interact with friends and useful for work, but we’ll quickly hit fatigue that makes me reluctant to think it will replace in-person networking, for instance.

Another reason I’m cautious about this approach is that the pandemic world we’re in feels like (hopefully) a moment in time. It could be a year, or more, we just don’t know. But most businesses are looking toward a return to some of the approaches we are missing now like tradeshows. I don’t’ think for a moment that if a vaccine came out in a year that we’d suddenly say ‘great! But I sure don’t want to travel to another tradeshow now that I can do it online!”

Tradeshow floors in the virtual world are especially fraught. Walking a show floor is where you see the sales stars shine. The people who actively engage passersby. When given a choice, many people—even those with an interest in a product or service—are reluctant to engage at a show, whether out of shyness, or not wanting to be sold, or not really being sure what’s offered. Great salespeople put them at ease and get the conversation rolling, which often ends as a new lead. In the virtual world, it’s simply too easy to ignore a chat window. We think some of these event efforts will shift over to more traditional lead generation campaigns designed not to farm huge numbers like you hope for at a show, but to target one-on-one engagement and conversation that has a stronger link to measurable ROI.

Let’s move on.

I talked last time about production values, and the idea that quality matters. I think we’re all familiar with the challenges of zoom meetings, or webex and its relative struggle to stream content in real time. We recently sat in on a webinar where the presenter couldn’t get the slides to advance, and literally sat with dead air for 3 minutes as they waited for the next slide. It was, um, awkward. For as advanced as technology has become, we are still often constrained by bandwidth and the little gremlins none of us can identify in real time that cause issues. So you have a couple of alternatives.

First, you have to get better at being comfortable being uncomfortable. The conference connection may crap out altogether, or you may find your content stuck like the situation I just mentioned. In those times you should obviously be prepared to vamp a bit. The truth is—and here I am putting back on my presentation hat—that if your presentation relies on the audience being able to see the slides, you’re likely presenting wrong. Slides are reinforcement, they shouldn’t BE the story for the audience. But I’ll wager you still see dozens of bullet points and 12 point type. Your audience is there for your expertise. So offer it in a conversational way and keep moving. Promise to send everyone a link to the slides as soon as you finish, and keep talking.

Second, there’s a better way, and it’s the one we’re recommending for our event presenters. The term is simulive, and the idea is to reduce the number of variables to as few failure points as possible. We are producing as much content as we can in advance, including recording the presenters giving their presentations. If your meeting starts at 1pm, and your first presenter starts at 1:05 after a short intro from the host, at 1:05 we press play, and presentation number one, all prerecorded, is off and running. As for questions, we encourage Q&A in the chat window, and announce in advance we’ll address questions at the end. That way we don’t have separate video and audio to fool with. It’s all together and completely ready to go. Yes, things can go wrong, but they’re less likely to, and the presenter gets their best take as the final product. The moment that presentation ends, the presenter is right there, ready to respond to questions live, usually only on audio. It’s seamless to the audience, and results in a smoother event all around. I mentioned on the last podcast that this is the approach we used for two of the main presentations at a Microsoft summit, where we were able to create those great production values along with custom graphics, and it worked great. But it can work quite well for a presentation with just slides on a screen and a presenter voice over.

We’ll have more to say about statistics for virtual events in the future. Right now we only have a few to measure, and while we’re seeing good engagement and attendance rates, I don’t want to put too much stock into so few data points. I’m encouraged that there are ways to navigate this new world and do so effectively.

I want to wrap up with a final topic for consideration, and how these trends lead me to make a recommendation for how you think about going forward. and it ties directly back to how we started, and the mistake of trying to recreate traditional events. If your company relies on a single event each year, whether it’s a customer event or an employee event, you need to remember what made that event special and memorable. It’s not just content. It’s also tied strongly to place and time. If people traveled in, they had an experience along the way. They took days off of their normal work week to be in Philly, or San Diego, or St. Paul or wherever you held that gathering. If I ask you remember the last time you went to the Consumer Electronics Show, your memory is tied strongly to Las Vegas as well as everything you saw on the show floor. If you had a company retreat, your memory of content is tied to meals, or hotels, all of the visceral things that just don’t exist right now.

So what does that mean? It means don’t try to replicate it. Sitting in a home office will never substitute for that trip. We recently had a client suggest they wanted to host a 3-day online conference, just like the one they did live. It’s highly unlikely I can get 1,000 people to sit at their computers for 3 straight days, focused on a screen and engaged. Period. We’re good at what we do, but that’s a tall order for 99% of businesses to pull off, and for 99% of participants to sign onto.

We’re helping clients rethink what they’re trying to accomplish with their events. If it’s customer engagement that happened during an annual 2-day summit, what can we create throughout the year that most closely accomplishes that engagement. Rather than having Continuing Education credits, along with keynote speakers, booths, networking, lunches, etc., we’re breaking those components into smaller chunks so that—for instance—training is a standalone effort. Hearing from industry leaders and visionaries is its own effort. Networking and traditional booths are shifting to new campaigns approaches that don’t try to replicate the booth, but take the look of more traditional marketing practices. Some things, for the time being, are going to be lost until we get back to whatever normal looks like. Think hard about what you want the outcome to be for your efforts. Is it leads? Maintaining mindshare? Being seen as the thought leader? Build your efforts anew around how they can help you accomplish that very focused goal. Your likely to find it looks very different from what you would accomplish in 3 days in Louisville at the big show. A series of ongoing interactions, perhaps attracting a smaller audience to each, can most definitely be a viable replacement for the big show, because you’ll be bringing real value to that audience. And remember that when you accomplish that, chances are you’ll be doing something your competition is not. Being innovative now can help you emerge from this time stronger and more closely aligned to your customers.

That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening.

The spread of the coronavirus has caused an unprecedented shift in our personal and business lives. The first priority as we adjust to a new reality is taking precautions and staying safe. We hope you are.

Businesses are feeling the impact in many ways, including having important events canceled or postponed, eliminating a vital connection to customers and prospects. The challenge now is how to pivot quickly and continue to create experiences that mirror the benefits of in-person events and meetings. In this episode of P3, we shift topics somewhat from presentations, to discuss ways to plan for online events that don’t feel like a terrible webinar, something that will soon be all-too-common. We’ll offer ideas for how to create an event that attracts attendees, keeps them engaged, and ways to continue conversations after the event is over.

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Hello, and welcome to P3, The Perfect Presentations Podcast. This is Doug Borsch, vice president of Perfect PlanIt. Normally recording these podcasts are straightforward affairs. We talk about presentations, about how to do them better. However, it is the third week of  March, 2020, and nothing feels normal. And it feels like nothing will feel normal ever again. When we record content for our podcast we work hard to make it evergreen, so that no matter when you come across it, it feels useful and relevant. In the middle of a coronavirus outbreak where things are changing not even day by day but really hour by hour, it’s hard to know what the world is going to look like in three to four months. So this feels timely now. It may not feel timely then, but it feels important for us to do it.

Today I’m going to focus on something a little different. Before I do that I just want to say it feels almost frivolous to be focused on business topics right now in the midst of the daily news and this deluge of healthcare workers struggling and uncertainty about what the future looks like. Our hope is that you’re staying safe, your family is staying safe and you’re taking care of those around you.

The reason for doing this podcast is that we’ve been hearing from a lot of clients about the uncertainty they’re facing. And, rather than focus on presentations today I’m going to focus on events. Events make up a significant portion of Perfect PlanIt’s business. That takes the form of a couple of different things. First, organizing complete conferences, where we turnkey that service for the organization of the conference, sponsorships, food and beverage, securing attendees, etc. etc. and staffing it and executing it. And we also just take our clients to tradeshows and meetings and conferences and help them present there or exhibit or the other things you all are familiar with when it comes to conferences. And it goes without saying that int the past two weeks everything has shut down.

We don’t have a single client that has a conference on the short-term agenda. We have clients that are looking out into July and August and trying to make decisions about those going forward. The talk today was about the Olympics and it looks like those might be canceled. As you know events have a fairly long time horizon for planning those decisions need to be made early.

A podcast on a business topics feels removed from the reality right now. Goes without saying that we hope for your own health and safety, and of those you care for as well.

One of the things that hasn’t changed about events and one of the reasons we’ve been talking with our clients daily about this is that they need to stay in touch with customers and prospects, and to continue to participate in discussions around topics that are important to their business just like you do for your business. If you’re in sales, or an executive, you want to be considered a thought leader, which is where events typically come in. You are exhibiting, or speaking and certainly you’re looking to make contacts and establish relationships along the way.

For a lot of our clients, events are so fundamental to relationship building that it feels like they’re operating with an arm tied behind their back. Not one of them has canceled an event and said, “oh well, I guess we’ll just do something else.” No, they’re asking us how to continue their marketing efforts while essentially flying blind.

