Going systematically through the branches of your organization diagram is not the best way to get visitors from abroad excited about your company.
When you make a biographical movie, it is recommended to spend a bit more time on the period in the life of the artist where she delivered those stunning pieces of sculpture.
Following the sections of that business plan template you found online literally will not encourage investors to write you the check you want.
Making good diagrams in PowerPoint
This presentation contains some useful guidelines for making diagrams. Thank you Alessandra for pointing it out to me.
Too many benefits = no benefits
Marketing managers always want to make sure that every single benefit and feature makes it on to “the benefits slide”. ROI. Low cost. Flexible. Scalable. Effective. Efficient. Affordable. Listing more benefits means spending less slide real estate on each individual one (words, visuals). Your remarkable story gets diluted into a generic cloud of buzz words that people find on just about every other benefits slide that they have seen.
You conformed. Marketing managers expect this benefits slide. Customers recognize it as: “hey, here comes the benefits slide”. Everyone follows the script. Presenter presents. Audience does a quick email check. The usual stuff.
Benefits are all about standing out from the competition. Let your benefits slide stand out as well and focus it on what is really different about your company and your product.
You conformed. Marketing managers expect this benefits slide. Customers recognize it as: “hey, here comes the benefits slide”. Everyone follows the script. Presenter presents. Audience does a quick email check. The usual stuff.
Benefits are all about standing out from the competition. Let your benefits slide stand out as well and focus it on what is really different about your company and your product.
Surprise? Hardly anyone reads annual reports
An interesting post by investor relations consultant Dominic Jones: very few bother to read a company's annual reports.
It is easy to understand why. Annual accounts consist of 2 parts. One, the financial data. This is read by those who need them (analysts). Two, an attempt by the company to sell its strategy to investors. Here is why this section does not work:
It is easy to understand why. Annual accounts consist of 2 parts. One, the financial data. This is read by those who need them (analysts). Two, an attempt by the company to sell its strategy to investors. Here is why this section does not work:
- The pages are written in a verbose PR style, full of buzzwords and cliches.
- The pages contain verbal description of financial data that is much better displayed in graph or table form. "Europe grew by 5%, Asia grew by 10%"
- Long-hand text does not work very well to communicate business strategy, and the annual report is no exception
- The slick, polished, permanent look of the annual report instantly reduces its credibility. The audience likes real, genuine, authentic stories.
A lot of money is invested in the layout, design, and printing of these annual report. Is this money not better spend by improving the quality of that earnings announcement presentation PDF that everyone IS reading?
Speaking "live" in NY on 26 July
I will be in New York the last of week of July to speak at a number of events (well, 2 actually). My presentation at the Netherlands-America Foundation is open to the public. Details to register are here. This is a not-for profit event, the proceeds of the small entrance fee will go to support the goal of the foundation. The presentation will be in English.
Emailing presentations without verbal explanation
Sending a deck to someone who will open it without verbal explanation is a problem. The slides work great on stage, but reading them stand alone does not provide the required context. There is no obvious solution:
- Making changes to slides (either modifying them all together, or adding text box subtitles to them) is a lot of work, and maintaining two master files is a big pain
- Converting them to video and adding audio tracks prevents people from skimming through, they might just give up mid-presentation
- Adding comments in the note pages does not look very nice, and many people do not know how to find them in PowerPoint.
So at the moment, I am trying something different. Over the past week I trained myself up on Adobe InDesign and am creating a framework to drop high-res images of slides into a template that adds a nice formated paragraph of text to the right of the slide. When you PDF the document, it creates the feeling of a spread with facing pages in a nice book that reads very well on a wide screen monitor. It looks beautiful, and it is easy to modify. Let's see how it works out for my clients.
The Anti PowerPoint Party
Matthias Pöehm, a speech coach from Switzerland is trying to create a global movement: The Anti PowerPoint Party or APPP. For the time being, he is trying to establish a regular political party in Switzerland by collecting signatures. He has a point when he says that many presentations would have been much better off if no PowerPoint slides were used. Matthias is offering a book on his site with suggestions on how to present without PowerPoint.
Find me on Google Plus
In case you signed up for Google Plus, you can find me here. I share my blog posts there as well.
Interview question: do a presentation
In a recent blog post, VC Brad Feld discusses job interviewing. One of the suggestions: give the candidate something to do, for example have potential sales people do a presentation. An excellent suggestion.
To take this a bit further. If you are up for a job interview, think of it as a presentation of your story. What do you want to tell? What clutter can you get rid of? And yes maybe, what visuals do you need to bring along (probably 1-page printouts)? The organization structure of that big project you managed? The personal thank you letter you received from the client's CEO?
To take this a bit further. If you are up for a job interview, think of it as a presentation of your story. What do you want to tell? What clutter can you get rid of? And yes maybe, what visuals do you need to bring along (probably 1-page printouts)? The organization structure of that big project you managed? The personal thank you letter you received from the client's CEO?
3 years and almost 1000 posts of Idea Transplant
Today is the anniversary of my blog. Starting it back in 2008 was one of the best decisions I ever made. It gave me many new friends all over the world, it convinced me to devote 100% of my time to presentation design, and it opened up a global client base to work with. I will be hitting post #1000 soon. I cannot believe that number myself. Thank you for reading!
A call to stock photographers
For most images I use in PowerPoint, I use Photoshop to extend the background and create more white space for type. You can only do this when the edges of the image have a nice neutral pattern background.
Stock photographers crop their images to get more interesting compositions. The result is that many images will have hard cut offs that cannot be extended. Here is my call to stock photographers: let the designers of the final products do the cropping for you and make the full version of your file available as well.
Maybe stock photography sites should do for images what they already do for vector files: offer a ZIP file for download that contains multiple items: one example crop that creates a nice thumbnail to drive sales on the site, and the original that designers can work with.
Image via iStockPhoto.
Update: Linda Lor linked in the comments to her video on how to extend images in PowerPoint without the help of Photoshop. I am embedding it here:
Stock photographers crop their images to get more interesting compositions. The result is that many images will have hard cut offs that cannot be extended. Here is my call to stock photographers: let the designers of the final products do the cropping for you and make the full version of your file available as well.
Maybe stock photography sites should do for images what they already do for vector files: offer a ZIP file for download that contains multiple items: one example crop that creates a nice thumbnail to drive sales on the site, and the original that designers can work with.
Image via iStockPhoto.
Update: Linda Lor linked in the comments to her video on how to extend images in PowerPoint without the help of Photoshop. I am embedding it here:
Video of my SalesCrunch webinar is up
Here is the video of the webinar on presentation design I hosted together with SalesCrunch last week. The focus was specifically on sales presentations.
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