Show Them It's Familiar: "You Already Know How to Do This"
Once employees understand how presentation management makes their work-lives better, show them that it’s already familiar. If you want your child to eat more fish, you don’t serve her steamed sea bass with capers and onions in a spicy tomato sauce. You start with fish sticks, because fish sticks are pretty close to chicken fingers. And all kids like chicken fingers.
Draw similarities to what employees already know and do. For example, presenting in interactive mode, where they are pulling up slides on the fly, might seem intimidating. They lose the familiarity and structure of their linear PowerPoint. But they already tell stories through interactive presentation every day in their personal lives, especially if they’re Millennials. Here’s a familiar scenario that shows what we mean:
Standing at the bar, while waiting for their table John asks Suzanne, “How was your vacation?”
“Amazing!” Suzanne responds with delight. “We took the kids to Disney World. Funniest thing, my 4-year-old, Eric, has a huge crush on all of the Disney Princesses.” She takes out her phone and starts scrolling through pictures. “Look at him blushing with Cinderella. Too cute! He’s going to be mortified by this when he’s older. And then we left the kids at my folks and hit the beach for few days to reboot.” Suzanne shows a few more pictures of her and her husband enjoying a romantic dinner. “How about you?”
“I have a job interview in two days at Acme Company. It would be a promotion and raise. I’m so sick of my current job right now. I need to nail this.”
“My friend used to work at Acme. Who are you meeting with?”
“Mike Whatshisface, he’s the SVP of marketing,” John replies. Suzanne starts the recon. She sends an inquiring text to her friend and does a Google search to get some more info on Mike Whatshisface. They both look at Suzanne’s phone.
They pull up his LinkedIn profile and see that he started out in sales. Suzanne advises John, “The guy has a sales background. Better talk about your experience in terms of results. You know, focus more on the results you’ve achieved and less about the process and details.”
Then they go to Google images and find a picture of Mike Whatshisface and his wife at a charity event.
Meanwhile, Suzanne’s friend replies to her text with a bitmoji of her running in fear, “Mike Whatshisface is a total jerk. Tell John … Run awaaaay!”
They both break out in laughter and order another round of drinks.
That’s an interactive story, using a mobile phone to present “slides” as the conversation unfolds. The content on your phone is formatted to present. Your phone is essentially a slide deck with the presentation following the conversation. When discussing interactive presentations, draw comparisons to what’s already familiar.
Other aspects of presentation management should be familiar to most people, too. Your team already knows how to search and shop for stuff on Amazon, put pictures of items into a shopping cart and buy with one-click. Well, with a new presentation management initiative, employees are going to be able do the same thing, except with slides instead of items, which users will save into a new deck instead of to a shopping cart.