In the past two weeks alone we’ve pivoted three events from in-person to being completely virtual. We’ve done virtual events for a long time, but suddenly they are the only short-term option, and what we’ve learned over the years feels very relevant. So, I wanted to share just some high level thoughts about how to consider your own efforts as you work to continue those relationships and establish thought leadership.

This is not a step by step process. Every event and client will be different, but you might consider some of this as a starter package on how to reset both your expectations and your approach.

What makes for a compelling live event? Think about your in-person events. How would you spend your day? Most likely doing a few of the same things:

What doe all of these have in common? Well, for one, they are social. In the days before elbow bumps and social distancing, this was where you shook hands, met new faces and get engaged.  Second, they tend to be an adult version of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. No two attendees are going to do it the same way. Choosing sessions, and when to walk a show floor, and maybe you focus more on making new contacts where someone else may focus on improving existing relationships.

Keep those objectives in mind as you think about how you might create a virtual event.

First, let me tell you what else you’re fighting against. How many times have you signed up for a webinar, and not attended? I mean, it’s right there on your calendar, and you got the reminder in advance. But by the time it comes around a couple of things happened. One, you forget why it felt important to attend, because the topic seemed interesting, but maybe not essential. Second, your day got out of control, and you just decided to skip it in an effort to focus on more important things. Third, you figure you can listen to it later. Spoiler alert, you rarely if ever will do that.

Right out of the gate I can mention one of the biggest mistake we’re already seeing. That’s people saying, let’s just create a webinar. In fact, I’ll wager that me saying that created a negative reaction with you. The reason for that is that webinars stink. When you think of them you envision product demos, a droning presenter, maybe some time for Q&A at the end when people are dropping out. What you’ve created is an event, and I use event in quotes, that triggers the reasons I just mentioned for not attending.

And this comes down to what we think is one of the most important aspects of putting together a virtual event. And that’s that production value matters. We’re about to be flooded with really crappy “so called events.” Let’s think about things like live video, and recorded video. Recorded video? Why would you want to do that? We’re currently working with a fortune 50 client to put on a worldwide partner award summit. Now, this client was planning to fly in customers from around the world to learn about products as well as celebrate winners in a variety of categories. Just 3 weeks ago, as the coronavirus outbreak was escalating, they made the decision to shift to a virtual event.

Now, this client has something you most likely do not. A world-class studio for video production. But the lesson here doesn’t require that you have those kinds of facilities. Just that you think creatively about how to accomplish similar approaches. Their new event will feel very much like a conversation, with two hosts live to guide the content, and we’re creating a mix of preproduced video segments on topics of interest, along with short videos highlighting the winners of various awards, which will make for fun transitions between longer topics. It sounds daunting, but we pulled it all together in a short period of time, including in this case a trip around the world to film the winners. This highly produced approach allows for a marketing effort that makes missing out feel very much like skipping a true event. It also creates an opportunity for the sales team to have conversations by phone to make invites and create that connection that’s so important.

Before we move forward, let’s address the cost issue. The ideas I’m talking about here can range from very expensive to much easier to manage. But the pivot to “Virtual” also means you need to pivot on how you look at budgets. The cost of attending, including sending people, booths, hotels and airfares, makes some events a large investment to begin with. Think about how you are repurposing your event budgets to support production values and follow up campaigns and you may find it’s a wash, or even less.

Planning an agenda is key to finding an audience.

You can’t just throw together a series of speakers and call it an event. What you’ll end up with is likely to be a bunch of loosely related topics. But think about how you attend conferences. Often there are various tracks happening simultaneously. You choose those of interest to you. You don’t randomly walk in and hope to learn something important. Apply that kind of thinking to your planning around a virtual event. What you’ll end up with is a much more narrowly focused series of topics, but they will be related in a way that will be compelling to a specific group of people. Yeah, for sure you’ll have a smaller audience to target, but that audience will be valuable to you, and your content will be valuable to them.

One way to ensure the content is can’t miss is to spend time recruiting the experts in the field that are aligned to your offering. This is no different than any show or event with speakers operates. You have to find the right people. The good news for you is that everyone is struggling to get their message out. Now is a great time to secure speakers who are itching to present, and the entry barriers are often low because for recorded content there is no travel and timing can be more generous as you develop content.

Getting your audience engaged will be key to making the ROI on your efforts pay off. We’re working with clients to extend conversations through a variety of channels. A private group on facebook is an example, or linkedin. But these won’t happen automatically. You’ll need to encourage the interaction, and oftentimes relay some of that learning and discussion through other channels such as email to reach those who attended but are not inclined to participate on social platforms.

Your goal at an in-person event is more than just getting a message out. The entire premise is based on a two way conversation, where you learn as much from customers and prospects as they do from you. The beauty of virtual events is that rather than happening in conversations over coffee, which often get lost quickly, Chat, messaging and social platforms create a great two-way communication vehicle to capture valuable knowledge to help you move forward, perhaps improve products and services, and understand where your customers see gaps.

Look, we’re busy just like you trying to keep up and adjust. This feels like the start of a larger conversation on what to do well, and what to avoid. The biggest message I want to get across on this very short podcast is that a changing world requires a change in thinking. Just like you’ve heard throughout your career, the companies that are aggressive now in pioneering new ways to connect with customers are the ones that come out of moments like this in a stronger position than their competitors. If we can be of help, please reach out to us and let us know. I’m at doug@

Please stay safe, and take care of those around you. We wish you the best and hope to continue the conversation.

It took a tour of colleges for a light bulb to go off in my head. That’s when I realized that PowerPoint dread begins at an early age. But there are valuable lessons to be learned about how your average, everyday business presentation can benefit from some “big room” thinking from the presenters who do it right.

In this episode we learn to approach presentations–every presentation–like a big lecture, or a TED Talk, and how that translates into huge time saving and a more focused message and audience.

Welcome to P3, the perfect presentations podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, your host, and co-owner of Perfect PlanIt. Since 2005 our company has created more than 7,000 presentations for conferences, trade shows, road shows, sales meetings, board of director meetings, pretty much any presentation you can imagine, for use anywhere around the world.

Today, I want to talk about how college better prepared me to give good PowerPoint presentations. Not going to college, just visiting colleges.

My 17 year old son is about to be a senior. That’s sort of a staggering thing for me to imagine. I just watched a video of him narrating to himself while playing a video game. He was probably about 6 years old. Little voice, little laugh. Now I’ve got this near-adult with a deep voice who’s researching colleges and writing thank you emails to enrollment officers, and it’s all just a lot to take in.

But the fun part has been these road trips to visit schools. We recently did a road trip where we visited five colleges in four days. When you visit a college, the first thing they do is huddle you all together into a room while an enrollment person tells you all about the school, the academics, sports, life on campus, financing and on and on. It takes between a ½ hour to an hour.

If you ever want to see how quickly an audience gets bored on PowerPoint, watch your kid, who’s never really sat through a PowerPoint of any length, come to realize that almost all of these presentations are the same, and quickly start to tune out. By day three, he was making jokes about it. “Here comes the student activities section, where they tell us about their dance marathon and their crazy squirrel watching club.” That’s a thing, by the way. Every school has student organizations, and the three biggest schools we visited had identical talks about how cool their clubs were, and one of them was squirrel watching. I’m fascinated to learn how that went viral and everyone decided to start it.

The point is, here’s a captive audience who’s traveled some distance just to visit your school and is excited to learn about it, and you are showing bullet points and reading what’s on the screen. And here’s the part that really frustrates me. This admissions counselor does this every day. They’ve got a room full of kids who want to be excited, even entertained. And there they are reading bullet points off a PowerPoint.

But there was one school that got it right. The admissions counselor was about 25 years old, and had graduated from the same school. He was talking in front of about 100 people, which is a lot for a Monday morning at 9am. He never once looked at his presentation. He looked at the audience. He cracked some jokes and loosened people up. He walked around as he clicked through his presentation and riffed on the content that was there, and it was nicely designed by the way. His presentation was essentially the college version of a TED talk. And I thought, this is wonderful! People are nodding, not nodding off. And when he was done we were all very excited to see the campus, because his enthusiasm was infectious.

This got me thinking about how we all give presentations. About how we discuss giving presentations. They typically assume that the presenter is standing on a stage like this young man, presenting to a large group of people. They treat every presentation like it’s a TED Talk, or a main stage discussion. But for you, when was the last time you gave that kind of presentation, if at all? And if you did, how many of your presentations are that kind?

My college tour experience was the opposite of what your daily life probably looks like. Chances are you spend most of your time in meetings, using presentations as a way to share information with your team. And we don’t talk about that enough. Don’t worry, we’re coming back to our hero admissions counselor. But I want to start with your presentation, the one that gets created on the fly, often with one version and no revisions, as you fly out the door to your next meeting. If you have a strong corporate template, maybe it even looks ok, even as you know your ideas are only vaguely organized.

