We like the phrase, “Content is king!” Without quality content, any presentation management implementation is a bit of waste.
When we started working with clients back in the ’90s, every new job was a consulting project that including writing and designing presentations. Those presentation services were initially our primary source of income. We’ve worked with clients in every industry to help them write their stories and create libraries of slides that can be used and repurposed.
In this chapter, we will share what we’ve learned over the years about how to create exceptional presentations, including what we’ve learned from experts about how presentations effect the brains of those on the receiving end.
Presentations Are the Stories for Business
The best presenters are great storytellers. The CEO is often the best storyteller in the company. Motivating people to act is integral to her and the company’s success, and stories do that better than statistics.Salespeople tend to be good storytellers as well, since their success is directly related to their ability to connect with customers. But employees in every department and function need to be good presenters. A research scientist can present a bunch of numbers with charts and graphs, and bore everyone to tears. But a great research presentation will tell the story of what that research means on a human level, with relatable characters and real feelings. That’s more interesting and more memorable.
Imagine a Federal Express presentation to see what we mean. The FedEx company story is not just about the logistical genius of strategically placed shipping hubs combined with a fleet of trucks, cargo planes and ships, and a workforce of 250,000 delivery experts. Those are certainly elements that make the company successful. But the corporate story is about helping businesses succeed. Think of a hardworking executive under pressure to meet a deadline. The executive is tired, stressed and fearful of failure – of losing a client and losing her job because she might not deliver. All are strong emotions that we can relate to. Using FedEx, she can work until 9 p.m. and still get her product delivered to her client by 9 a.m. the next day. She gets more time to work, and her client is pleased to have the product on time. The sale gets closed. Everyone is happy. For this FedEx presentation, you could use images of stressed executives and combine them with facts about FedEx’s locations and guarantees of timeliness. But you will remember that the executive was able to turn a harrowing situation into a success story.
So let’s make the business world a better place, one presentation – one story – at a time. Here are some tips to help you craft better business stories, and then organize them in your presentation management solution so that your team can repurpose the slides and decks for their individual meetings.
Make It Relevant. Ask So What?
Every piece of content created should answer the question, “So what?”Whether you’re creating one slide, an entire presentation, a brochure, an email or even a tweet, it should tell the audience why that point is important — and, especially, why it’s important to the intended target. It will take you out of your own head and put you in your audience’s frame of mind. That mental exercise will push you to create more compelling content.
Here are a few messages that stand alone.
Our sales increased 15 percent.
Our widgets were rated No. 1 by this prestigious industry organization.
You are a jerk.
Now let’s take those three statements and add “So What?”
Our sales increased by 15 percent, which means you will get a bonus at Christmas.
Our widgets were No. 1, which means you will get the best product for the lowest price.
You are a jerk, which means no one wants work with you, and
your job is in jeopardy
We want to know, what’s in it for me? When you’re writing a presentation, you want to flat-out tell your audience why this is important, and why they should care. Don’t expect them to make that connection on their own. As a passive listener, that’s not their job.
Rather, it’s your job as an active communicator. So what? gives the audience relevance and motivation. Since the purpose of most business presentations is to get people to act, then better presentations provide really good reasons to do so. So what? gives them that reason.
Keep It Short. The 10-Minute Rule.
Our brains are lazy. According to molecular biologist John Medina in his 2008 book Brain Rules, the mind gets bored at 10 minutes. Next time you are in a not-too-exciting meeting — ergo, the typical corporate meeting with a PowerPoint presentation — check yourself when you check the time. It will be in 10 minutes.
A lot of our clients have very complicated products and services, and the story they need to tell cannot be told in a mere 10 minutes.Pharmaceutical companies have presentations that encompass everything about a drug: its molecular composition, uses, diseases it treats, clinical trials methodology and results, risks, legal disclosures and other information. Those presentations can grow to well over 100 slides. So what do you do?
To paraphrase Steve Jobs, do something big. His presentations were 30 minutes to an hour long. But every 10 minutes he’d break up the monotony by, say, introducing a new speaker, using a prop, or cutting to video. He broke up the monotony to keep listeners riveted.Break up your presentation into 10-minute chunks. After 10 minutes, make a change. Switch presenters, introduce a prop, ask the audience a question. Do something to break up the monotony. When you have a very long presentation, break it down into sections and make an obvious change to re-engage your audience.
Make It Memorable
Have you ever walked out of a presentation with a phrase or image emblazoned on your mind? Or more likely, you’ve walked out of a presentation and couldn’t recall a single thing. In one ear, out the other.Our presentations are competing with a million other things for our audience’s attention, from email to mass media to family issues.Everyone is multitasking and distracted. Therefore, as presenters we have to work harder to not only get our message across but to make it memorable. We asked Carmen Simon, author of, Impossible to Ignore, how to make memorable, impactful presentations.
