The YouBlog

Gone Fishin'

GREAT QUOTE from Henry David Thoreau: "Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not the fish they are after."
        And what are you really after with your presentations or sales calls or press releases and such? Is it to hear yourself talk or see your words in print, or is it to affect and influence someone else?
        Start from that and work backwards, and you'll be far more effective than if you just hurl your line out there and hope someone takes your bait.

Let's Talk About Transitions

OOOH, THE TEMPTATIONS! All those clever, stylish, even dramatic transition effects just waiting for you to go "Yesssss." Whirling cubes, starbursts, solar flares, and so on. The possibilities are endless.
        Just one teeny little problem here — most of them should be avoided at all costs.
        That's right. Unless a particular transition effect perfectly merges with what you've just said, or what you're about to show, then it adds nothing but visual noise to your presentation. Worse, it stops your audience's train of thought, while they subconsciously process what that transition was about.
        The excitement in your presentation should come from the ideas you're sharing or the vision you're painting. It shouldn't come from some meaningless visual trick.

So what do you do?
In most cases, just go to the next slide without adding a transition effect. That's the basic model for film and TV, and that's what your audience is used to. Sure, film editors regularly apply a quick dissolve for some scenes, so if you really feel the urge to add an effect, use that. Leave all the fancy tricks to everyone else. I promise you, your audience won't miss that stuff.
        Meanwhile, think about how you go from one slide to the next. Do you just flip to the slide? Do you say, "And on this next slide..." ? Or do you set up the idea that's coming up, and then change slides? That's the way you should go most of the time.

Handled well, transitions can build the pace of your presentation and further engage your audience. Handled poorly, they can kill your rhythm and distract or distance your audience.

Don't Take the Easy Route

RAISE YOUR HAND if you use a slide template. Okay, it's a trick question — even blank slides rely on a template of, well, blank slides. Templates are good in providing a consistent look to a presentation, which helps your audience concentrate on your message, not on abrupt changes in slide design. (There are, of course, things to be wary of. Read this and this.)
        Templates make the task of creating a presentation easier, but they also can make us lazy. Worse, they can even weaken how we present our ideas, by giving us a seductively simple — and potentially ineffective — form into which to pour our thoughts.
        Need a new slide? Just click the "New Slide" button. Then fill in the box that says "slide title" and start bashing in your bullets. (Or filling in some other prefab form. Pie chart, anyone?)
        Result? Another potentially good presentation gone bad.

A first step in a better direction
Let's look at that "slide title" bit. It seems logical. We want to label what the slide is about, so the audience will understand what's coming up and we'll know what to talk about, right?
        But who is giving the presentation? The slide deck or you?
        Let's go back to the basic purpose of using slides, which is to help illuminate or explain things for which words aren't enough — or to feature the three or four bits you absolutely want your audience to remember.
        If you buy that premise, then individual slide titles are virtually irrelevant. They become the equivalent of saying, "Here's what I'm going to tell you now." That just gets in the way of the story you're telling and risks talking down to your audience.
        Slide titles can sometimes help set a tone for the content within, or can anchor a series of slides on a particular theme (if you're doing builds and such). But in those cases, the title should be only one to three words in length, no more.
        And if you're thinking you need slide titles for the print-outs of your presentation you plan to leave behind, then please read Powerpoint ≠ Word.
        So leave the titles out and just paint your vision. Your audience will be more tuned in every time.

The Low-Hanging Fruit for Presenters

SETH GODIN has an insightful new post that is very relevant to presenters. (Well, not directly, but I'm here to translate.) The punchline is that our presentations don't have to be perfect or flawless or "electrifying". Most presenters aren't trying to get there anyway, they just want to do a good job (and hopefully close a deal, or getting funding, or get a raise or a job or — you get the picture). And so they might buy a book on presentations or listen to a podcast or maybe even attend a seminar. Most presenters aren't looking for the stone tablets of presentations, they just want something that can help them.
        And the one thing you can do that will have the most impact is to ditch your title slide and instead use a "Goal" slide. This applies whether you're presenting a product, a service, or an idea that can change the world. If your audience knows, right from the start, why they should care about what you have to say, they'll be much more engaged in your presentation — and much more likely to follow the vision you're creating.
        That's it. Only one thing to do, and it will make a dramatic improvement in how your ideas and message come across. This one thing leads to a more interactive presentation and greater recall (and greater action?) afterwards. Try it once, and you'll never go back to the old ways.

