It'll Be Alright on the Night

Listen to any seminar on presenting and they'll all ram home the importance of rehearsal. They're clearly correct, and so we all devote several hours to getting every gesture, every pause prezactly right.

Don't we?

Oh, OK, I'll agree that there are just a few people who never seem to have the time to do more than run through the slides half an hour before.  Good job you and I aren't among 'em, eh?

So this morning's post is for that vanishingly small minority who wing it every time.

Bullet point screens often give me trouble.  Sorry, I mean I know someone who often has trouble with bullet screens. It's that moment when you can't remember whether there are any more points to reveal on this screen.  It looks about full, so you do a big wrap-up, ready for your next topic. Then you click the mouse and another bullet point sneaks in, leaving you mumbling "Oh yeah, and that as well."

The alternative's no better. You convince yourself there's another bullet point to come and click the mouse. The screen clears and your next big topic pops up. "Ah," you stammer, "I didn't mean to go onto this yet, let me just go back for a moment to the last screen." 

So slick; so polished; so don't.

This person I know- the one who doesn't rehearse properly - gets round this problem by making a small, barely noticeable marker appear after his last bullet point.  It'll be a tiny change to the screen that the audience is very unlikely to spot, but that tells him the screen will change next time he clicks the mouse.

We build markers like this into our Configurative presentations, and it's easy to add them to your own PowerPoint; just add a small block or other shape after the last bullet point on each slide.  In fact you can even set this as part of your template by building it into your master slide.  Daniel's just recording a video to show you how.

Fortunately I never need it because, just like you, I rehearse my presentations to perfection.

And that ranks alongside "There's a cheque in the post", "Of course I love you" and... the other one, among the greatest lies of all time.

Presenting the Numbers

I'm wearing my serious trousers today, so let's get straight into talking about stuff.

There's a distinct type of presentation that causes alarm, despondency, terror, global warming and scrofula wherever it's encountered.

It's the one that includes numbers.

Numbers are scary. You have to walk into the firing line and hold your hands up. You have to say something concrete and measurable. One slip and you'll go down like Willem Dafoe; and thanks to multimedia technology, you can even pipe in Barber's Adagio.

It's OK though. If you use the usual approach and paste in an Excel spreadsheet, no one will be able to read or understand any of it anyway.

This is a shame.  We recently put together a numbers presentation for one of our long-standing clients. They wanted to show one of their major clients just how much money they could make for them. It was a big story, with more than twenty separate propositions, each with its own financial model. If the customer went for half of the suggestions, this would be a massive win for everyone in the room.

We could have pasted in twenty-odd spreadsheets.  All the numbers would be there, and if the audience wanted to challenge any of them, they could even be changed on the fly.

But that's not a presentation, it's a maths lesson.

So here's how we approach numbers presentations.  You start by splitting the models onto separate screens; typically this means you'll end up with a page for assumptions, one each for the current and proposed situations, and a final summary. 

A typical - though in this case deliberately anonymous - numbers presentation

All of the background workings are kept out of the picture, so it's easy to see and understand, and your big proposition isn't lost in a mass of identical figures.

Audiences tend to challenge figures.  If you've put your case together properly there's no need to fear this. In fact it's worth encouraging them to explore the what-ifs; they'll become more involved and enthusiastic.  In the case of our client's big numbers pitch, their customer green-lighted every one of the propositions.

Daniel shows us how to leave behind an edited copy of the presentation

If all's gone well, you should have succeeded in turning the presentation into a planning session. Instead of telling your audience what you want them to do, all of you're all already talking about how it'll happen.  That's serious progress. 

Now's when they'll ask you for a copy of the presentation, so make sure you're able to load up a memory stick with numbers that reflect what you achieved together.

Shameless plug warning: With a Configurative presentation, this is easy...

If I left now, this presentation would carry on by itself, wouldn't it?

Thankfully, I was born too late to get called up for National Service. That's probably why I spent so many of my formative years listening to the Incredible String Band while wearing loon pants and the outside of a yak. As a result I was spared the joys of a uniform that fitted (and itched) where it touched, and was almost capable of ambulation without its conscripted occupant.

Today the one-size-doesn't-really-fit-anyone approach is found only in Italian driving seats, baths and - yes, you knew I'd say it - presentations. The first two can be ignored because Armitage Shanks has a long tradition of employing alien life forms in its design department, and Italians can justify Fiat by pointing at a Ferrari.

But presentations? No-oo I think not.

Most of your marketing materials have to be fairly generic; you can't afford to change them for every possible customer. But the people in your audience are as individual as the architecture in Orangi Township. A presentation is a rare opportunity to craft your message to fit perfectly.

I regularly hear people refer to their slide "decks". "We'll use our leisure industry deck for this presentation", they announce glibly, and the customisation is complete. But the Financial Director in their audience has more in common with the FD of a double glazing company than with his own IT Manager; where did we get this idea of industry sector being the lodestone of our pitch?

