October 2013Corby Guenther

corby@bulletproofcommunications.net

415.559.6185

BulletProof PresentationTraining

Why live presentations are a powerful tool

We’re constantly bombarded with information. We get so much email that people ignore the vast majority of it.

It’s hard to get anyone’s attention while they’re dealing with all that noise and “information.”

We’re often working with people in distant locations and time zones who have other priorities and expectations.

When you do take the time to read anything, it’s often badly written, hasn’t had much thought put into it, and hard to understand.

It’s difficult to do business or to collaborate in a written format. It’s next to impossible to make a human connection.

The Power of Small Talk

There are many reasons to walk down the hall or pick up the phone to have a conversation instead of sending an email. But one of the best is for the opportunity to make chit-chat. A few minutes spent talking about kids, dogs, or the weather can work wonders for a relationship and for your power to persuade.

We’re overwhelmed We work with people all over the world

It’s hard to get anyone’s attention

Most written communication isn’t

handled well

Writing isn’t a great format for negotiating, persuading,

or building relationships

We’ve lost many opportunities for real

conversation

Technology has eliminated many opportunities for direct interaction. Live presentations help by getting us together in one place.

What’s in it for you?

Live presentations are your best shot at being persuasive.

Presenting allows you to show yourself at your best.

Planning your presentations gives you the chance to frame the argument.

Presenting well inspires confidence and leaves a lasting impression.

Your wardrobe and the way you present yourself can redefine how people think of you.

Strong presentations help you earn an audience’s attention the next time you need it.

Be the star of your own show

Presenting can be your chance to shine. Think of it that way and it can be really exciting. Make it your “thing” and you can be a star.

Be persuasive Control your messageMake a good impression

Show your value Manage your image Get them to come back next time

We’re all presenters

The kind of event carefully crafted to distribute an official message or position.

The big ballroom presentations that provoke fear in speakers and audiences.

The presentations that many of us sit in every day without realizing how important they can be.

Presentations don’t always involve groups. Some of the most important are one-on-one.

An opportunity to make a quick pitch, much like the Jeopardy exercise.

A critical non-work event. Just remember to make the bride happy and you can’t go wrong.

Informal presentations can be as important as the formal ones

You need to be prepared if you run into your CEO in the lobby and she asks you what you’re working on or if you’re looking for a job and someone at a cocktail party asks what you do. You never know what might lead to finding a new job--or having to look for one.

Company-wide meetings Project status meetingsKeynote speeches

Interviews Elevator Speeches Wedding Toasts

Simple storytelling techniques

Keep it relevant

Just as you should never tell a joke at the beginning of a presentation solely for the sake of telling a joke, you need to make sure that your stories are directly relevant to the objectives for your presentation. If your audience can’t figure out why you’re telling a story they’re likely to think you’re showboating and wasting time.

Probably the first kind of story that comes to mind in presentations. What’s the backstory? How did we get here? What’s next?

Chronological

Stories don’t need to be complicated. They can be as simple as a pair of before and after pictures.

Before and After

Starting with a quotation that illustrates your topic is a classic presentation strategy and gives you “evidence” for what you want to say.

Quotations

Using an extended metaphor to tell a story gives your audience a familiar structure to follow.

Metaphor

Another variation on Chronological or Before and After stories. You can use Cause and Effect to focus on how a specific situation occurred.

Cause and Effect

Making your topic personal and showing the audience how you relate to it is a big step toward getting them to share your ideas.

Personal Anecdote

Presentations aren’t about slides, they’re about persuasion

Remember that presentations are not just the delivery of information. If they aren’t designed to persuade an audience they really have no reason to exist. What you have instead is just facts, chit-chat and lost time which people could have put to better use.

If you’ve ever sat through a presentation and felt it was a total waste of your time or couldn’t even figure out what it was about, it’s probably because the persuasive

element wasn’t well defined or didn’t exist in the first place.

It’s up to you to make your presentations effective. The first step is to make sure you understand why you’re doing a presentation to begin with, what you hope to accomplish. Of course you can’t accomplish anything productive if you don’t have a goal.

