Presentations : The Best Wingman!

As I grabbed my fourth coffee for the day, frantically rushing to my cubicle, I had just fifteen minutes to make an impression. An impression that is hard to make. An impression that must be made. 

I was up for an important prospect meeting! 

(Not sure what you were expecting :P) 

I had the notes from my sales counterpart. I knew what the prospect wanted. But so did our other competitors! I’m no Doctor Strange to create magic out of thin air and impress my prospect! I had a standard tool which I was supposed to sell. 

As I sat down at my desk, with my artsy-post work-alter ego begging to let him out, I wondered : where do I stamp my face in this meeting? How can my 60 minutes with the prospect stand out? How can I become my company’s Doctor Strange? 

I can’t change the tool I’m selling. I can't hypnotise my prospect. I can’t use fancy vocabulary. The prospect already knows I do sales for my livelihood. They are just going to see right through my Shakespearean gimmick! 

I did something lame. Something boring. Something remotely interesting. Something that is considered geeky. Something that was once loved. Something that is now thrown in the trash, left to die all alone, begging for some attention. 

I opened up my long lost friend : a new presentation. 

Wait!! I don’t work for Google or Microsoft or Prezi! Don’t worry. This is not a sales pitch! 

I’m not talking about the chart loaded, number heavy, data heavy, boring presentations. 

The moment I open up a new presentation, all I see is a blank screenplay: I can write the most beautiful, adventurous script that the prospect has seen. I see it as a movie. This is why, I don’t understand when people say “I hate making presentations, man!”. 

How do you hate writing a movie? How do you hate giving life to your ideas?

Go crazy! Throw in images, videos! You know what your prospect wants. Package that with all guns blazing! Nobody cares who the director is. As long as the movie is kickass, you get your money back! (Side Note: The producers will come in line for you! ) 

To any rulebook bugs who try to establish a format for a presentation - Booooorrrrriiiinnnngg! - It’s like asking Nolan to direct the movie but giving him a script of Thomas the Steam Engine!  

You have an audience that’s willing to watch your movie for 60 minutes, a chance to write your screenplay. Why limit yourself? Why break your head on how to impress the prospect? 

The reason people seem to have lost interest in presentations is due to some suit-clad people who started loading numbers and too much data onto my poor friend’s back until people started calling him “Boring”. 

Even if you want to present numbers, nobody said it has to be in tables. It is your movie, you can even make it fall out of the sky. 

For those who think I’m talking about the effects and animation NO! I know you all are not kids who would be excited about that stuff. 

I’m talking about what the eye wants to see. Every human eye wants to see something. The colours, the design, the space, the flow, the packaging of the content. All of this matters, even if you have the greatest content in the world! 

Once you hit that note, you can breeze through your competition and get a personal touch with your prospect.

I’m not advocating making some eye-catching presentations with zero content and ending up like the Justice League movie (not the Snyder cut : P )

Get your content on point. But use my long lost friend to package it. 

Oh and also, if you are still interested in knowing what happened to my meeting, we got through!!! The Director of the company did make a special note about my friend as well : THE PRESENTATION WAS GREAT AND PERSONAL!

I looked at my friend as I finished my coffee. A small tear dropped down his face. Someone had used him after ages!

P.S: Give my friend his life back! Bring him back to the scene! Trust me! He is the best wingman!