For more detail on this, see Trash the Title Slide.

How Do You Close Your Presentation?

HOW YOU END YOUR PRESENTATION is almost as important as how you start it. It's your chance to put an exclamation point on your key message, or to set an emotional hook that cements your case in your audience's minds. It's a chance to leave them on a high note, or to cut the legs off an otherwise good presentation (which is what too many presenters do).
        A weak ending won't necessarily kill your chances, but why do that to yourself — or, more importantly, to your audience? Of course, if you started off with a limp, "Me"-focused presentation, they won't even notice a vapid ending.
        But let's suppose you have a strong message and the audience is with you. What happens if you end it with "Any questions?" If they really do have questions, they've probably already asked them long before your final slide. So to show them a slide with "Questions" or "Any questions?" or "Questions & Answers" is likely to fall flat. A deadly pall settles over the meeting, until someone either mercifully asks a question, or you say, "Okay, then. Thanks!" Kind of leaves a sour taste in their mouths, don't you think?
        Of course, some presenters say, "Please hold all questions until the end", but don't do that to your audience. That clearly announces that the audience is trapped, and it totally stifles the sense of the presentation as a conversation. It's not a winning strategy.
        And what if you've got a formal Question & Answer segment as part of the schedule? It happens regularly to one of my clients. Does that mean they need a specific slide to announce it? No. It's far more powerful to leave the previous slide up — the one with the killer recap of their message — and then just say, "Let's open this up now for further discussion." Then, while the formal Q&A goes on, that killer recap burns into their audience's brains. You couldn't ask for a better chance to build recall.
        Finally, once all the other bits are over, how do you wrap it up? While there are as many ways to do this as there are presenters, don't miss the chance to give them or remind them of the next steps in the process. You want them to walk out thinking, "Here's what we need to do."

For a related post, see Asking Better Questions.

Do Your Presentations Miss the Point?

"BUT THAT'S THE WAY WE'VE ALWAYS DONE IT . . ." Boy, are those deadly words. And I've heard them, both directly and indirectly, from three separate sources this week. Ouch! Does anybody care about the audience any more?
        I hope that's a rhetorical question, but clearly there are a lot of people who miss the point of what a presentation is really about. It is NOT about your company or your products or services or features & benefits (which are typically all about yourself anyway). It is NOT about how much you know or how facile you are standing in front of an audience. NOR about your titles or your company's awards or even your view of art or technology or business or WHATEVER.
        What a presentation should be about — ANY type of presentation — is opening the eyes and the minds of your audience to things greater than they've seen or they currently know.
        That's it. And it really does apply to any type of presentation.
        And to do it right, you can't just throw your viewpoints or features or agenda out there and hope the audience gets what you're driving at. For anything you're going to share with your audience, you have to clearly establish why this is important for them — and then you need to lead with that.
        If it feels like I'm about to start pounding on the table, you're right. This is really basic stuff, but it's rarely taught and even more rarely grasped and applied. That's why there are millions of horrible presentations given every day — because presenters start with their viewpoint and work outwards, rather than starting with the audience's viewpoint and working inwards.
        So the next time you're preparing for a presentation, DON'T automatically follow your old format. Instead, put yourself in your audience's shoes and think about what their needs, interests, or goals might be. Think about what sequence of information would make most sense to them (chances are it's not the way you usually present this information). And then be totally clear about what they'll gain or what will affect them or what can change their life.
        Do that, and you'll never give a more powerful presentation.

Presentations Should Be So Direct

IF YOU HAVEN'T DISCOVERED IT YET, Guy Kawasaki has a wonderful new site up called "Alltop". Their charter is to help people find the top stories in a multitude of different areas, including presentations. Yes, The YouBlog is included in that "Speaking" collection, but I was a fan of Alltop long before they added this category. Here's why . . .
        By aggregating great content from a lot of different sources, it makes it really easy for me to find the things I'm interested in. And the pop-ups help that along by allowing you to sample stories without having to launch each page.
        Just imagine if your presentations allowed your audience to effectively do the same thing — to guide you, the presenter, in what they want to know or the sequence in which they'd like to hear things. Sure, you'll get a chance to talk about your company and your wares, if what you have is compelling to them. But by giving them options and allowing them to indicate what they're most interested in (or where they are on the learning curve), they'll be far more involved and invested in what you have to say, as opposed to them sitting back, arms crossed, waiting for you to finish talking about what an industry leader your company is.
        Simplicity of design and user-control. It works for Alltop — and it will do wonders for your presentations. (More on this coming up in a future post.)

