Win at presenting, or, why we hate PowerPoint*

Recently at TimeZoneone, we’ve been working hard at being better presenters. And we’ve learned heaps. So if your job involves presenting read on.

Full disclosure; we aren’t the most amazing presenters. In fact, and I’m probably being far too frank with you here, there are times in the not too distant past, when we’ve done a terrible job presenting to potential clients. We were unprepared and underwhelming. Guess what? We didn’t get the work.

But failure is a lovely thing, because it eyeballs you grimly at 3am and snarls: “You just made a complete arse of yourself. Now either learn from your mistakes, or never ever put yourself in that situation again.”

We present all the time. We present work to our clients. We pitch to win new business. We speak at conferences. We do webinars. So getting good at public speaking is important to our business.

Focusing on how we present has made a huge difference to how we feel about presenting. We feel proud of what we have to say. Presenting is even starting to become fun.  Best of all, we’ve started winning more work. So read on, and hopefully you can glean some useful tips from our strenuous efforts.

Focusing on how we present has made a huge difference to how we feel about presenting. We feel proud of what we have to say. Presenting is even starting to become fun.  Best of all, we’ve started winning more work. So read on, and hopefully you can glean some useful tips from our strenuous efforts.

 Start with the why

You’ve probably heard this phrase before. You may have watched Simon Sinek’s famous TED talk.

When you plan your presentation, start with the why. Why are you in that room? Why have you been asked to present? Why do your audience want to hear what you have to say?

It sounds obvious, but it’s not always evident. We’ve all come out of talks shaking our heads, saying: “Well that’s half an hour of my life I’ll never get back”.  And that’s because the presenter didn’t pay their audience the basic courtesy of considering why they were there.

We were getting it wrong all the time. We’d go into new business pitches and we’d talk about ourselves. But that’s not why we were in the room.

When we meet new clients, we’re in the room to talk about how we can help them make their marketing better. They want to know why they should work with us, and not with the other agency who pitched to them that morning. They want to know what’s in it for them. So start with your why.

Elements of a good presentation

Every good presentation has at least three elements:

1. The leave behind document
2. The presentation
3. The presentation script

The leave behind document

This is the detailed document your audience takes away after the presentation. I like to write this first, because it is the most time consuming piece of the puzzle. However once you have written this, it becomes the keystone on which your presentation rests.

This document could be a detailed proposal, a white paper, educational exercises, or research. Whatever format it takes, it supports your presentation and demonstrates the level of thought and research that has gone into what you have to say.

Your leave behind document is not a print out of your PowerPoint deck.

This is because:

1. You’re not going to be using a PowerPoint deck.
2. If you’re packing this level of detail into your presentation your audience will be overwhelmed, and not with delight either.
3. There are few things more dispiriting than showing up at a presentation, picking up the print out of the PowerPoint slides on your chair and realising, with an awful sinking feeling, that you’re going to spend the next hour being droned at by someone reading through every single bullet point on sixty slides.

Your leave behind document carries on selling and educating for you, long after you have left the room. So make sure it does a good job at being your ambassador. You can do a presentation without a leave behind document. But I’m working on the basis that when you give presentations you have a goal in mind. You want people to do something when you have finished talking. So a leave behind document is an opportunity to further that goal.

And don’t give the leave behind document to your audience until after you have done speaking, because if you do, they will spend their time flipping through the pages, and they will not listen to what you have to say.

The presentation

Your presentation is the visuals you use to bring your story to life. Note that I wrote visuals. Not bullet points. Pictures are the thing here. If you can get away without using any words at all, do it.

One way to build your presentation is to strip your leave behind document back to the essential points you want to convey. Use those points to tell a story. Incorporate anecdotes to add colour and make your points. Then tell that story in pictures. You’re also allowed snippets of video. I’m feeling benevolent today.

Visual storytelling is far more powerful than words. You’ve heard the phrase show, not tell. This is because we react more emotionally to images. They have instant cut through.

Visual storytelling is far more powerful than words. You’ve heard the phrase show, not tell. This is because we react more emotionally to images. They have instant cut through. Research around decision making indicates that the parts of our brain that make decisions respond more strongly to images than to words1. You only have to look at content marketing stats to see that images get more interaction, more views, more likes, and more shares2. So practise telling stories using images. If you’re looking for visual storytelling inspiration, pecha kucha is the bomb. This format has nailed the art of the concise presentation.

Two types of images are particularly engaging.

1. Pictures that evoke the senses of touch, sound, taste, and smell work, because people experience the imagery on different levels. Images of physical exertion or extreme physical experience fascinate for the same reason.
2. Images that evoke universal human emotions and rites of passage intrigue us, because we identify with them. And we also respond powerfully to images that capture moments of intense and authentic human emotion.

