Taking the sleeping pill out of powerpoint presentations
June 29th, 2006
In business marketing, or b2b marketing the board room/sales presentation is probably one of the most common sales activities.
Some people are good at it, naturally. Some people struggle. But most people have never learnt how to put a good powerpoint presentation together. I came across this site by Cliff Atkinson recently and watched the recording of his webinar “Transform Your PowerPoint Beyond Bullet Points“.
Some of the key points:
- Most presentations have all the content in the bullet points which is subsequently read out loud by the presentor.
- The vast majority of recipients of “standard” bullet point presentations find them boring or can’t see the point in having someone read out what is already on the screen (”might as well email it to me”)
- Studies have shown that when you take away the text from your standard bullet point presentation retention by the audience goes up by 28%
- The same study shows that if you remove the text from the screen the audiences ability to apply that information afterwards goes up by 78%
- Creating presentations based on the concept of a film story board is a much more effective way to do powerpoint presentations
- More images, fewer words.
Good stuff. It’s a long presentation, but Windows Media Player does allow you to speed-up the video….
July 5th, 2006 at 8:16 am
I have found this out the hard way.
After playing put the shape through the hole with two year old twins I put a similar shape on each slide plus one or two words on an internal presentation. I thought at the very least it would get a laugh. Not one laugh - the audience took these slides more seriously than the others. I was stunned and have started using them externally.
I also find helps to really know your content (so that you don’t end up reading from the slides) and have good eye contact with your audience.
July 5th, 2006 at 9:39 am
I guess one of the attributes you need to bring to this is a little courage.
Everyone has a particular expectation of a Powerpoint presentation, so when you step outside that format you take a risk.
Well worth the risk judging by Philips’ experience.