It would be easy to give everyone a pass here and say hey, it’s ok, we get that you’re just sharing information and you had to do it quickly and as long as your ideas are all there, it’s all good.

In truth, there is a kernel of the right idea in teaching presentation training as though you’re on a big stage, whether that’s a TED talk, or a 25-year-old admissions counselor at a university.  So today I want to talk about how you change your presentation culture, and get your teams to share their information in new ways that feel much more like they’ve got a spotlight on them. Because information sharing is critical. There shouldn’t be a free pass just because you’re busy. It’s because you’re busy that it’s more critical than ever to do it right and do it well. And guess what? In the end it doesn’t take any longer than doing it wrong!

Let’s back up for a moment and start with a simple premise. No one claims to like PowerPoint. Right? Those kids at the college tour got their first, sad exposure to PowerPoint dread, and all they wanted was to see a dorm room and a cafeteria and maybe an academic building.

We know the reasons we hate PowerPoint. Endless bullet points. Bad clip art. Boring presenters reading off the slides while you read along. And boom, you’re done and forget all of it and wonder where your half hour went.

Let’s go deeper. Why do we have meetings to start with? We do it to share information, tasks, updates on progress and projects. Which is to say, we do it to move forward and achieve goals. Now, there’s an entire industry around more productive meetings, but we’re here to talk about presentations. When it comes to meetings, PowerPoint is foundational in many companies. It gets used because people see it as a way to share information, and to do it in a way that they can manage. That’s an important point, so let’s focus on it for a moment. Most of us are not natural presenters. And we’re definitely not information design experts. At Perfect PlanIt, we create gorgeous presentations, but if you as me to design one, I’m going to struggle, even though I know all the right ways to do it. That’s because I’m a natural writer, not a designer. In a perfect world, you’d have a team like I have, where you could meet and share all of your ideas for what you want to convey in a meeting and magically they’d come back with gorgeous infographics, data brought to life, and a story to tie it all together.

But we don’t have that. We have only ourselves, and this pretty simple tool that lets us put our ideas down, and organize them in a way that we can share with others.

But we’re missing a few key components, and this is where things start to break down.

First, we’re missing the expectation of what the audience will do with the information we share. Most presentations I see are simply information gathered and shared, but with no outcomes associated with it. OK, you shared this with me, but what do I do with it? Step back for a minute and ask yourself why you’re there. There should never be a meeting where you simply give a status update. I mean, someone has to do something next, right? Even if you’re presenting the results of something, let’s say a big research project. You’re sharing what you’ve learned. From your company’s perspective, they’re not anxious to simply have you share that learning. They want to know what to do with it. And that’s all outcome based. You’re sharing what either you, your team, or both should do with the information. Yet so many presentations are simply regurgitating facts and figures, and everyone asks a few questions and goes on their merry way. That’s a terrible outcome for a meeting.

Second, ideas are not organized. This is really common, and is a function of the world we live in. So many things to do, no time to do them well. Your presentation was an afterthought. “I need to give an update, so let me throw everything into PowerPoint in a stream of consciousness flow, where maybe I reorganize a couple slides to make more sense, but not really. Success in business isn’t random. The people who rise are able to build compelling arguments, for themselves, the products they manage, the initiatives they challenge. And building a compelling argument is a process of establishing a premise, then backing it up with data, then concluding with why it all makes sense and what to do. Think of a lawyer giving a closing argument to convict a suspect. That lawyer is going to create a meticulous argument based on the evidence and the motive, and weave that story together in a way that the jury can nod their heads and say yep, it all makes sense. You’re challenge isn’t much different.

Third, everything looks terrible. Yes, this is where we finally get to vent about those bullet points. Because they really are a terrible way to share information. Why? If you’ve listened to our other podcasts, you’ve heard about our Listen or Read rule. Simply stated, your audience can listen, or they can read, but they absolutely, positively cannot do both at once, no matter how much they claim to be multitasking geniuses. I’ve proven it over and over in our training, simply by putting content on the screen about healthcare, then talking about something unrelated like baseball. When I stop and ask everyone what I just said, I get blank faces.  Our brains are wired in a very specific way to consume and process information, and it does not allow for you to both listen and read at the same time. So here’s the rub with that. You just built a presentation that has all of the information you want to cover, and it’s written down on every slide you’re going to walk through. So at a minimum, you are guaranteeing that you’re wasting everyone’s time in one of two ways, by talking, or by speaking. Maybe you say, I’ll just have one word for each bullet, and I’ll talk about them one at a time so they have to focus on me. Now you’re headed in the right direction, but I’m going to call BS and say you won’t actually do that. We’ve had dozens of clients tell us “I really want this presentation to be visual with almost no words.” And that’s what we deliver. Later, when I ask them to share back the presentation they actually gave, I get back a deck with dozens of words on each slide. “What happened to the highly visual, I ask?” “Well, I needed to show X and Y and I just needed a deeper story.

“Needed”. That’s the key word here. It’s the crutch. I Needed to do it this way. What that shows me is that they don’t have an alternative that they’re confident enough to use. And in fairness, a lot of the time I think the presenter really DID want to show just the highly visual slides and have the audience focus on them speaking.

And that’s the crux of our discussion today. It’s the expectation that we most need to fight against. The “If I don’t show all this info, people will be mad, or they won’t know what to do.” We trained a team where the management explicitly told the people being trained that the reason they were there was to change how they thought about presentations. They wanted a complete shift in the approach, with a focus on all the lessons we teach. But the pushback was very strong. And the main argument was one of “this is how we’ve always done it, so it must be how people want to get the information.”

It’s time to change your presentation culture. It won’t be easy. It will take a strong leader, and strong evangelists who champion the cause. That person might be you. And since you don’t have a great reason to visit college campuses and find a great 25 year old,  the best place to start may be those TED talks we mentioned at the beginning. Watch them for how they take an idea, a single idea and make themselves the star for 10 minutes.

Let me wrap up with a quick way to create your own TED Talk-like presentation out of your average, every day presentation. Here’s an easy way to do it. Start with the conclusion. What do you want your audience to know AND do when they walk away? Put that conclusion on a slide. Now, without doing anything else, make an argument that supports that conclusion. Do it at your desk, in the shower, wherever you can talk to yourself. Can you support it? If you say “well, I need a data point that backs up my argument,” put that single data point on a slide. Just the data point with a descriptor. Now you have two slides. Back up some more and ask, will the audience know why they are here?” If the answer is no, or maybe, then add a slide that says why you’re there. You should be able to do that in just a few words, something like “Our customer survey results show positive trends in satisfaction.” Now you have 3 slides. A powerful intro, a data slide to back it up, and a powerful conclusion slide that tells them what to do with the info.

You can see you might need to fill in a few more slides of data to support your case, but ONLY the data that supports it. Lose the charts. Lose the graphs. Pull out that one, all important point and just focus on IT. And Look, you’ve built a TED talk where you are the star, and the slides just give the supporting points the audience requires.

Want to know the hidden side benefit of this approach? You also cut down the amount of time it takes to build your presentation because you’re focused on what you’ll say, versus trying to have the slides say it for you. You didn’t have to spend two hours with smart art and bad stock photos. You got a chunk of your day back, and put your confidence back into your ability to tell the story.

Give it a shot. See how it goes.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you on the next episode.

Want to lose your audience? Of course not. But when you put up spreadsheets and complex charts, that’s exactly what you’re likely to do. Audiences can’t uncover the story you want to tell by looking at a slide with 5, 10 or 50 data points.

In this episode of P3, we tackle one of our top 3 problems with practical tips on how to bring your data to life, and let it enlighten your audience, rather than lose them. Your data has a story to tell. Make sure it’s being heard!

Welcome to the Perfect Presentation Podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, your host, and co-owner of Perfect PlanIt. Since 2005 our company has created more than 7,000 presentations for conferences, tradeshows, road shows, sales meetings, board of director meetings… pretty much any presentations you can imagine, for use around the world.

I mentioned at the start of our first episode, we’ve been at this a long time, and along the way we’ve seen practically everything when it comes to how people create presentations, good and bad. Today I want to talk about one of “the bad” and how we turn it into “the good.” (I’m doing air quotes here, which isn’t very effective in a podcast).

I’ve had quite a few sales calls lately with prospective clients. Having done hundreds of these throughout the years, you start to hear the same things over and over. When I ask prospects what they struggle with most, here are the top three things we hear.

First, their presentations are poorly designed, and they don’t have good resources to help them improve. Second, they don’t feel like there is any consistency to how people in their company present. Everyone has their own favorite way, and often their own deck they use that might not look much like anyone else’s. And third, people put all of their content on a slide and simply read the slide.

