Our friend Scott had an opportunity to present to his company’s biggest supplier, but he only had twenty-four hours to put his slide deck together. It was an incredibly important meeting that would determine the company’s future relationship with the supplier, so he knew he had to do a good job. But with so little time to prepare, he didn’t know where to begin.
As he sat in his offi ce, feeling the anxiety starting to build, he remembered a presentation the previous summer that his coworker Sally had given on the same topic. It had gone so well that the audience applauded. Some of those slides were relevant to his supplier meeting, so he called Sally.
“Hey there, Sal, can you send me the slides from your presentation last summer?” he asked. “You know, the one where the client applauded afterward.”
26 “I’ll have to hunt them down,” Sally replied. “I think they’re on a flash drive somewhere, but I’m not sure.”
“Okay, thanks,” he said. “If you could get them to me sometime this evening, that would be great.”
“I’m not sure if I can, but I’ll do my best. I haven’t touched those slides in months. They could be anywhere.”
“Just do your best,” Scott said, but inwardly, he was thinking, Please, hurry up and find them, Sally. I really need those slides!
After that, Scott spent a long time hunting through his own computer folders, looking for some other content that he needed. There was a specific case study he wanted to use, but he couldn’t find it anywhere. Finally, he summoned his assistant, Bob, to see if he could help.
27 “We published a case study for a client in Ontario,” Scott said. “I really need it for my presentation tomorrow, but I seem to have misplaced it. Do you happen to know what we did with it?”
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Bob replied, as he scurried off to his desk.
He returned a while later and shrugged apologetically.“Sorry, Scott, but it turns out that case study was pulled for legal review last month due to a lawsuit related to some claims we made in it. I requested a copy from legal, and they sent an automatic reply that said we would get a response in forty-eight hours.”
“I don’t have forty-eight hours,” Scott replied. “The presentation is tomorrow!”
By now, he was starting to get frantic.
“I’m going to get a copy of that darn case study,” he muttered, “even if I have to go over there and talk to legal in person.”
Desperate, he rushed out of the office and headed across town to the building where the legal department was located. This was a career-making (or breaking) presentation; he couldn’t afford to give a second-rate show. He wasn’t going to let a little legal complexity get in the way!
When he finally spoke to someone in the legal department, the sheer panic in his voice seemed to help, and they released the case study that he needed. Still, there was a lot more content that he needed, and he’d already spent a couple of hours trying to pull things together.
As he drove back to his own office, he remembered a commercial that the company had run about four years earlier that really hit on the right point, so he called the video production team and begged them to track it down.They finally agreed.
In the end, after bringing together all of the disparate pieces of content, including photos, videos, slides, and charts, and finally creating the slide deck for his presentation, he looked up and realized he was the only person left in the office building. Glancing at the clock, he discovered that he’d been working on the presentation for more than five hours. Now, he just had to practice his speech a few times.He might even be able to squeeze in a couple hours of sleep, though he was so anxious, he thought a few cups of coffee would have to do.
And how did the presentation to the supplier turn out in the end? According to our friend, “It was okay, I guess.”
That’s a lot of fear, frustration, and frantic work just to achieve an “okay, I guess” for your most important supplier, but that’s how it goes all too often in the world of presentations.
Organizing The Mess
To be completely honest, this is a somewhat fictionalized account of a real story that happened to a friend of ours, but we’ve all had experiences like Scott’s, hunting around the network looking for content we need for a presentation. You open a folder, find a file that looks like the right one, realize it’s not exactly what you wanted. Then you open another folder, find the file, but the numbers are out of date.
Then you’re looking for that one specific chart. You know you’ve seen it before. You remember using it last year, but you’ve forgotten where you saved it. Eventually, you track it down to a folder on a different computer in the same network, but someone has messed with it, changing some of the information. Now, you have to change it back to make it work in your presentation.
Oh, and then there’s that one video you need to use, but you can’t find it anywhere. Did it get deleted? You look all over the place for it, but it’s nowhere to be found. Finally, you call the ad department, and they direct you to a subfolder.There’s the video you wanted. It turns out, the name of the file got changed. Also, when you open the video, you realize it’s too long for your presentation. You’ll have to edit it down.
As you bring all of your content together—logos, backgrounds, infographics, white papers, and more—you realize they’re all out of whack. The backgrounds don’t match, and some of the logos are out of date. You have to update some of the customer profile information. Now, you’ve got thirty different files open on your computer at the same time, and you’re trying to format all of the slides, which takes forever.
“Maybe I should go and talk to the guy down the hall who’s really good at making PowerPoint slides,” you think. “He could probably help with all of the formatting. I’m not a graphic designer, after all. Hopefully, he’s not busy right now.”
By the time you’re done, you’ve wasted far more time than you thought you would.
You can easily spend hours and hours just to prepare for a fairly short presentation, and even then, a single unanticipated response from the audience might derail the whole thing.
It’s exhausting just thinking about it.
Our friend Scott eventually embraced Structured Storytelling, and it radically changed everything about his presentations for the better. Now, instead of spending more than five of his own hours, plus Bob’s, Sally’s, and legal’s time, trying to hunt down content, put together a slide deck, and practice his speech, he says he spends about fifteen minutes!
All of the content he could possibly need is there in his library, readily accessible, easy to find, already on message and formatted to present. No more reinventing the wheel every time he has to present, no more chasing down content, driving across town, or begging people to help him, which means the anxiety and frustration have been almost entirely eliminated.
In our experience, five hours to prepare a slide deck is pretty typical, so think about all of the time that Scott has reclaimed. Let’s assume he had a forty-hour workweek, and he did just one presentation a week. With Structured Storytelling, he reclaimed about 12 percent of his week, time he can now spend on more productive things.
You can get back so much lost time, money, and productivity just by giving your big mess of content an organized structure. If all of those slides were organized and readily accessible, then anyone could find what they wanted when they wanted it. Content could be reused instantly. You would no longer have dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of people in your company putting together slide presentations on their own, telling their own versions of your corporate story.
Not only is this revolutionary for branding, but it’s great from a legal and liability perspective. No one is going to be selling the wrong information to customers and putting you on the hook for things you can’t deliver. No one will accidentally use a slide with the wrong price or a missing legal requirement.
In Part Two of this book, we’re going to walk you through a process for creating this level of organization, but for now, consider the difference it’s going to make throughout your organization. A tangled mess of slides reflects poorly on any company. It conveys the sense that your company isn’t managed well and can’t deliver efficiently, and that has a far-reaching impact on customer satisfaction.
If someone walked into your office and saw trash piled in the corners and messy stacks of paper covering every surface, they wouldn’t be excited about working with you. Yet that’s exactly what presentation content is like in so many companies—a big mess—and it shows in the inconsistency and lack of quality in the presentations people are giving.Every salesperson presents the same content differently, tells different stories, and some use old logos and outdated branded content. Presenters struggle to respond to clients.
“I’ll get back to you on that” is a constant refrain. All of this reflects poorly on your company as a whole.
It’s time for a change. It’s time to start cleaning up that mess and creating your own structured slide library. It’s time to turn five hours of prep time for a presentation into fifteen minutes, so your people can focus on more productive tasks, like building client relationships.
