I received an e-mail from a reader espousing the benefits and yes, even absolute necessity, of using PowerPoint slides during sales presentations (see see below).
“Steve! No way you can give a sales presentation without PowerPoint. Business people expect it … demand it! You must be a marketing bonehead!
Obviously the reader doesn’t know me.
Do I look like a marketing bonehead?
But, the vehemence and hard-core fanaticism of the reader’s comments (which I do not include here due to my civil nature) made me rethink my position.
That’s right. I might quite possibly have been wrong. As hard as that is for me to admit, it’s true. I’m flip-flopping. With a slight qualification.
If you can pass the PowerPoint Presentation Proof-of-Pudding Test below, you are one of those rarefied elites.
A superhero among PowerPoint presenters. (That includes anyone that uses PowerPoint slides to present an argument or presentation of a project, business case, or intelligent information.)
A Business Presentation Without PowerPoint Slides?
Can you really give a business presentation without PowerPoint?
Maybe.
Depends.
Probably. But only if you can pass the Proof-of-Pudding test.
Dare you take the PowerPoint Proof-of-Pudding Test?
The next presentation you give or attend, take note of what occurs after PowerPoint slide number five is swiped/swished onto the screen. Unless you really are “da man,” the Steven Spielberg of the sales presentation, 99 percent of the people in attendance will fall into one of the following disruptive descriptive categories:
1. The Mighty E-mail Master Multi-tasker (MEMM)
The MEMM reads their e-mail on desktops, smartphones, laptops, PDAs, or wireless (or all three at the same time) during your presentation. He looks up occasionally, feigns interest, may smile on the rare occasion and spews a few meaningless corporate acronyms to let you know he’s in the room, then … puts his head down, empties all e-mail folders – including sent, draft, and trash – and proceeds to the nearest online sports or horoscope web page.
*A special note on the MEMM. MEMMs tend to be the most vociferous critic of the presentation after you leave. They can clearly and concisely detail the flaws in any presentation to which they don’t pay attention.
2. The Diligent Dutiful Drone (DDD)
The DDD stares, smiles, nods, drinks, and laughs on rare occasions (keep your distance … could be flatulence) and most closely resembles a display-case manikin. What’s nice about the DDD is:
A. They smile and make you feel a little better about yourself, and
B. They have ZERO influence.
They don’t want to be there.
• You’re boring.
• You’re lying.
• They know it.
But, they’re masters of the art of being actively employed while daydreaming.
3. The Game Player (GP)
A real classic. I like him. Type “A” introverted extrovert. Flips open the laptop, occasionally tries to hide online game-playing activities, but goes to no great effort. Looks up every five to seven minutes and convincingly nods understanding of complex technology, processes and people issues. Has canned industry-analyst quotes or research that is prattled off machine-gun style in the blink of a PowerPoint swish. The GP can typically play between three to five online games at one time, within communities ranging from 2,000 to 4,000 users; answer all attacks; and defend and super-power-pack energizing, life-protecting, virtual-shield questions via Instant Messenger (IM) in less than one second. Very efficient.
4. The D*mn Data Destroyer (3-D)
The 3-D may smile occasionally and has insidiously iridescent eyes and a serial-killer smile that yells, “What lie are you telling?” The 3-D exuberantly researches each fact you use in your presentation and typically has between 800 to 1,000 search engines at his disposal intelligently configured to automate the process of destroying your credibility. His success rate is over 90 percent. Keys to look for: Sometime after PowerPoint slide #10 of your presentation, if he has failed to find a factual misstatement, his eyes turn a glowing red and some spittle or drool visibly emanate. Steer clear … 3-D is extremely dangerous.
5. The “ME-ME,” or the “I’m Much Too Important to Be Here”
The most irritating of presentation attendees, ME-ME, answers all e-mails, never looks up, never pays attention, and takes all cellphone calls while in the meeting. The only courtesy extended to you is turning around backwards to bend over while talking to the auto-repair shop on the cellphone. Sometimes ME-ME even stoops to feigning a cellphone call by testing the ringer … “Sorry, I have to take this very important, business-critical call.”
WARNING! ME-ME is just as dangerous as 3-D. To be able to pull off this offensively rude behavior, ME-ME actually has some power and/or authority. Me-Me is predisposed to not liking your presentation most probably because it wasn’t a ME-ME idea.
Therefore it stinks.
And so do you.
You recognized the categories didn’t you?
Didn’t you?
You did?
You flunked.
But that’s okay. Everyone does. It’s the nature of the business presentation.
However, have you given a PowerPoint presentation presentation without seeing one of them?
If so … YOU ARE ELIGIBLE FOR:
PASSIONATE POWERPOINT PRESENTER’S HALL OF FAME!
Currently there are no members …. you’d be the first.
If you flunked the test …
Do the PowerPoint Punt!
Throw your 58-slide, PowerPoint presentations and reverse-flash, creative swipe/swish, corporate-acronym gobbledygook out the fourth-story window.
Try something else.
Get creative.
###
RELATED:
IRREFUTABLE MATHEMATICALLY SOUND ILLOGIC
Creating or re-designing your website means you will have to justify the costs to the CFO (or your boss). And you’re going to have to talk about things like “responsive design, speed, mobile and tablet content presentation.