That’s the one I want to focus on today. And I’m going to give it a bit more of a slant that will provide more of a focus. Because at this point everyone knows that they should put their content in the notes section and not read off a slide (even though they still do).

Our clients are exclusively business-to-business companies. And many are technology companies, but it doesn’t matter that much what they do, because ALL of our clients have one thing in common. They deal with a lot of data. We are awash in data in a way we’ve never been before. The rise of the infographic is an attempt to treat data in a way that makes it more understandable for a reader. We intuitively know that it’s hard to make sense of a huge spreadsheet, so what do we do? We try to make it more visual. Enter the pie chart. Or we go for comparisons. Enter the bar chart. And by the way, these are all infographics in their own right. They are all attempts to display data so a reader can make sense of it. And since we respond better to visuals than to raw numbers, we can process a chart or a graph more quickly.

The problem is, when you present, you’re always walking a tightrope and looking for this very fine balance of information conveyed on a screen, while not losing your audience’s attention from what you’re saying. And that’s hard! Think back to our golden rule of presenting. Listen or Read, your audience cannot do both. Not a seasoned executive, not a multitasking gen x-er. Your brain doesn’t operate that way. We prove this during our training sessions.  I put up a slide that says listen or read and explain the rule. I practically telegraph that I’m about to prove it. The next slide is content heavy about the importance of great content on each slide, and as soon as that slide comes up, I talk a bit about something off topic like baseball, then stop. Once everyone looks at me again, I ask what I was talking about. Blank stares. They have no idea because they were reading the slide. It’s a fun little experiment, but it underscores one of your biggest challenges.

So let’s operate under this assumption. When you present, you’ve got data you want to share. Could be a spreadsheet of statistics, or product attributes. Maybe it’s a financial report for the last quarter.  It doesn’t matter what, let’s just assume it likely has more numbers on it than can easily be read in a few seconds.  How do you keep your audience from getting lost?

They are lost, by the way. Because unless you stop, and literally tell them to take a few minutes to read, while you wait quietly, they can’t process it. You counter, but that’s why I’m there! Well, that IS why you’re there, to make sense of it all, to give it context. But the visuals should do that right along with you, not overwhelm your guidance.

So let’s talk through how to rethink your data to build a presentation that enlightens.

We have another saying. Data slide aren’t really about the data. They’re about the MEANING of the data. No one cares about a spreadsheet full of numbers, not even accountants. What they care about is the story those numbers tell. It might be about profitability, or performance, or targets. A spreadsheet can’t tell you what that story is. And if presented with a spreadsheet, 10 audience members might come away with 10 different takes on what it all means.

Your job is to bring those numbers to life.

I’m going to walk through a series of steps to create slides that support your story.

Step one: Determine what the story is. Think about your audience, and the purpose of you talking to that group. They’re there to hear something important. If you listened to our podcast on Creating the Big Idea, you know you’ve got to focus your discussion on a single idea that permeates the rest of the presentation. And that’s made up of what you want the audience to know, and why should they care? Let’s use a pretty typical example of showing a bar chart. It might have five or six, or maybe even more columns of data. Picture that for a moment. Six bars of data with a Y axis showing you what the height of each bar means. The idea of course is that you’re comparing a series of things. Thing A through thing F, let’s say. And hey, look here, column A is at 50%, and B is at 35% and C is at 70%, etc. So what? We can all see that. It’s right there. Your audience is looking and looking and they’re trying to fill in the blanks for themselves. It’s YOUR job to say hey, I want to talk about C, and why this 70% number is so critical. OK, just like that, your audience has instant context. You’re building your story around what that 70% number means to the group.

Step two: The security blanket. Change is hard. Not only for you, but possibly for your audience as well. We like to make it as easy as possible by thinking through all of the ways the audience might react to what they see. I’m going to start talking about how to reduce what you have onscreen, and lots of people have a very hard time doing it. It ALL seems important. Or they don’t want to get caught out by an executive who starts going deep on the data. If you’ve got your Big Idea, you can help keep things focused, but even then, it can be hard. So here’s the easy solution. Create a backup slide. This is the slide with EVERYTHING in it, not the one you’re going to show first. Put it in the appendix so you’ve got the backup ready if anyone asks for it. They shouldn’t if you keep your story on track, but it’s a nice security blanket so you don’t feel like you can get caught short.

Step three: Do you need to show a chart at all? If your goal is not to show data, but to give meaning to data, why not create a big, bold slide with one key data point you want your audience to know? Going back to our column C of data at 70%, maybe rather than a bar chart, that slide becomes a big, bold slide that says “Competitor C has increased market share by 70%, outpacing our growth by 20%.”  Think about the impact of that, versus looking at a bar chart. By focusing on the conclusion, you’re creating urgency and keeping the audience on point. You could even show the bar chart next if you need, but you’ll do your audience and yourself a huge service. You’ll also look completely buttoned down on your message, because you’ve focused on the conclusion…what the data is telling you.

Step four: Narrow the focus. Sometimes you do need to show everything. If it’s a series of competitors, it might be a mistake to leave any of them off. But lots of times, there’s data on there that’s simply extraneous. And it just clutters things up for your audience. So put your data through a litmus test. Ask yourself, what do I lose, if this single column isn’t included? If the answer, and truly, you have to be tough with yourself, if the answer is ‘nothing’ then delete that column. Now, you can’t do that with a pie chart that needs to equal 100%. Or can you? Pie chart data is challenging because there’s often a lot of small slices. Often, you can combine several small slices into an “other” category. Now, visually you’ve got a larger but cleaner slice, and you can simply tell the audience that the “other” category doesn’t matter for your purposes.

Step five: Improve the focus. One of the challenges to working with charts and graphs is it’s hard to differentiate the data in a way that’s easy to follow. PowerPoint especially loves to create a lot of theme colors, so every bar has its own. Everyone likes a rainbow, but it hampers your ability to create clarity for your audience. But color can work in your favor just as easily to help the audience identify the main point quickly. With our A through F example, we’ve got six columns, each a different color. We want the focus to be on C. So put color to work. Turn everything the same color, let’s say blue. And let’s make just column C red. You can probably picture in your mind what that will look like. There’s no way for your audience to focus on anything other than column C. And suddenly your job is so much easier.

Step six: Articulate conclusions. Too many presenters create generic titles on slides. This is deadly. Every word on a slide should serve to illuminate or support your topic. If you have a bar chart slide, or any data slide, don’t ever use a title that tells what that chart is about. Use a title that tells the audience what it MEANS. Don’t ever let your audience read a slide headline that read something generic like “Competitor sales growth in 2018.” How does that help you? Or your audience? You’re showing that data for a reason. You’re there to explain it. Your slide is there to help you do that. If you need a headline, it should be something illuminating like “Competitor C is pursuing aggressive growth, and it’s working.” Or maybe even focus it more. “Competitor C’s online campaign is driving huge growth gains.” Wow, think about that. You’ve done your audience a huge service. And the entire time you’re talking about it, they’ve got a reminder of it on screen. It’s much less likely someone in the room will take you off topic now.

Last tip: don’t operate in a vacuum. It’s very hard to self-evaluate with presentations. In addition to practice, you need the input of a colleague to make sure your presentation says what you think it says. You don’t have to physically give the presentation to someone, although that’s ideal. You can even just sit and run through the slides with them and what you want to articulate to the audience, and see if they agree that they’re taking away from it what you want.

So let’s summarize.  What’s your story? Think about what the data says, and what you want the audience to know about it. That’s data’s only job…to enlighten. It’s YOUR job to make sure that enlightenment happens. Don’t default to the same charts and graphs. Either get rid of them by showing only the data points that matter, or if you do show the charts and graphs, make sure your audience sees what you want them to see.

I hope that’s helpful. If you shift your focus from data, to thinking about what story the data tells, you’ll do yourself and your audience a huge favor, and you’ll find your presentations are more focused and more successful. That means your audience is more likely to adopt your ideas, your efforts are more likely to succeed, as so are you.

As always, I’m interested in what you think. Thanks for listening, and talk to you next time on the Perfect Presentations Podcast.

If you’re a sales executive, there’s nothing more frustrating than an office full of salespeople working on non-sales tasks. And if you’re a marketing executive, you want to support that sales team, but you aren’t resourced to create one-off sales presentations, leaving them largely to their own devices.

There IS a way to build an internal machine to support the sales team and let them focus on selling. Along the way you’ll save money, and your company’s brand.  In this episode we dissect the cost of doing it the wrong way, and outline the requirements and benefits of building a sales presentation machine that let’s salespeople do what they do best…sell.

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Hi, and welcome to P3, the perfect presentations podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, vice president of Perfect PlanIt.

I’m going in a bit of a different direction today. It’s part of the ongoing conversation about creating better presentations, but It’s focused on one particular breakdown.  It’s part rant about doing it wrong and part impassioned plea, and I’m talking to sales executives, and marketing executives that support their sales teams. This will be of interest to CFOs and CMOs as well.