The single most important thing you need to do when creating any presentation is to define your objective and keep refining it throughout the process of writing your talk so

your goals are clear and relevant to your audience.

Presentations must be persuasive

If you don’t have a good reason for a meeting, save everyone’s time and cancel

What all presentations have in common

The reason your presentation exists in the first place. What do you want to accomplish?

Message

You

Audience

Who are they, why are they there and what do you want them to do, think or feel?

Why are you giving this presentation and not someone else? How can you be persuasive?

Questions to ask about your message

A presentation without an objective is a presentation that shouldn’t be given.

Stay focused on your goals and the strategies you’ll use to achieve them.

Storytelling can be the most effective way to bond with and persuade an audience.

Show them that you know your stuff, but don’t overwhelm your audience with information.

Plan your presentation around possible reactions, especially emotional ones.

All formats aren’t suitable for every presentation. Plan what you use strategically.

What’s your objective? What story can you tell?What do you need to do to accomplish it?

What evidence do you have?

How is your audience likely to react?

What format makes sense for your presentation?

Questions to ask about your audience

Who are they? How do they feel about you?

What do they know about your topic?

What will they be interested in?

What’s the right tone for this group?

What do they have in common/what are their

differences?

Questions to ask about yourself

Are you the right presenter?

Do you have enough time to prepare?

Do you have enough authority?

Can you be an enthusiastic advocate?

Will your style be a good fit for the audience?

Can you still say “no” to this assignment?

“You” things to remember

Don’t try to be someone you’re not. Chances are the role won’t fit you.

Make an effort to be your best at every presentation. Try to be alert, enthusiastic, present.

Show your audience that you really believe what you’re saying. Be confident rather than tentative.

Tell your audience something about yourself and they’re more likely to feel positive about you.

Don’t get thrown off by small details. Change your plans when you need to.

Surprising your audience is one of the best ways to get them to remember and act on your presentation.

Just keep moving

Even experienced presenters can get thrown off track when little things go awry. But don’t make a big deal if your slides don’t work quite right or you forget a minor idea. Chances are that your audience won’t even notice if you don’t point it out.

Be yourself Make a strong argumentBe your best self

Tell a personal story Be flexible Do something unexpected

“You” things to remember

It’s your responsibility to create a relationship with your audience and involve them in your presentation.

If you want your audience to be excited about your topic you have to show them that you are.

Sales is all about presenting and persuading, so there’s a lot we can all learn from sales techniques.

Audiences listen and are persuaded better if you speak conversationally.

Try to make your voice and the words you use sound as normal as possible, not inflated or awkward.

Don’t do anything that will make the audience turn on you. Once they do you have no chance to persuade.

Look the part

How you dress for a presentation is important, but don’t always wear your best suit. Think of your outfit as a costume. Your wardrobe needs to be appropriate for your topic, your audience, and your environment. What works for a talk at a beach resort is very different from a court appearance or a job interview.

Be engaging Learn from SalesBe enthusiastic

Be conversational Use your own voice Don’t make them resent you

Handouts--how will you use them?

Removing information from slides and putting it in handouts helps solve the “slideument” problem.

Rather than just printing slides, design custom handouts to serve as the record of your talk.

Clean up your slides by putting branding in handouts, where your audience will have this information later.

Don’t distract from your own talk by distributing handouts at the wrong time.

Don’t waste time and effort on handouts if the audience or occasion doesn’t require them.

Resist the urge to distribute handouts instead of having a talk. Your role is too important.

What purpose do your handouts serve?

Like every part of your presentation, it’s important to keep in mind what you want handouts to accomplish. Are they simply exhibits? Are they meant so your audience has a place to keep notes? Are they your marketing materials? Make sure they suit your needs and those of your audience.

Move supporting information

from slides to handouts

Put your logos and branding on handouts

instead of slides

Use handouts as your “permanent record”

Plan the best time to distribute handouts

Consider whether the audience expects and

needs handouts

Don’t let handouts take your place

Step away from the keyboard!

