The Three Best Rules for PowerPoint
Bob Wiesner
Principal in the Organizational Effectiveness Practice at changeforce | Helping professional services firms grow revenue and increase value | My book: "Winning is Better" is now available on Amazon
You've heard all about "Death by PowerPoint." It got 12 million hits when I Googled it in March. (And over 4 million on bing.) It's a big freakin' problem.
But you -- ah, you are going to go ahead and use PowerPoint in your next big pitch anyway, aren't you.
Well, if you gotta do it, you can avoid putting your audience to sleep - and killing your chances of a new business win - by following these three rules. And you might find them surprising.
RULE 1: Your audience should be looking at a PowerPoint slide for no more than 25% of the time you're talking. Present for one hour? Bring 15 minutes' worth of slides. That'll force you to visualize only the most critical information. And it'll keep the attention on you as the expert, the visionary, the one who's going to deliver the goods.
RULE 2: Transition into each slide before you show the slide. Use language like
"The next slide I'm going to show you will..."
"I'm now going to show you how we'll..."
"When you look at the next slide, please focus on..."
This will ensure you actually have a reason for showing the slide other than to serve as your script. (I like to call this abuse of PowerPoint, "Closed captioning for the hearing impaired.")
RULE 3: Finish the slide with an emotional, memorable statement. Or, at least a rational summary/conclusion. Something like
"So it's clear that we absolutely must target (this group) or we'll be looking at a big deficit in the coming year."
"You can't look at these numbers and not agree that we have a huge opportunity in front of us."
"Put it together and it means this: A plan without (____) is a lot of noise and no substance."
Again, the value of this is not just the persuasiveness of the point, but the discipline it forces on you to show a slide that ACTUALLY HAS A POINT!!!!
Can you have slides for fun, for transitions, to break up the monotony or to protect your weaker presenters? Yeah, I guess. But every slide you add that doesn't follow the rules is a slide that might weaken your presentation.
Management, Marketing, Merchandising and Sales of Leading Brands and Retail Enterprices
9 年Great help. May I add, the best line should be the headline, the rest can be read by the audience, and the speaker engage them with a great story that is relevant to the objective of the presentation.