If you use powerpoint (or any presentation software) to make your sales pitches, the bottom line is you’re wasting money. When I say you’re wasting money, what I mean is you’re wasting gobs and gobs of money. Worse than that, you’re hurting your company and your sales prospects.

I’m not advocating for NOT using powerpoint. Quite the opposite. For many companies, PowerPoint is a core part of their sales process…and not something they’re likely to change any time soon.

I’m going to dive right in today, and talk about the impact of using PowerPoint in most sales teams, but I want to do it in terms of cost and productivity. Then we’ll talk about how it affects your customers, and their likelihood of purchasing, and finally, ways you can solve the problem.

Sales presentations — which typically take the form of PowerPoint slides — are integrated deeply into most large organizations. The problem is that few of those companies ever take the time to evaluate their use of the tool and the quality of its output, or its cost and benefit to the company. As a result, the majority of companies that use PowerPoint are missing a costly source of inefficiency. Along the way they’re causing potential damage to their brand, and ignoring the cost of the wrong people doing the wrong tasks. If we stop, and we rethink how we use the tools, and the overall process of making a sale, we can create immense efficiencies, improve customer interactions and save a lot of money.

PowerPoint is perhaps the ultimate corporate conundrum. It’s maligned and derided as the enemy of clarity, while simultaneously being embraced and used to the tune of 30 million presentations every single day. There’s no piece of productivity software that elicits such passion and debate. The reality, as always, lies somewhere in between.

Organizations that rely on PowerPoint do it for a variety of reasons, but the end goal is the same. To convey information, to persuade or to effect change. Perhaps the most concrete example of this is among sales teams, where presentations to prospects, and updates to customers almost necessitate the use of PowerPoint. Companies like it because it’s fairly easy to work in, and often, sales teams exist in this do-it-yourself environment when it comes to actual customer contact.

But before we just accept that as gospel, let’s ask why sales teams operate like that. Traditionally, the role of marketing in large companies includes support for the sale role. Marketing is designed to sit overtop of the entire sales cycle, and provide the right support and messages at the right time. So, a first contact with your company by a prospect, maybe through your website, is obviously a higher-level conversation than you’d have with someone close to making a purchase, where the conversation will be more detailed, talking about specific features, or services, etc.

In a well-designed sales process the marketing team has created specific messages and support materials distinct to each step of the sales process leading towards the close. If you detailed out each of those steps, and then drop bracket over top of all of them, that’s where marketing should sit. The reality inside most organizations, is that the marketing team is focused almost entirely in creating those materials that lead up to the sales conversation, but once the sales team is talking with a prospect, they are largely on their own.

And I don’t mean to imply that the marketing team is doing something wrong. Marketing teams tend to be under resourced and therefore only have so much bandwidth to pull together the materials that the company needs. We talk with our clients awesome what will hear is that they get multiple requests from the sales team and they want to accommodate them, but they just don’t have the time or the resources to do so. The result of this is that they end up creating PowerPoint presentations at the corporate level which are useful for the sales team for a first meeting, but not once a prospect has moved deeper in the sales funnel.

So what did you end up with? You have a marketing team that’s putting his best effort into creating great looking materials, followed by a sales team that’s largely left on its own to produce its own materials.

The creation of those sales presentations can account for an amazing amount of a salesperson’s time. We conducted a study for a Fortune 50 client that has a US-based sales team of nearly 200 people. Our research revealed that salespeople were creating between 2-3 presentations each week for customers and prospects, with an average time investment of 8 hours/week just to format the presentations. That’s in addition to creating a compelling proposal, writing and organizing the content. If you’re a sales executive, you know the frustration of trying to achieve difficult sales targets, and then learning that 20% of the sales team’s time is spent designing presentations.

The true cost of a business process like this is enormous, and largely hidden. Why? It’s typically seen as “part of the job” to prepare proposals, because the salesperson is already responsible for assessing the needs of a prospect. Because of that, they are in the best position to put together the recommendation. Even when planning involves others, such as product or marketing managers, the salesperson is usually viewed as the one who collates the information to create the actual presentation. What this approach misses is the requirements around design and formatting, typically an area that a salesperson lacks experience or skill. The result is time spent on creative in addition to content.

So, here I go with some math again.  Let’s look at the true cost.

Sales people are highly compensated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the mean salary for sales representatives (wholesale, manufacturing, technical and scientific products) is $86,750. In competitive industries it is significantly higher. Add in employment taxes, benefits and the multiple is generally accepted as 1.25-1.4 times the salary. We’ll use a simple $100,000 salary, with a 1.3X multiple for a total employee cost of $130,000/year.

$130,000 divided by a typical work year of 2,080 hours = $62.50/hour

Now, let’s multiply that $62.50 by the 8 hours per week each person is spending designing sales presentations, and it equals $500. So every week you’re paying that sales person $500 to do a task they are not trained for, and are not good at.

But remember, you have 200 salespeople! So you are losing $100,000 per week in productivity.

The impact of the wrong people doing the wrong tasks goes deeper. In addition to those costs, every hour lost is an hour not spent prospecting, improving customer relationships, completing follow-on sales efforts and hitting sales numbers. In a commissioned sales environment, it’s not just executives who feel the pressure to improve productivity. Salespeople are intensely interested in spending more time on the next opportunity, which directly impacts their own compensation. The typical approach is lose-lose for the company and the salesperson.

But wait, it gets worse! Large teams can create hundreds of presentations. With so much activity there is little coordination across the team, so work is largely produced in siloes with little visibility into what’s available, what’s working and what’s not. One hundred employees creating their own presentations will create 100 variations on a theme.

Even when companies create templates and starting decks, the concept of entropy is almost inevitable. Over time the systems put in place — typically a template, or a standard product or capabilities presentation — will be modified until unrecognizable. After enough time goes by, a sales manager, executive or product marketer will see a presentation that’s wide of the mark, which starts a process of accountability. Salespeople who had a presentation that they were comfortable with, even though misaligned with brand, receive new materials and start from scratch again. The entire effort resets and repeats. Unfortunately, this effort is mistaken for progress, when it is nothing more than running in place on a wildly expensive treadmill.

So that’s the money side of it, but let’s talk for a moment about the impact on the customer.

Most large and mid-size corporations ultimately spend millions of dollars developing and maintaining their brand. That effort — advertising, events, public relations, etc. — goes toward building equity in the mind of customers and prospects, right? Well, that investment meets its final expression in the form of a salesperson making an in-person (or virtual) call on a prospect. The work of brand teams, ad agencies, copywriters, designers and product managers comes down to the tip of the spear, that first customer interaction. And it’s at this critical juncture that, most often, the baton is handed to a person with little or no design experience, who creates a presentation from scratch, often ignoring guidelines and templates in an effort to simply produce meeting materials by a deadline.

The result is a customer meeting that bears very little relationship to the expectation created by the work of the brand team. The damage may be minimal or significant, but just as the lost hours are invisible in the sales process, the impact of poor materials is invisible to management .

Here are three things that companies try to do to solve this problem.

They make start and stop efforts to improve efficiency, without realizing the problem they are trying to solve is one of process. The result is costly and typically unsuccessful. Here’s what they try.

Some companies recognize the need for “better” materials, which focuses on improving the design of presentations. The effort is viewed as a cost, rather than a savings. Typically these companies look externally to design firms or freelancers with varying skills but no eye on the global process. The work most often coalesces around a new PowerPoint template or a new capabilities presentation. Design firms will charge handsomely for the work, and view it as a one-off effort. Once in use, the previous problems simply reemerge.

Often, companies focus on creating better support staff. These companies are closer to the target, viewing the effort as a way to eliminate inefficiency and free up time for their teams. Because internal marketing teams rarely — if ever — can effectively support rapid, ongoing presentation development and still complete their own work, the task most often falls to internal administrative support. These efforts yield varying results, and it mostly depends on the skills of the admin. But they can’t solve the volume problem, the need to produce enormous work output quickly. Or, work that scales up and down.

The software world is moving quickly. And software has emerged with the promise of automation and standardization of Microsoft Office tools including Word and PowerPoint. The idea here is that by creating slide libraries, and locking down the corporate materials, users will have a more efficient and aligned way of generating their materials. Usually, these solutions require the use of a web interface and entirely new process to enter information, create charts and content, with little flexibility. They can’t anticipate every need, but aside from their limitations, the biggest miss for these approaches is one of process and adoption. The entire organization must slow down to systematically transform its business process in order for the new solution to work. Such efforts have failure rates that range from 35-75%. Cultural change, as any large business knows, is difficult at best.