The moment you learn about a presentation you’re going to deliver is not the time to fire up PowerPoint and start typing bullet points. At this early phase in the process of developing your talk you’re probably not even sure what your presentation is actually about, and you really shouldn’t even be committed to the idea of using slides.

Besides, PowerPoint is a lousy place to work on developing your ideas. The fact that it’s so linear (slide one, slide two, slide three) makes it a difficult tool for brainstorming, exploring ideas, moving them around and editing them. In our experience people get so attached to their initial attempts at slides that they don’t make a lot of the changes that would improve

their work. Something about PowerPoint just looks “final” to many people.

The other element where drafting a talk in PowerPoint generally fails is in accounting for the “performance” part of a presentation. It doesn’t give presenters a good format for planning what they’ll be doing during the talk: the jokes they’ll tell; how they’ll work with the audience; what they’ll be doing as they stand in front of the room. PowerPoint encourages presenters to focus narrowly on their slides, and presentations suffer from the lack on an overall plan.

Instead, start thinking of writing a presentations as a process where you should only start creating your visual aids (whether they’re slides or something else) late in the game.

Think of creating your presentation as a writing process

How fear affects presentations

Rather than face our fear, most of us put off our presentations, which just makes it worse.

Because we procrastinate we don’t give ourselves enough time to create an effective presentation.

We try to divert the audience’s attention from us to our slides.

Our fear of the audience causes us to avoid dealing with them or even making eye contact.

Nerves make us look and sound awkward, which can ruin our credibility with an audience.

Avoiding interaction with the audience wastes the opportunities to persuade presented by a live talk.

We forget to focus on our objective

When fear takes over our brains go into survival mode and we forget that we have any goals beside surviving until the end of the hour. When you’re nervous about a talk it’s especially important that you keep reminding yourself of your objective.

We procrastinate We hide behind the screenWe’re not prepared

We pretend the audience doesn’t exist

We sweat, stammer and fidget

We don’t take advantage of the live format

Streamlining your presentations

Don’t feel like you have to show the audience everything you know. Give them just what they need to see.

Force yourself to edit by self-imposing a limited number of words or slides for your presentation.

Keep in mind what you want to accomplish and remove anything that doesn’t help accomplish it.

Follow a model for creating slides like the 10/20/30 rule or our “Six Slide Solution.”

Audiences don’t want to read blocks of text. Give them headlines and they’ll be grateful.

Know what each slide is meant to accomplish and remove anything that isn’t relevant.

Identify the purpose of each slide

Write headlines and conclusions rather than paragraphs

Use a model for creating slides

Simplify Focus on your objective

Impose limits on yourself

Develop your message before creating visual aidsThe easiest way to fall into the trap of creating slides full bullet points and too much text is to start working on your presentation in PowerPoint. Figure out your message first and know what you want to say before you even start creating slides. Your visual aids should just be there to support your message, they shouldn’t be your entire argument.

Don’t fill slides with textOf all the most common problems we see with presentations, this may be the easiest one to solve. Just don’t do it.

We’ve worked with many presenters who treat presentation slides like Word documents, copying and pasting whole paragraphs out of Word and thinking that they’ll work just fine as slides. Don’t do this--trust us!

Just remember that your slides are there to back up what you have to say; they aren’t supposed to act as your script. Far too many presenters wind up relying on these kinds of slides and reading them to their audience rather than actually delivering their talk in an engaging way. This just sucks all the life out of any presentation--you might as well hand everyone a document and have them read along with you.

The other major danger with “slideuments” is that your audience will try to read them for themselves and one of two things will happen. They’ll get frustrated that the text is too small for them to read, or they’ll read your words faster than you can say them and grow bored waiting for you to catch up. Neither result is good.

Stick to headlines or bullets (let’s say no more than five per slide) and fill in the rest of what you want your audience to know as you’re speaking. If we were going to include this idea in a presentation (and you know we will), the slide would just say “Don’t fill slides with text.” That’s it!

Use original images

Coming up with original, meaningful images for your presentations can be a challenge. But try to produce your own images whenever possible.