BE PREPARED
Be prepared when they give you a responsive…
“What the “H” are you talking about?”
They may still think tablets are made of stone. They will ask questions. Many. Then many more. Each question will have money attached. Money you want.
WHAT THEY’RE NOT LOOKING FOR
The answers they’re looking for are not visitors, views, page hits, comments, links, feeds or community building, it will look so cool or it will be the epitome of awesomeness.
WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR
They want NUMBERS! How will this improve leads, increase sales, reduce costs or improve the business?
You have to show them the math before they will show you the money.
HERE’S THE GREAT THING ABOUT CFO’S
CFO’s are typically easy to read neuro-linguistically. Though they esteem themselves as calm, cool, poker-faced scions of logic, they usually give off subtle signals – if you know what to look for. Slight visceral indications of how you’re presentation is faring.
MAKE SURE THE MATH DOESN’T ADD UP
You need to be “creative,” in a “make it up math for the better of all humanity” type of way to sell your project. Especially one that is new technology. Analytical types like CFO’s don’t appreciate or understand creative types – except they think they waste a lot of money and time. They don’t get them. Never will. SO you have to baffle them with a badinage of irrefutable, mathematically sound illogic.
EXAMPLE (THIS WILL WORK ON ANY ANALYTICAL PERSONALITY)
Recently I helped a friend create and present a straightforward and fairly simple presentation for her CFO. It went as pretty much as expected at the start.
“We built that website in 1993. What’s the rush to change it?” It still works doesn’t it? What’s a blog again?
My friend championed her project as “the future of the web,”the intrinsic value, the quick payback, the powerful capabilities and possibilities of the new responsive design website.
Of course, being a CFO, he expected to see the numbers. The math. So, we presented the responsive design website ROI (quite effectively I might add, if I do say so myself) with this instructional video.
RESPONSIVE DESIGN ROI MATH: 28/7=13
DISTRACTIVE DESIGN
This baffling badinage of balderdash stunned the CFO.
It’s a well known psychological technique called “distraction,” that we built into the presentation. The CFO was speechless, confused. and more importantly … VULNERABLE to some real logic. We took advantage of it and quickly presented the case for the website redesign.
WHY RESPONSIVE DESIGN?
We Need Better Design
Our customers are going mobile. Heavily. Smartphones and tablets. Our mobile traffic has increased from 0% 2 years ago to 47% today. And that 47% leaves almost immediately because or website display Hoover’s (sucks).
Our buyers favor mobile applications that are crisp, clean, and quickly responsive. The small screen size and real estate and short visitor-attention span on the smartphone and tablets demand better design decisions – to help them find what they need to find – quickly. They want to get in, solve their problem and get out.
Our website has to make it easy for them to do business with us.
EXAMPLES:
Hubspot (www.hubspot.com)
Harvard University (www.harvard.edu)
We Need Better Navigation
Content consumers dislike deeply nested features on mobile devices and tablets because they’re hard to use– and it’s spreading to websites. They don’t like to go deep-diving through extended sub-page navigation. Too hard. They prefer the EASY experience.
Scroll down, scroll up or scroll sideways. Big visuals. Less words. More meaning. Really. A lot less words. Ditch the corporate gobbledygook.
We need to put our best content up front. Not buried. Easy to see. Easy to find.
EXAMPLES:
This is Responsive (http://bradfrost.github.io/this-is-responsive/index.html)
Empowered: Sykes Blog (Http://blog.sykes.com)
We Need Better Content Display
In 2010, the average number of unique screen resolutions was 97. That number is almost 250 different types of screens now. This complex variety of screen resolutions today means it’s more difficult to ensure the content presentation functionality of websites across devices. It could look good, bad, ugly … or worse.
Responsive design adjusts to whatever device our customer might use, be it a tablet, smartphone, or desktop.
Some technology analysts recommend building separate mobile and tablet sites to address this issue. We don’t. We think the best way to go is a Responsive Design website. Why? Responsive design eliminates the need for a separate mobile presence. This makes the our proposed website significantly easier to maintain – and much more efficient.
A responsive website generally loads faster—this is critical for SEO – and critical for our customers to find us and our products. Because responsive design has to account for both desktop computers and small screened limited-memory devices, the best responsive websites tend to be minimal builds with fewer interactive components. Responsive design websites are like the Road Runners of the internet. Our current website is like the Eeyore Donkey from Winnie the Pooh fame. And Eeyore is right all the time.
EXAMPLES:
Compass Clinical Consulting (www.compass-clinical.com)
The Boston Globe (www.bostonglobe.com)
BESIDES THAT?
Google has officially said responsive Web design is its recommended configuration, and since the majority of our traffic – 80% – comes from Google, it seems like a good idea to listen to their recommendations on how to handle mobile traffic.
We were getting ready to wrap-up the presentation with the INFOGRAPHIC below. The nuts and bolts. What I consider a lot of the good stuff. But the CFO stopped us.
“Could you replay the Abbott & Costello video again? I’m going to use that on the CEO. I need a raise.
… You have your budget for the redesign.”
It reminded me of an old Mark Twain.
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
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