Let’s talk about how you can build a more efficient process to support your sales team. And as you listen, you may think, wow, I’ll never get that funded. But the math is the math, and if you work out the actual cost, even though it feels hidden, you’ll see this approach will be less expensive, and more effective than anything you’re doing now. This is part of our POP program at Perfect PlanIt. We outsource this service to our clients, and it’s the reasons we’ve do so many thousand or presentations so quickly. But it can be built internally as well. Let me tell you the four fundamental principles, and then how you need to structure a team to succeed.

So, what does a support team look like?

It depends a lot on volume. If you do 10 presentations a week, and each PowerPOint takes four hours for a designer to create, you can probably get by on two designers (since sometimes projects will come in at the same time).  When those designers have downtime, they can support the marketing team that will greatly appreciate having a PowerPoint expert available to assist on projects.

If you get much beyond that, you’ll need a project manager to handle intake, review the decks, control the tracking, take care of revisions, etc. When you’ve got 20 presentations coming through each week, someone must be the gatekeeper.

We structured our teams in such a way that a project manager and design “pod” can handle an enormous flow of work, and deliver it back within 24-48 hours in most cases. For some clients, within stringent guidelines, we deliver in 8 hours. An internal team should be able to do the same.

An alternative method is a project manager, one or more designers, and reliable freelancers who are trained on the process who can handle overflow work.

Delivering ROI

Ultimately, a program must either pay for itself, or pay enough dividends with better efficiency and work product that the investment is justified. To give you a sense of what’s possible, after a full year of measurement for our client with the 200 sales people, we calculated that our program had delivered 8,000 work hours back to the sales team, and a gross savings of $400,000 in their own time. When you added back the program costs it still netted a savings for this client, and it sent productivity and job satisfaction skyrocketing. The client expanded the program to a second sales team to increase returns.

There is no magic wand to uncovering and solving the inefficiency problems that likely exist in your organization. There is a better way, however. It takes work, but if you suffer from heart palpitations every time you see a salesperson at their desk trying to add charts or find photos for a presentation, I promise you the effort is worth the payoff.

I hope that’s helpful. As always, I welcome your feedback.

Thanks for listening and talk to you soon.

It seems intuitive enough. Every presentation should have a “big idea” behind it. But few do. And without it, your audience is likely to get lost (if they ever really engage to start with). In this short episode, we’ll show you how to stop wasting time, money and people power, and how to build a powerful idea that resonates with your audience.

No matter if you’re in front of a large group or giving a status update to a group of co-workers, your ability to deliver a meaningful presentation rests on the central idea behind it. Let’s build your Big Idea!

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Hi, and welcome to P3, the Perfect Presentations Podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, vice president of Perfect PlanIt.

You might recall in an earlier episode I said that once you started talking about better presentations it was like pulling on a thread of a sweater. It’s all tied together. Today I want to pull on one of those threads and talk in more depth about creating a Big Idea in your presentation, and how to do it.

Let me tell you what a big idea looks like. In 2006, or somewhere in there, I was at a business luncheon, where the guest speaker was nationally recognized investment banker, who was often sought out for his opinion on a variety of topics. But in the past several years, all anyone wanted to know was his opinion on the housing market. The market had been on fire for years, and a lot of people were getting rich, and as happens with most investments, the suckers are the last ones in. Well, that becomes obvious in hindsight, but just like day trading during the internet bubble of the late 90s, or the tulip panic in the 1600s, or bitcoin today, things were hitting a frenzy and everyone wanted a piece. Even investment professionals were afraid they were missing out on the good fortune. So not surprisingly, this presentation was to a packed room, hanging on every word, as if we were listening to a seer about to tell us all our futures. Keep in mind, it wasn’t just investor types interested at this point. A lot of people had bought homes recently, and many had cashed out equity to finance other parts of their lives, or to buy another home. Everyone was riding high, but recently the market has shown signs of topping out, and people were nervous. In hindsight I count myself lucky. I was a homeowner, and had benefited, but I hadn’t bought recently and wasn’t planning on selling, so I was more of a dispassionate observer. But even I felt that twinge of missing out on all of the action.

Well, this guy got up to speak and everyone put down their coffee cups and dessert forks and waited for the latest opinion of the guru. And he brought up a title slide titled (I’m paraphrasing here, but this will be close), “Housing market primed for a soft landing over next 12 months.” That was a big idea. And he knew how to land it. He didn’t make the audience guess, or wait. He simply told them exactly what he was going to say, and now the audience was ready to hear the justification for this conclusion. He’d struck a nerve. Even a nationally recognized figure, who certainly could have extended the drama, decided not to try to drag the audience along and build up to his big reveal. He simply told them “here’s what I’m going to tell you, and how I’m going to tell it. And you know exactly where I stand.” That’s a rare feat in a presenter.

The coda, of course, is that he could not have been more wrong. The market crashed spectacularly and a lot of people—some of whom might have been there that day, lost a lot, and maybe everything. And I love that he continued to be quoted as an authority for years after that, but that’s another story.

Here’s a more typical story.

I was at a conference last week about what the sponsors were calling The Experience Economy. It was about how we interact with customers, clients, patients.

The first speaker was a former biotech researcher, and later an executive at a large data firm. In general I don’t have high expectations when it comes to presenters. But this guy had obviously studied at the school of TED talks. His presentation was incredibly visual, and beautifully done. So we were already leaps and bounds ahead of expectations. On top of that, he told great stories about his time as a researcher. He wove in little anecdotes in interesting ways. In short, if you’d asked the audience what they thought, I suspect they’d largely say he was a “good” presenter.

But…. Of course there’s a but. If you asked them what his talk was about., I’d wager that not a single person in the audience could summarize it in less than three or four sentences. They’d fumble around a bit to think how to articulate what they thought it was about, and no two answers would be the same.

Since this episode is all about the big idea, it’s obvious that he didn’t have one. Telling good stories doesn’t add up to a good presentation.

You might think of yourself as a good presenter. And you might be in the sense that you can comfortably stand up and talk easily in front of a group. But if you’re listening to this, then you also know you can improve, and focusing on a big idea is one of the easiest and most powerful ways.

So much of what we teach is in reality quite intuitive. You know a big idea when you hear one. How about this one? [JFK: I believe that this nation should commit itself before this decade is out to sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to the earth]. No question about that, right? One statement that laid out a mission for an entire country that guided much of the rest of the decade. How about this one? [I have a dream that my four little children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.].

It’s easy to find examples of big ideas in politics, because it’s built around the idea of summarizing a position or an aspiration in one short statement.  It’s rarer in business, where a lot of information is involved and sometimes it’s hard to know how to parse through it all.

First, I want to dive into why the big idea is so critical for you when you present. It applies whether it’s to a thousand people or a room full of co-workers.

There’s a statistic we use when we work with clients. First, we have to get them to understand what happens when someone sits through a poor presentation. I’m not talking about bad clipart. I’m talking about sitting for a half hour or an hour without coming away knowing what to do with the information you just sat through. If you’ve got a room full of people, and they walk away with unclear directions, what happens? They go and continue their work without changing direction. Or they have to research for answers, when the answers were already available. We estimate that every bad presentation results in 10-15 hours of rework for most companies. That includes the time spent creating the presentation, time wasted sitting through it, and time the team spends doing rework, or through unclear direction.

Stick with me here because the numbers are impressive. One of our clients had an executive team of 60 directors. Each director gave about 12 presentations a year. So that’s 720 presentations. If each presentation wastes 15 hours of the team’s time, that’s 10,800 hours of productivity lost. Do the math against an average salary of $100,000 and that works out to a cost of $518,000! So as a company, you get hit twice. First, you lose the productivity and ability to be agile. Second, you’re spending a fortune for the privilege of getting nowhere. Ah, but people love to argue with that 15 hours figure. No way, they say. OK, sure, I can walk you through it and prove I’m right, but let’s go with a best-case scenario and say that miraculously each presentation only took an hour to create and deliver. This of course means that you’re only presenting to yourself, since you’re obviously not wasting anyone else’s time in this scenario. Even then, the waste is 720 hours, and almost $35,000.

If you think I’m off the mark, please, get in touch with me. I’d love to have a detailed discussion about it. I love going over the numbers.

So, what’s our bottom line? We need better, clearer outcomes. And the way to do that is through a strong Big Idea.

Let’s start with a quick definition. What’s a big idea? A big idea is one single idea that ties the entire presentation together, and carries through each slide. You’re looking for the one takeaway you want everyone to carry with them.

You’ve heard people say that you should appeal to people on an emotional level. You’ve also heard people advocate for reasoning and logic as a way to prove your point. The truth is, both ideas are right.

A strong big idea is made up of both halves. First is what we call the head. The cerebral part. It represents what the audience should know. Here you want to build awareness on the subject, describe your point of view on the topic, and build a logical argument. If we had to assign a character to this part of the big idea, it would be Spock.