Authenticity is key; brands that trialled stock imagery versus Instagram style real imagery found that the real imagery had 25% higher conversion rates3.  People have an inbuilt authenticity filter that can smell a stock shot a mile away.

What about the words? Well if, and only if, it adds to the experience for your audience, you may add some text to your visuals.  But keep it minimal, big impressive stats and powerful quotes, that sort of thing. And while you’re relearning the art of the presentation, experiment with removing words altogether from your visuals. It will make you work harder on what you say, and make you a better presenter.

The presentation script

A presentation is a performance. So just like a performance, you start with a script.

Unless you’re a living legend, your audience are probably not here for you. They’re here because they want to get something out of your presentation. So make sure you deliver.

When I write my script I like to write three things at the top of the page to keep me honest:

1. Why are my audience here?
2. What’s in this for them?
3. So what? Why should they care?

If you keep answering these questions as you write your script you won’t go far wrong. But remember, if your presentation deviates from the real reason you’re in that room, you risk losing your audience.

You’ll all have different ways you approach scripting your presentation. I’m a nervous public speaker, so I don’t like to leave anything to chance. I script every word and every dramatic pause. Some of my colleagues prefer bare bones bullets and fly by the seat of their well-cut pants.

So script your talk in whatever way works for you. And then practise, practise, and practise some more. Ideally you want to learn your talk by heart, so that you can dispense with your notes and concentrate on connecting with your audience.

The presentations we do are team efforts, where we pass the topic back and forth, and each of us talks about our area of expertise. So we rehearse together. We’ve only just started doing this, and of all the changes we have made to how we present, this is the evolution that has borne the sweetest fruit. So practise in the mirror. Practise walking to work. Practise with your team. You will feel silly. Do it anyway.

Setting the scene

If you have a chance to set the scene for your presentation then spend some time thinking about the ambience you want to create.

When we pitch for new business we’re often presenting in boardrooms. Now most corporate boardrooms are blander than a bland day in Blandsville. We’re a creative agency and we like to bring a bit of creative mojo with us to our presentations. So we dress the room. We bring in large scale graphics and branding, set the table with flowers and branded mugs, and create a sense of vibrancy and excitement. We aim to give a taster of how it will be when you work with us.

We also like to offer our guests food and drink and create an atmosphere of conviviality and plenty.  I don’t know about you, but I get grumpy when I arrive at a meeting and I’m not even offered a glass of water. It shows a lack of concern for me as a person. If you’re giving a presentation, you’re the host, so be a good host. As a bonus, focusing on making your guests comfortable takes your mind of any nerves you may have about the presentation.

Vibing the vibes

So you’ve set the scene. But have you set the vibe? At the risk of sounding like an old hippy, (which I totally am) the vibe is all. If you create a sense of excitement and anticipation, greet people warmly, and show them that you’re genuinely enthused about being with them, then you’ll make a good first impression. And we all know that first impressions are the thing. Just Google “creating a good first impression,” then settle in comfortably to read the 39,500,000 results.

As a team, we’ve found that the rehearsal time is where we build that positive energy that creates a great vibe. Before we started rehearsing, we were going into presentations underprepared, so we lacked crucial confidence. We were also going in as nervous individuals, rather than as an excited team.  Getting together and talking about the energy we want to create together has been a bit of a game changer for us.

Presenting well takes time. It’s a lot easier to throw a lack lustre PowerPoint together with a bunch of bullet points. But time spent becoming a better presenter really pays off, boosting both your power to influence, and your self-esteem. We’ve all suffered through dreadful presentations that left us bored and deflated. And we’ve all experienced the joy of a truly exceptional presentation, one that left us fizzing with excitement and new possibility. Which presenter do you want to be?

* We don’t really hate PowerPoint. We just hate the endless hours of boredom and poor presentations perpetrated in its name.

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1 Research on the role of emotion in decision making includes Damasio, 1994; Loewenstein and Lerner, 2003; Cohen, 2005; Shiv et al., 2005; Seymour and Dolan, 2008).

2 Marketer Jeff Bullas collates data showing that articles with images get 94% more total views.

3 Social media agency Laundry Service measured the performance of its campaigns using organic Instagram-style photos — defined as a non-glossy pictures shot outside of a studio — and found that they performed far better than their traditional stock counterparts. Using regular photos, the company saw a 2.35% click-through rate. With Instagram-style shots, that increased to as high as 8%. When tying ad performance to sales, Laundry Service saw conversion rates increase by 25%. The data was drawn from over 100 million impressions, spanning campaigns from more than 15 advertisers.