Audiences are much more likely to be impressed with and remember visuals that they know you’ve created, and using your own images gives you a chance to share a story and an emotional connection with them. On the flip side, nothing looks lazier or less imaginative than using the same old clipart that you see in presentation after presentation.

Whatever you do, don’t use the cartoons that come with your Microsoft products. Everyone has seen those over and over (and over) again. If you’re not up to creating your own, there are free photos and graphics available from Microsoft and Flickr, or places like iStockphoto where you can buy images for a couple of dollars. Just don’t steal them, and certainly don’t use pictures that still have a watermark saying “Not Licensed for Use.”

Anchor ideas with imagesAlways remember that your visual aids are only there to support what you have to say.

Clip art that is just there to decorate your slides isn’t useful-- it’s actually distracting. Too often people stick an image on their slide just because there’s a placeholder for one in the template they’re using. The great power of using images is that, when carefully chosen, they’re much more memorable than words are on their own. You don’t want to waste this opportunity, so make sure that you use images that reinforce what you have to say.

Marketers have been taking advantage of this memory trick for years in order to get us to remember company and brand names--think of all of those cheap wines you see on the store shelves that are named with some combo of a color and an animal. You should take advantage of this trick, too.

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Tips for creating slides

Reading your slides will bore your audience and likely put them to sleep.

Unattractive and low-resolution images make your ideas look cheap.

Make sure that the oldest person in the audience will be able to read your slides anywhere in the room.

Keep any animated transitions simple and avoid using sounds to accompany them.

Don’t forget that your visuals represent you and your ideas. Don’t let them make a bad impression.

Minimize your use of logos and branding to avoid overwhelming your slides.

Use logos and branding with care

Remember your visual aids represent you

Avoid distracting animations and

sounds

Don’t create slides as a script

Keep text big and legible

Use good quality images

We’ve already talked about the importance of not treating your slides like Word documents. “Slideuments” are unholy hybrids that aren’t well-suited to accomplishing anything.

But there’s another important reason to keep your visuals simple and limit them to one idea per slide. Your audience is much more likely to remember what you’re talking about if you present one idea at a time. Don’t make your audience search for what’s important on your

slides or allow them to read about one topic while you’re still speaking about another.

Rather than having one slide with seven bullets, create seven slides that each represent one idea. There’s no shame in having a lot of slides as long as they’re relevant--your audience won’t even think about how many you have as long as you keep the presentation moving (and you don’t make the mistake of numbering your slides).

Stick to one idea per slide

Divide complex ideas into multiple slides

Given the chance, most people will take the path of least resistance. And because PowerPoint and Keynote both default to slides with bullets, most presenters wind up creating slides with bullets.

But you don’t have to.

The first example on the left shows how most people create slides; they start with a title and add bullets until they run out of room or ideas. Sometimes they even combine more than one main idea and multiple sets of bullets on a single slide in order to cut down on the number of slides in a presentation. The result is that all of these items make it hard for the audience to read, focus on, or remember the individual idea that each bullet represents. Because there’s so much material up there onscreen the presenter usually winds up reading their points without adding anything helpful.

A better strategy is to organize your presentation as an outline where each item has its own slide. That way you and your audience can focus on each idea one at a time. We find that strictly limiting each slide to one idea is also extremely useful in helping us write our presentations and make sure that the flow of our talk and the transitions between ideas actually make sense. Eliminating all of the extra stuff helps make it clear when your points don’t really go together.

Many presenters seem very concerned about the idea of having too many slides, but the number itself isn’t something you should really be worried about. Just having more slides doesn’t mean that it will take longer to get through them, and people won’t be counting as long as your slides make sense and you stay on each one only as long as you need to. In fact, they’re less likely to get bored from looking at any one slide too long and much more apt to pay attention when they can see that you continue to move rapidly through your ideas.

Of the three examples on the left side of this page, we clearly prefer the third version. It allows you and the audience to focus on the particular point that you’re discussing at the moment and it eliminates the temptation for the speaker to read from the screen because there isn’t even a complete sentence that could be read.

The speaker has to fill in the details, which is how it should be.