Everyone in the room with you has opinions, biases and agendas. They're the things you have to deal with if you want a successful outcome. So a beautifully logical explanation of the lifetime cost of your proposition won't float the boat of someone who's thinking about this quarter's VAT bill.

Most of the time, your biggest competition comes from inaction, not from your biggest competitor; it's usually easier to do nothing than to take on a huge upheaval to achieve the end you're proposing. To get the decision you want you have to make everyone in your audience want what you're offering enough to put up with the inconvenience of making a decision.  That means it needs to be as personal as a LadyShave.

But most presentations are less bespoke than the grey overalls in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.  They deal with a few features and benefits, sure, but mostly they're concerned with telling you about the people behind the pitch.

Which means you might as well have sent a fax.

Look, you're going to spend a couple of hours in front of an important customer.  That's costing you a lot of money. And someone's putting aside a similar amount of time to listen to you, and that's costing them too. 

So talk directly to the people who'll be there, not just their market sector. Think of what you have to offer them, personally, to make their lives a bit - or a lot - better. Make it fit.

If you don't, all they'll feel is a slight itch where you touched the spot.

I've got something you're interested in. But first...

So there you are, leaning on the rail of the cruise liner, musing on the infinite, when somebody floats by below you. That must be what caused the splashing noise.  Fortunately you have Unmatched Experience in the Provision of Lifesaving Hardware to Drowning Voyagers.  That and a lifebelt.

So you explain this to the flagging passenger as he goes under again. Obviously, your experience is important to him; how else can he judge your ability to save him? So as his head briefly surfaces, you tell him that you've rescued more than twenty people in the last ten years, and that... oh hang on, he's sunk again.

Then a flailing hand breaks the surface and grabs the inflated hot water bottle that the guy next to you just threw in. The guy with half your experience and a solution he made up on the spot - and yours had a British Standard Kitemark and everything.

I think I've probably made my point.

Presentations nearly always start with a grinding exposition of your company's credentials, experience and approvals. And pretty much ignore what use all of that is to your customer.

Please, just get to the point. They'll want to know who they're dealing with after they've decided they want to deal with you. Give 'em what they want first and everyone will have a nice easy voyage.

OK, so nobody's going to drown while you meander to the point of your presentation, but your audience's interest will have gone down for the third time, and you'll have got all wet for no good reason.

Copy and Paste - Your Embarrassing Assistants

If there's one thing we British dread above everything else it's embarrassment. We can stand losing at sports we invented; it's the humiliation we struggle with. We don't really mind that Robert Green couldn't win a game of catch, but we'll never forgive him for letting those upstart transatlantic revolutionaries believe they're our equals. We'll eat sautéed cockroach in a restaurant, and assure the disinterested waitress that "everything's lovely, thank you".

Because otherwise people might Look.

Which is why presentations baffle me. How do you feel when you know your audience is so bored that they're considering eating their toenails? Can you really be entertaining, witty, urbane and persuasive when you feel like Howard Hughes doing a last-minute replacement speaker spot at Nuremberg?

Two words that changed their meaning somewhere in the early nineties have a whole lot to answer for: their names are Copy and Paste.

Try this for starters: how many people does it take to produce a new brochure? I’ve seen brochures that have involved input from more people than the client actually has on the payroll. Aside from the armies of designers, consultants and copywriters, we also show draft copies to the sales department, marketing, accounts, the cleaning staff, the bloke at the golf club who knows a bit about marketing, and next door’s budgie. Meanwhile the corporate identity police have the Agency’s visual strapped in a chair in a basement while they positively vet the Pantone references and… ha! I thought so! The white space around the logo isn’t exactly one third of the height of the third “J”!

The new Website tends to develop a similarly inflated supporting cast. Steven Spielberg made Saving Private Ryan with fewer people and in considerably shorter time. In fact you can replay the scenario for pretty much all of your marketing exercises. God can make a universe in six days. Humans can make more humans in nine months. The impossible we can do at once. Marketing takes a little longer.

Unless we're going to turn up in person.

All your marketing time and expense led up to this. Someone actually wants to listen to you. So the day before the presentation you start thinking about what you're going to say. But you're a bit busy, so you'll get your friends Copy and Paste to help. OK, so this means that your new customer's going to listen to a bunch of stuff that only marginally applies to them, and get to hear you saying "actually, that last point there isn't strictly true anymore", but they'll also catch the odd glimpse of their main competitor's logo, so that's alright isn't it?

No it bloody isn't. If you're British, this sort of embarrassment is as painful as watching Jedward perform The Comedy of Errors. With John Prescott as Emelia.

This blog will be all about taking the pain and embarrassment out of presentations. They're arguably your most important communication. You're there in person, and you're going to get listened to. So don't waste the opportunity by recycling something you spent five minutes putting together a couple of months ago. Create something new, relevant and persuasive.

And if that feels too comfy when you present it, you can always moon the audience at the end.

You embarrassment junkie you.