The second half is the Heart – This is about why the audience should care. Here you’re working to build desire, motivation, etc. For some reason this makes me think of Prince playing Purple Rain. Or the ending of It’s a Wonderful Life. Think about how you want you audience to feel.

Your Big Idea is essentially your presentation title. Use it as a powerful way to set up what you’re about to talk about. Now, let’s think about a title for a presentation. Let me start with a title you’re likely to see. It will often be something like “4th quarter results.” Or “Investing options in 2018.” Now, ask yourself, how much do you know about what you’re likely to hear, based on that title? Almost nothing. This is just noise…it doesn’t inform, and leaves your audience adrift before you even start.

Let’s look at the investing title. Investing options in 2018. And let’s think about what we want the audience to know. Maybe our audience is a group of money managers. Any investment gurus, please go easy on me here, as I’m likely to get out over my skis, but I want to make the point. How about we want to make the point that the long term rise in the stock market means a 1st quarter correction of more than 10% is highly likely? Spock would react well to that, don’t you think? You’re starting with a statement of opinion, but as an audience member, I expect that you’re going to give me all of the reasons why I should agree with that opinion.

But the facts here aren’t enough for me as an audience member. We need to address the questions, why should the audience care? Well, no one wants to be positioned poorly during a downturn, so maybe we’re advocating that an adjustment to a stronger cash position can minimize the impact of a downturn?

OK, now we’ve got the “what” and also the “why you should care.” And it’s obvious that the title Investing options in 2018 is pretty weak. We can take these two halves, and create a new Big Idea. Something like: The likely Q1 market correction warrants a stronger cash position for your clients.

You’ll notice that this title feels a bit longer and is certainly more descriptive. That’s a good thing. If you can shorten your title and still make the point, great. But don’t be afraid to be this specific.

We’ve heard the comment that this takes the surprise out of a presentation. That the presenter wants to reveal that. The problem with that is that if your audience is in the dark, or unsure of where you are headed, they’re more likely to check out. And your big conclusion is predicated on them having listened intently throughout your presentation to start with. If they don’t know where you’re going at the start, they’re not likely to have followed you to your destination.

I’ve been accused of being an over-explainer. But in my experience, that’s a positive.  I liken it to when our accountant sends us our corporate tax return. It’s got a lot of pages, but there, sticking out from the side, are those little yellow stickies that say “sign here.” And I can flip right to that page and know exactly what to do. Think of your big idea as a giant sticky note to your audience. They won’t have to search for anything, because you’ve told them what they need to know.

Now, once you’ve got your big idea, it’s your responsibility to follow it up. Your big idea makes for a wonderful litmus test. Each slide in your presentation should support that big idea in some way. It may provide context for it, such as talking in my investor presentation about other downturns in the market. It. Or it may provide more detail to prove my point. Perhaps it talks more about the impact of not acting (appealing to the heart again). If a slide doesn’t do those things, chances are it should be considered for deletion. Your big idea can help you focus on creating a really tight, powerful message.

If you have the opportunity, I’d also encourage you after you present to talk to a few people who listed to it. Ask them what they thought the main point was. If your big idea was strong and clear, each person should say nearly the same thing.

Remember, the head and the heart go together. Use them both and nail your big idea.

I hope you’ve found this episode helpful. Let me know if you have thoughts or ideas about it. Thanks for listening and good luck with your next presentation.

Main stage presentations, keynotes speeches, ballroom talks. If you’ve been invited to address a large group, you’ve got a unique, exciting opportunity ahead. How do build a presentation with impact that lives up to your star billing in the spotlight?

In this podcast we delve into storytelling, pacing and passion, and how to put them to use. You’ll leave your audience wanting more, and excited to share what they’ve learned from the expert. The chance to grace the main stage at a conference is a rare chance for most presenters. Make the most of the opportunity!

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Hello and welcome to P3, the Perfect Presentations Podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, from Perfect PlanIt, and today’s topic is how to give a great ballroom or main stage presentation.

When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was be an actor. Starting from grade school, where I got the lead in our school Christmas play, it’s all I wanted. I loved the nerves before going on stage, and learning the lines. And counting all of your lines to see who had the most. All through high school, I tried out for everything, and because I went to a pretty small school in the middle of nowhere, I usually got the part I wanted. I think what I didn’t realize is that for as much as I craved being on stage, I wasn’t actually all that great at it. I could memorize the lines and deliver them with gusto, but I never really owned the lines. When I watch a great acting performance today I’m just blown away at the realization of the huge gap between delivering lines and acting. But I kept that dream up and entered college thinking about an acting major. The first thing I did was to seek out the drama department. I tried out for plays and got a few parts. But the more time I spent in the drama department, the more I realized how clique-ish it was. There were a lot of would-be artistes, as it were. And there were also some talented people that I could already tell could do things I couldn’t. But there was this sort of thirst for attention that I’d always felt and now that I was seeing it in others I had this really negative reaction to it. And like a light switch, it just shut off for me. I suddenly relished my anonymity, and aside from one last role in Jesus Christ Superstar, which was a long-time dream for me and my roommate, I was done. Like, completely done.

When graduation came, the heads of the journalism department asked two people to speak at commencement. And I was one of them. And suddenly, I had to be on stage. And for the first time, I was nervous in a new way, because A, I’d had this epiphany that I didn’t want to be on stage at all, and B, because as opposed to reading someone else’s lines, these were going to be my own. And as a natural procrastinator I also waited until a few days before graduation to get started. And at that point the full weight of it hit me and I was terrified. This might sound pretty familiar right about now.

So I dove in and worked like crazy to write something I thought people would like. And I decided no one cared about much of anything except getting out of the room and celebrating. So I turned it into a roast of the professors, all of whom were sitting behind me. I kept it good natured, except perhaps a couple questionable references to one professor’s writing being more suitable for penthouse magazine than esquire, or something like that. It’s a haze. I got a lot of laughs. But even in college, I knew on a level I couldn’t have articulated that I needed to end with a good story. And I ended it with a story about being at the mall, and walking up an escalator that had stopped. And as I and others climbed the steps, the escalator started moving backwards. And I was looking up and noticed immediately, but others had their heads down and kept on walking, making no progress. And I told my classmates I hoped that as we went through life, if the escalator kept us moving in place, we’d be the ones to keep our heads up, see things others couldn’t, and know when to take the stairs.

I got this big applause, and it wasn’t like anything I got for acting. Oh man, I was hooked again.

When you nail it, it’s like no other feeling. It’s beyond knowing you did a good job. It’s knowing you made people stop and consider themselves and how they fit into your story. You feel like you changed something for the better.

That’s what we’re here to talk about today. How to give a great keynote or ballroom presentation.

I mentioned on the first podcast that we won’t focus on speaking techniques and traditional presenter training. There are some places, however, where there’s inevitable overlap. If you’re not a confident speaker, I can’t solve that with a few words of advice like “own the stage.” But we can talk about tips that focus on how you pace yourself, and how you walk out ready to go.

This could be broken down into one of those “5 tips” sort of articles, but I’d rather just have a conversation about what we’ve found helps our clients succeed. And the first thing comes out of one of our training sessions we give to new presenters. We have a client who made us part of their new hire training process. They’d bring in about 25-30 new summer hires each year. These were kids right out of college and this was their first job. So we focused on creating a way of thinking about presenting that gave them tools to simply get on the playing field. And one of them, I realized, is one that’s useful for CEOs as well as newbies.

We live in this post-Steve Jobs world. He changed the game for what a presentation could be, and what a presenter could do. Now, there have always been great speakers, since the dawn of time. But what Steve jobs did was to popularize the idea of a powerful presentation in a way that hadn’t been done before. Today, people like Elon Musk of Tesla carry on that tradition for giving a great presentation.

Unfortunately, this legacy creates a lot of tension for some presenters. They feel like they have to live up to that expectation from the audience. What we work with their clients to teach them is that going into a presentation with that approach is a sure recipe for disaster. Instead, we show them examples of short 3 to 4-minute speeches given by others. Things like Ted X talks, or even youtube videos that they might be familiar with. And then we asked them what resonates with them about that video. Do they think they were great speakers? What stood out most to them? Almost universally, the response we get back comes down to one word. Authenticity.

So when you think about yourself and the presentation you have to give, don’t try to become the next Steve jobs or Elon Musk, or Tony Robbins. I think one of the reasons I succeeded when I gave that college commencement address is that it was the first time that I wasn’t pretending to be somebody else. I was free to express myself the way that I wanted and that put me at ease in a way that I hadn’t been when I was on stage before. There’s always still an element of a performance when you’re on stage, but when you’re playing a true version of yourself you’re much more likely to succeed.