Here’s her advice.
1. Know what you want your presentation to be remembered for.Determine what your audience should remember and why it is important.Determine what your audience should remember and why it is important.A lot of business communicators aspire to be memorable, but few knowwhat specific memories they want to set in other people’s brains.Audiences forget 90 percent of what you share after 48 hours. Pick theone thing that you really want your audience to remember, and reinforceit throughout your presentation.
2. Provide cognitive ease. Once it’s clear to you what message you want to stick with your audience, make sure that message comes to their minds easily. Often we get enamored with our own words and ideas, and we forget that just because these messages come to our minds easily, they might not have the same effect on others. Here’s an example. Carmen was sitting in a hotel lobby browsing through a magazine article about the new McLaren 570S Spider model. The main message focused on its “dihedral synchro-helix actuation,” which is the technical term for the way the doors swing, guiding air into the side intakes to feed the radiators. Would you remember this phrase after two days? Dihedral what? You might remember it if you were a car fanatic and might have existing mental models around this type of verbiage. For the averageperson, if we describe the doors as “up-and-out” doors or “butterfly doors,” it will be easier to remember the message. Once you clarify the message you want to make memorable, ensure that the language you use makes the message come to others’ brains easily. Cognitive ease is a
prerequisite to memorable stories. Make it simple.
3. Use sensory stimulation. In the paragraph above, was it easier for you to process the phrase “butterfly doors” more so than other phrases? Visuals are important to memory because we build our memories through our senses, and visual is a powerful sense. Have you ever looked at a picture of a chocolate lava cake oozing fudge, and thought, I can almost taste it. That’s because the visual image evokes your sense of smell, taste and chocolate satisfaction. It stimulates your senses. Appealing to other senses activates additional brain parts, which forms more memory traces. A presentation about arthritis could use a sensory description of arthritic pain like this: “knuckles cracking, throbbing and swollen so badly that she couldn’t even hold her fork at dinner.” Those words “throbbing” and “swollen” evoke pain, and using a fork at dinner
is something we do every day, without a second thought (until we can’t anymore).
The examples activate more brain areas (visual cortex, motor cortex,
amygdala, frontal cortex, hippocampus). When more brain parts become active, it increases the chance that the stimuli you mention will trigger memories later on. Just in these few paragraphs, words such as doors, butterfly, pain, hands, dinner fork … seeing any of these later may remind you of reading this. In short, try to evoke real human feelings.
How to Create a Story for Business – Formatted to Present
One of the elements of presentation management is that all content is visual, in slide format. Whether it’s an actual PowerPoint slide, a fourpage brochure, a white paper or a video, all the content is ready for presentation on a screen. When you write your next presentation, which is synonymous with telling your business story, think of story elements from a visual perspective. In presentation management, that’s your end game. That means you need to think about content in a different way – a visual way.
PowerPoint is an outline. Typically, you open up PowerPoint and start typing in slides – a headline and some bullet points. When you write a presentation today, you are really just filling in an outline. To create better business stories, get out of outline mode and get into story mode.Here is a five-step approach to help you create better presentations by penning stories that engage your audience and tap into their emotions.We are using PowerPoint as an example because that’s what most people use to create presentations. But you can apply these principles to any medium.
- Close PowerPoint. Don’t start creating a presentation by opening PowerPoint and filling in slides. Instead, figure out your story as if you were talking to someone about it over coffee. Once you’ve come up with a good story, track down someone — a colleague, a spouse or a friend — and practice telling them the story to see what they have to say. This forces you out of outline mode, and ensures that you’re able to whittle the story down to the essentials that can impact the audience.
- Imagine a three-act play. Every good story has a setup, climax and resolution — a beginning, middle and end.
- Setup: Establish the characters and the setting. In business, the characters are the products or services you are selling, or the objective of the task or project you are planning. The hero is the main driver of your presentation. The setting is your marketplace, situation or use case. It’s the environment or the world in which your hero operates. Describe the hero, his situation, and why the hero is important to your audience.
- Climax: A good setup will lead the audience right into the big problem or obstacle to overcome. For a business presentation, this would be the pain points, market analysis, product challenges or failures and successes.
- Resolution: This is the happy ending — a problem solved, a product sold, a project completed. The outcome should feel meaningful, for everyone in your audience. It should answer the question, “So what?”
