How to Marie Kondo your Presentation in 5 Steps

“The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t.” – Marie Kondo

Marie Kondo has helped millions of people unclutter their homes and simplify their living spaces by using a few principles that can also be applied to sales presentations.

Many business presentations have become messy junk drawers of content, riddled with bullet points that force salespeople to tell a story that’s “all about us” instead of about how they will help their customers avoid problems and thrive. They have become monologues that essentially say, “choose us” instead of dialogues that ask, “how can we help?”. They’ve devolved into slides that put customers brains to sleep with talk of ROI, TCO and POC.

They lead with “product” instead of “the problem” and they end with “Any questions?” instead of there BEING ANY ACTUAL QUESTIONS.

Am I right?

It’s not surprising that MOST SALES PRESENTATIONS END WITH NO SALE. NO CUSTOMER ACTION TAKEN. NADA.

Here are 5 tips inspired by KonMari as applied in our (www.pitchkitchen.com) presentation & website development practice, that will improve your sales presentations.

1.    Put your slides in one big heap.

Put them in slide sorter view and reduce the scale to 10% so you can see all of it at once on one screen. Take it all in. Take ownership of the fact that this is where your presentation is at the moment. Take a moment to honor your journey of how you got to this place. Recognize that while these slides may have served you well, it is time to move on, and be willing to let go of anything that’s here if it doesn’t serve you and your purpose. As you look at the totality, notice how many slides there are to support one idea or another. You should be able to see slides coalesce around topic ideas and sections. Take note of those sections.

Now, put your old presentation aside, and create a new presentation. But don’t worry, all your old slides will be there in case you still want them.

2.    Tackle sections, not slides

There is a great temptation to start working on one slide or another to make it come together. You might think that if you can only make one slide better it would come together as a great presentation. Just stop. Instead, start with a clear outline that structures the conversation that you want to have with your customer.

Use the power of Three. Or Five. You don’t need more sections than you have fingers on your hand to have a great presentation. Presentations with 4 sections or 6 sections are harder to remember and present from so don’t use them. I don’t know why. Maybe ask a friendly neighborhood neuroscientist if you can find one. Or just take my word for it. If you can only think of 4 sections, think of another one to wrap it up or perhaps to start with. Steve Job’s formula for a presentation was a 5 part structure that followed this outline.

1.    Start with a story

2.    Talk about the problem

3.    Introduce the solution

4.    Give an example

5.    Call them to action

Or it can be a simple 3 part structure like this:

• THE PROBLEM
• THE SOLUTION
• NEXT STEPS

3.    Give your sections boxes or visual containers

Use shapes to contain text ideas. Make those shapes matter in terms of size. Larger shapes will be more important. Shapes that touch eachother are related. Also, perhaps give your presentation a progress bar agenda so you as the presenter and your audience doesn’t get lost. Make it visually clear by putting your content in visual sections and indicate on every slide with a miniature legend of sorts where you are in the discussion.

Once you are clear on the sections that will support your conversational presentation, look at each of your old slides with an eye for content that would be valuable in the new structure. If it would be valuable, copy it over into that section in the new presentation. If it’s not valuable, RIGHT CLICK and then DELETE it. It may be hard to let go of slides that you’ve used a long time as they have sentimental value for you. It may conjure memories of the time you presented to that company and won that big deal. But if that slide is no longer serving you and the conversations you want to and need to be having, then be brave, be bold and DELETE it. This way you can continue to decide which slides are GOLD and which slides are IRON, which are dragging down your presentation.

IMPORTANT! Don’t follow those instructions that PowerPoint tells you to do. Don’t click to add a title or click to add text. Know that your presentation will be about images and storytelling which are not spawned with bullets of text. Instead, delete these two text boxes immediately and begin to use the slide as a container for your visual ideas. When you put images on slides, find “happy accidents” where text placed on objects adds an interesting narrative. Like these examples:

Think of your slides like they are billboards and bumper stickers, not to-do-lists and documents. Your slides aren’t meant to be read. Don’t treat your slides like a document. They are meant to trigger a visual story that will engage you and your audience in the telling.

• Your slides don’t need to all look the same.
• Your headlines DO NOT NEED TO BE all in the same place.
• Your background DOES NOT NEED TO BE WHITE.
• YOU DO NOT NEED TO HAVE PAGE NUMBERS
• Give yourself the freedom to make the presentation a visual story that facilitates the conversation you want to have.
• Break the rules.

4.    Make your audience the focus of the presentation, not you.

The purpose of your presentation is to share your insights, not your information because information is cheap and everywhere. Insights are rare and hidden. The purpose of your presentation to share your knowledge – not your data. It’s to activate customer trust so your guidance can be taken. Truth be told, your customers don’t give a s%it about you, your product or your company. They have taken their time to listen to learn how you, your product or service can help them go from where they are today – to where they want to be. Your customers want to transform and they are curious to know how you can help make that happen. They are the hero of their transformation story – not you or your company. Your role is to be their guide, their Obi-wan, their Yoda, their Rafiki, their Dumbledore. Not their Superman or Wonderwoman.

Every company’s reason for existence is to solve a particular problem. Yet many businesses, have allowed the curse of their own success to overshadow that purpose. That’s why you must try to turn your presentation into a conversation. Make your presentation an opportunity to deepen your relationship by using open questions on slides in your presentation to help make the focus about their journey instead of your product.

It’s essential that you #designtheconversation to have moments where you are asking them questions about how they are doing things today, what they are trying to accomplish, and perhaps what great things would happen for them by way of the outcomes of the thing you’re are selling. Don’t ask leading, closed-end questions that you know the answer to. They will feel trapped and you will feel dirty asking a question like that. Ask instead questions you don’t know the answer to, such as “What is most important to you?” “How does this impact your business?”

5.    Do your slides spark joy?

Now that you have gathered all the slides you want to keep and have put them inside the sections you want to have for your presentation, go through slide by slide and ask yourself – “Does this slide spark joy?” Does the slide let you present at your most authentic self? Does it spark the clarity you need to convey aspects of the problem and the solution? Don’t worry about your audience here – if the slide sparks joy in you, your joy will be contagious for your audience.

Here’s an important caveat; You will have slides that are problem-focused, and may not be joyful in the story that they tell, for example a slide that shows the current state or problem – but don’t worry, that’s fine. You may want to keep it and use it - just like in your wardrobe you may have a black suit you wear at funerals which you would want to keep, even though it doesn’t spark joy in a literal sense, but does spark joy because of the respect and humility which it transmits in the right context.

A 20-30 minute presentation should have 12-15 slides with opportunity for discussion. Try to get your presentation in that range. Each slide should have one major idea and up to three minor ideas that are related to the major idea. Use the power of three when you have multiple aspects to show.

And use the BEFORE / AFTER to visually show ROI, contrasting situations and impact.

If the slide itself doesn’t spark joy, but there is something about the content that does, takes some time to redesign the slide, simplifying what’s there to allow the joy to emerge.

Less is more.

I’d like to thank Marie Kondo for inspiring people to clarify aspects of their life – beyond their homes. And I’d also like to thanks a few amazing businesses for giving us the opportunity to help “tidy-up” their sales presentations so their value and power in transforming their customers comes through – DBLatimore, Moet, Scribe-X, TryWoof, Planorama,and Social High Rise.

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Greg Rosner is the Founder and CMO of www.pitchkitchen.com, a presentation development agency based in NYC that helps software and service business leaders fix their bad sales presentations and boring homepages – turning ineffective narcissistic pitches into engaging conversations that involve them deeply in their customer's transformation story.