What Story Do Your Graphics Tell?

PICTURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS alone won't save your presentation. They have to be relevant to your audience's situation, otherwise they're just visual noise (or worse). You can read more about this in my latest column for Sales & Marketing Management's ManageSmarter site.
        And if you haven't read it before, be sure to check out a related post about the dangers of slide templates: Hazardous Materials.

Don't Waffle

BOY, IS THIS AN EASY WAY TO SCREW THINGS UP. Just pick up the phone to call someone about something important, and then ramble on — either live or in a voice mail — until you finally hit on what you were really calling about.
        I've done it, and you probably have, too. It's waaay too easy to do. Most times, we get through it, and the receivers get through it, and life goes on.
        But sometimes, particularly if you're trying to persuade or influence someone, that kind of waffling can weaken your position.
        This act of "winging it" also affects presentations, if you've done the barest of preparations and suddenly are faced with a live audience. And it rarely comes out the way you really want it.
        I'm not saying your calls should be precisely scripted, nor that your presentations should be delivered by rote. (see "Death by Memorization?")
        But you should take a few moments before you pick up the phone (and many moments if you're working on a presentation) to organize exactly what you want to say. Write down the one key idea you want to convey, or the critical question you want to ask, or the three major points that your team needs to address. Just the act of writing them down helps organize your thoughts, so that when you do call, you'll be that much more concise and clear.
        I've stopped myself while dialing more times than I can count and said, "Why am I calling?" or "What exactly do I want to ask?" Then I'd jot some notes and dial again — and the call or voice message has always been better for it.

Warning: Obfuscation Ahead

IT IS SOOOO EASY TO COMPLICATE THINGS. How? Just talk like you write.

"Huh?!" (I hear you say.)

It's true. We tend to make our writing much more complex and dense than it needs to be (and, for most people, a lot wordier than it needs to be), and that too easily spills over into how we talk, particularly when we're trying to persuade or influence others.
        It may seem more professional and advanced to use a lot of long words. You certainly see this in most press releases and marketing pieces, and waaaay too many presentations and sales pitches — phrases like "maximizing your mission-critical applications while simultaneously achieving dramatic reductions in resource-intensive operational flows."
        In reality, writing or talking like that is one of the worst things you can do to keep people engaged in your ideas or message. Here's why:

1) People may not even understand what you're talking about.

2) They may stop listening or reading while they try to decide what something like "mission-critical" really means.

3) Even if they understand both the context and the words, it's likely to sound or feel phony, since only "Me"-focused sales people and marketers talk that way.

You want to know how insidious — Ooh, tripped myself right there! "Insidious" is actually the perfect word for that idea, but will everybody understand it? Not necessarily. Better to go with a different approach, like "...how easy it is to fall into this trap".
        This doesn't mean you have to dumb-down your message. It's just that the simpler it is to follow your ideas, the faster the receiver can process it and the more likely (and grateful) they are to stick with you.
        Back to what prompted today's post: "internationally-active" versus "globe hopping". These came up in a project we're working on. Sure, there are subtle differences between the two phrases, but in the context in which we would use them, they weren't that different.  Meanwhile, it's eight syllables versus three.
        Do you know what happens when you spin out a phrase that requires eight syllables? The receiver's mind just stops, waiting for you to finish the phrase. Yes, it's only two words, but compared to the speed at which our brains work, it takes half a lifetime just to get through those two words.
        And it's harder to say things like that, whether it's you the speaker or them, the readers (who say these words in their heads as they're reading). Try those two phrases right now and see for yourself.
        So keep your words short — and few in number, if you can help it — and your ideas will be much more concise.
        (Time to take my own advice . . . bye!)

Related posts:
  · Busted
  · exercise #2 in Don't Get in the Way of Your Message
  · Stillness in a Hectic Life
  · Why Be Concise?