3. Ask yourself how your story feels. Emotions drive behavior more than logic. (Our friends in the ad business live by this, but the rest of us in the corporate world tend to forget it.) As noted in the previous section, we get so mired in our own intellectual ideas that we forget about the sensory aspect. Attach the corresponding emotions to the So what? points in your deck. While you want your stories to connect to your audience’s emotions, you need to make sure that you’re tapping into those emotions in a proper way. If you tap into the right emotions, you’ll ultimately get them to “act” the way you want.
4. Visualize the emotions. What do these emotions “look” like? Once you have a handle on how your story feels, it’s time to visualize the content. Match the image to the emotion and use descriptions and/or images that trigger the senses and activate the brain. Just keep in mind that whatever visuals and emotions you choose, you are supporting your story and moving it forward.
5. Now, open PowerPoint and fill in your slides. You have the story, you have the motivating emotions, and you have the triggers to make it memorable. The hard work, the thinking part, is done. PowerPoint is merely a conduit to communicate that story. It does not drive your story. The story will drive the slides – words, images, charts and videos.
Every presentation is a story. Every slide is a scene.
We went through five steps to create a great presentation. But if you’ve been following the principles of presentation management, by now you understand that presentations are corporate assets with long-term value not just one-and-done.
So how do you take the principles of good storytelling, combined with visualization, emotion and sensory stimulation, and create presentations that any employee can take apart and repurpose for his or her own use? After all, in a large organization, a lot of different people are making presentations with different purposes. Every presentation could very well have a different beginning, middle and end. It’s not one-size-fits-all. We want to empower everyone to be able to create great stories with the library of slides provided.
Make sure every slide is a scene in the bigger story. Each slide should be able to stand on its own. Think of a slide as its own subplot within the story. That way, when your team starts mixing the slides in ways that you never dreamed of, they will still create a professional, branded presentation that’s on message.
Content Organization
The next step is to organize slides into a library that tells an even bigger story: the story of your enterprise. Apply the same methodology of “every slide is a scene; every presentation is a story” to your enterprise.
If you work for a large enterprise, there are probably many departments divided by discipline, product or geography. Each department has a story. Here’s how we built a presentation management solution for cable TV company Scripps Networks, which had a mission to improve their viewers’ lifestyle and community. Its portfolio of networks included brands like Food Network, HGTV, DIY Network, Cooking Channel,Travel Channel and Great American Country. Each network answered a So what? that mattered to viewers. Furthermore, each program, each slide, had a more specific So what? that mattered to a particular demographic. For example, Rachel Ray showed people how to cook a great meal in 30 minutes, so we can eat well even when we don’t think we have the time. That was important to time-strapped parents who worked outside the home. We organized content into chapters for each network and slides for each program. Each network told its overarching story: why it exists, what it means to the viewers and the value for advertisers and cable operators.
Then each program did the same, but on a smaller scale. The stories included factual information about the programs and their ratings, and also a human element about viewers and how that program changed people’s lives. Each slide or set of slides told its own story. We didn’t just create a chart comparing audience delivery of women 25 to 54 years old — we stated why women 25 to 54 are such a lucrative target for advertisers, and included pictures and videos to bring that audience to life. The slides showed real people with real emotions who were affected by those programs. Even though it might be safe to assume that the advertisers in the room knew their target, Scripps went the extra mile and reminded them why their target is important. Finally, to keep the audience engaged, Scripps introduced different presenters to present the different networks, each with his or her own personality and character.
And, the presenters broke up the slides with videos. The changes added energy to the Upfront roadshow presentations room and kept the meetings flowing. In doing so, Scripps demonstrated that it intrinsically understood the marketplace and how it affected its advertisers’ business.
This approach “allowed all of our salespeople to speak intelligently, whether talking about the details of one program or the value of working with Scripps in general,” said Jon Steinlauf, who was at that time, in 2005, Senior Vice President of ad sales for Scripps Networks. (He is now Chief Advertising Officer at Discovery Communications.) “Presentation management gave them the ability to cross-sell the networks, which translated into higher revenues.”
In the Scripps library, each piece of content met the criteria for a good presentation management strategy. It was formatted to present; it told a relevant, memorable story; and it was branded and compliant. The 150 Scripps ad sales reps had a range of stories that they could repurpose and customize for their individual meetings. Because they were telling better stories, they became better presenters, and ultimately better brand stewards for Scripps.
Chapter 6 – Takeaways
- Presentations are stories for business and every slide is a scene.
- An effective presentation is memorable, relevant and short.
- Memorable presentations appeal to multiple senses –physical and emotional.
- Presentations, like good stories, should include a set-up, climax and resolution.
- Get out of outline mode and into story mode. Develop your story, your presentation, in your head before you open PowerPoint or another program. Tell it to someone, imagine how it looks, and then you can start typing.