This can embody itself in interesting ways. If you’re the kind of person who likes to pace back and forth what you talk, chances are you going to want to do that when you’re on stage as well. So set yourself up for way that you can do that comfortably. If you also rely heavily on speaker notes, you’re going to want to find out if there are reference monitors at the foot of the stage that you can look at. If not, you have some decisions that you need to make. What’s more important to you, pacing or the notes?

Part of being authentic is also knowing your limitations. Some people get paralyzed by the idea that they need to be funny. Somehow we got drilled into our heads that we’re supposed to start our presentations with a joke. If humor is not your forte, again, this is a recipe for disaster. There’s nothing worse than starting a presentation with a joke that falls flat, because it primes the audience to expect that the rest of the presentation isn’t going to go so well either.

Which leads to the next topic. Instead of relying on humor, let’s focus on stories. Stories resonate like nothing else. And the research shows that listening to a story lights up part of our brains that don’t get activated when we’re looking at spreadsheets or other analytical topics. And you might be thinking to yourself, how can I tell a story on the topic of accounting, or plastics, or Health Care. I promise you can. Start by asking yourself, how can I make this personal? For years we managed a conference for a client on the topic of bedside barcode safety. It was about the devices and techniques that hospitals use to ensure patient safety. So basically when a nurse comes into your room before she gives you medication she would scan a bar code on your wrist tag and then the medication and make sure that they matched. That ensures that you’re not getting the wrong medication. One of the featured speakers at the conference relayed a story about how a medication error that she personally had made had resulted in the death of one of her patients. As you can imagine, you could afford a pin drop in that room. She didn’t have to embellish, or be dramatic, the topic did that well enough on its own. And that story was deeply relevant. She was in a room full of colleagues, most of whom likely had their own stories.

Now, you may not have a story that’s life and death like that, and I hope you don’t. But she was there to talk about the changes that her facility had made around patient safety, and she started by relaying it in a way that made it very personal and the audience instantly knew how important it was to her. It was also directly relevant to the topic at hand, and therefore the information she relayed afterwards was grounded in this incredible and moving story she had told. So how is your topic important to you? If you’ve been invited to be keynote speaker, or mainstage presenter, somebody has seen something in you, or you’ve achieved something in your industry that gained you enough recognition that others wanted to hear what you had to say. I’m going to assume that that means you have passion around the topic. And if you have passion around the topic show your audience were that passion comes from.

A great story consists of a couple of things. First it creates tension in the audience. Think of every movie you’ve ever seen. Without tension, there is no story. Will the Wicked Witch get Dorothy? Right? By creating tension your audience will come to share the emotions of the people involved in that story, and even after the story ends they will continue to hang onto those feelings. Second, a great story creates triumph over adversity. There’s a reason we have sayings like its two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Or the chips are stacked against you. It’s that idea of the underdog, or the person who’s just on the edge of defeat could then turn around and succeed. It’s the basis for every feel-good movie ever made. You don’t have to have an epic journey, what you do have to have is an authentic story that you believe in, that was transformative for either you or your company, and that showed the you persevered to over the odds. Now that might sound like a daunting task, but it’s really not. Think about your topic, and then sit down with a piece of paper and just start making a list of all the ways related to that topic you struggled to succeed. Or that your company had to change and grow and evolve to succeed. This is a great time for freeform thinking. Let your mind wander in see where it takes you.

Another thing that can keep your audience engaged as you walk through your topic is to keep your stories personal. What I mean by that is this. You can talk about how a topic relates to customers, clearly, but what will be more impactful is to relay how it will impact “a” customer, singular. This is a technique politicians love to use. You see it in the state of the union address all the time, where the president looks up into the gallery and talks specifically about one person in attendance and how it might relate to one of the initiatives that are championing. It’s hard to care about a customer base, it’s much easier to care about an individual who struggling with a problem.

Let’s talk about pacing. One thing our clients tell us frustrates them is gaining the audience’s attention to start with. If it’s a lunch speech, or after a coffee break, it can be a struggle just to rally everyone to even listen. Tip one: don’t ask them to put their phones down. No one wants to hear that, dad. Here’s a better tip to get their attention. Do nothing. Stand there, prepared, looking at the audience. You’ll see something fascinating start to happen. After 10-15 seconds, you’ll see cell phones start to go down, and eyes start to lift. You’re asserting authority to be there, and asking (without asking) that your audience stop what they’re doing and provide you the attention you expect. Polite, respectful, and incredibly powerful.

Now, I talked about passion, how important passion is in making sure your audience is on your side. Passion and pacing can go hand in hand. As you start to think about your topic you also need to think about the timeline. How you’re going to start how you going make points that you want to make and how you going to get out. When I was as a junior in high school, I was in the band. It was one of the saddest bands you’d ever seen, something right out of the end of The Music Man. And I played the tuba, and I may have been the saddest of all of them. But the band was there to play at graduation for the seniors, and we were sitting right in front of the stage. We played the national anthem, and pomp and circumstance. And then mostly we just sat there. The speaker that year was a World War II veteran. And he cared immensely about the topic, and therefore so did the audience. For about the first 25 minutes. Unfortunately at about 20 minutes in it started to turn political, and then went from political into a rant, and it continued on for another 40 minutes. This was a small town, patient crowd, used to showing respect for others. But finally, the father of one of the graduates stood up and started screaming at the guy to let the kids graduate and get off the bleeping stage. He was so pissed he had to be escorted out. After a few choice words back and forth, the gentleman wrapped up his speech, and the entire room breathed a sigh of relief. If he’d have stopped at 20 minutes, his pace and his passion would have been perfectly matched. There’s a balance that you got to respect. At some point a story can tip over and you lose your audience.

So for timing, if you’ve got ½ hour of content to fill, how do you do that? I can’t fill in the meat of your presentation for you. What I can say is, the most effective presenters are not afraid to use that first five-10 minutes to become familiar to their audience. Those stories, the background. The setup. That’s the time you use to win the audience to your side and to your cause. What follows – the meat of the topic – is how you prove it. You’re arming your audience with a new way for them to think about the topic. During that time, continue to bring it back to real stories about your company, what you’ve learned, how you’ve changed. And the wrap up is a great time to personalize it again.

You might be thinking I’ve just told you to tell one long campfire story where everyone roasts marshmallows. I’m not. What I really want you to hear is that a great presentation doesn’t feel like a presentation at all. You’re not being sold, or explained, taught. You’re being enlightened. You’re there for a reason. You’ve already brought your authority with you. You’re on the stage. You were invited. Give them something useful and personal.

I do want to talk for a moment about visuals. And I’ll go back to TED Talks here, because they’ve turned presenting into an industry, and done it with a technique that they replicate and stick to fairly rigidly. If you watch a TED Talk, you may see some visuals. And that’s what they’ll be. Visual. Not copy. Not bullets. Those visuals enhance the story, they don’t tell it. They don’t explain it. Those presenters are set up in a way that the focus is on them. Take that lesson to heart. Main stage presentations take many forms and you may need to show content on a screen. If you’re presenting results of a study you’ve conducted, you’ll likely have some data to share. If so, that’s fine. But the content should not be your speech. It should be something you are speaking about. I hope that distinction makes sense. If you’re reading what’s on the screen, you’re losing. If you’re describing what’s on the screen, you’re winning. If it’s a chart, then make sense of that chart. If it’s the results of a survey, don’t just recite the results to them, focus on what the results tell the audience.

And keep it as simple as possible. One slide = one idea. Period. And the ideas on all of those slides equal your central premise for your talk. Does that make sense? You’re building upon an idea, and every building block should support that idea.

Finally, remember, your audience will not retain details. They’ll retain ideas. They’ll go back to work and say “this presenter had a really great idea about X.”

The last thing I want to say is about practice. If you think back to when we talked about telling a great story, unless you’re a natural speechmaker who can walk onstage in just wing it, you’re going to need to practice. Don’t believe that spontaneity will improve the impact. The story becomes more powerful the more times you tell it and comfortable with it. You’ll start to realize that there are little nuances of it that you’ve been missing, and you want to add in. As a universal rule, when it comes to practice use the 24 hour rest test. Practice until you’re comfortable with the subject matter and feel like you can walk through it fairly consistently. Wait 24 hours, and then do it all again. If you have time in advance of your presentation you should be doing this every day. The shower is the ideal time for me, so I tend to run through my talks there, and I always find places to improve and change. So by the time you get ready to walk onstage perhaps you practiced 5 to 7 times. It’s almost impossible to overstate how comfortable that can make you feel when you walk onstage. You’ve seen the guys who’ve lost their place and look like a deer in the headlights. You’ve probably not noticed the guys who’ve lost their place, but it doesn’t matter because they’re so familiar with their speech they can do it without support.

A mainstage or keynote is a real opportunity. For you, your company, possibly for your career, but especially for your audience. Make the most of it, and leave them wanting more of your time.

I hope you’ve found today’s topic helpful. I look forward to your feedback. Until next time.