Never use just one bullet

Since bullets should only be used in lists with multiple items, never create a slide with one bullet like the second example above. It just looks like you didn’t take the time to clean it up.

At times you may find yourself tempted to create a slide with many bullets in order to represent a list of items that you want your audience to be aware of but that you don’t actually plan to discuss in detail. You might want to do this to represent the complexity of an idea, for example.

But instead of resorting to all of those bullets, we’d suggest that you consider using what we call a scatter slide, like the one above. We use this slide to illustrate the fact that there are a lot of things that you should think about before you

agree to give a presentation. We’ll put this up on screen and say something along the lines of “Planning a presentation is a complicated task, and there are lots of questions you should ask yourself before you agree to give one.”

But we don’t discuss all of the individual items at this point. We find that using a slide like this instead of a bulleted list is less formal and reduces the audience’s expectation that you need to explain each item or that they need to take notes and write everything down.

Consider creating a scatter slide

Display headlines and conclusions rather than raw informationDon’t make you audience figure out what the information you’re showing them means. Tell them what you want them to see.

Presenters tend to be proud of the data they’ve gathered and want to share it with their audiences. They also feel that they need a lot of evidence to back up what they have to say.

But raw data is often more confusing than helpful. Spreadsheets projected on a screen are seldom legible except in the smallest meetings, and unstructured data isn’t very persuasive. You need to tell your audience what it means to you.

The examples on the right are increasingly helpful at interpreting data. The top one may look totally ridiculous because it’s so hard to read, but many presenters actually use screenshots of spreadsheets. They often feel that this is their only chance to share raw data with their audience, so they put it up there whether it can be made sense of or not. If your audience really does need to see data on this level, send it to them in advance or give them a handout so they can read it in your meeting. Putting it onscreen will only serve to frustrate people.

The second example is better because it actually makes sense of the data and graphically represents a trend in the numbers. Now we know that we’re looking at sales reports and we can compare the results by region or year--if we can make sense of the legend and labels.

The third slide is the one that really accomplishes your goals, though. It does away with the data altogether and tells the audience what you want them to know, that sales declined in every region in 2001. If you want them to analyze the numbers further you could use this slide in conjunction with a chart slide, or just use the chart as a handout.

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Simplify your data

Don’t overwhelm your audience with information they don’t need. If you are a lawyer, scientist, or accountant who needs to give an audience raw numbers to prove your point or establish your credibility, give them the information as electronic files or handouts.

Even though we recommend that you avoid bullets and create new slides for each point that is important enough to put on the screen, you’ll probably continue using them anyway. And they can be very useful in presentations and other places, like email, where you want your audience to be able to scan and process information quickly. So it’s worth taking a few minutes to go over guidelines for using bullets in any written format.

Use parallel structure

Each item of your bullet points needs to have the same structure. If you start the first item with a noun, every items should start with a noun. If the first bullet is a command (like our list above), every bullet should be a command. Whether you use complete sentences or

fragments, make sure you do the same for each point. This principle is called parallelism and its misuse is the most common problem we see in bulleted lists.

Punctuate consistently

The rules for punctuating lists are pretty loose. The only thing that really matters is that you are consistent. If you punctuate the end of an item, do the same for each of them. Capitalize the same way throughout.

Make sure items are related

It’s all too easy for unrelated items to sneak into a bulleted list. Check all of your bullets to make sure that they truly belong in the same group and that each of them is an idea of the same relative scope.

Using bullet points correctly

(The right way)

Keep each item short

The whole point of bulleted items is to make them quick and easy to read. Try to keep them to one line of text.

Number (or eliminate) long lists

We’d rather you just remove long lists, but use numbers instead of bullets so you can easily refer to specific points when you have many items.

Omit transitions

Your transitions between items in a bulleted list are all assumed to be “and” since all of the items are supposed to be similar and carry the same weight. So you can get rid of the “second”s,

“finally”s, and “even worse”s on your slides. It’s the speaker’s job to verbally insert these kinds of transitions for their audience.

Avoid sub-bullets

Sub-bullets introduce too much complexity on slides. If they are important enough that you need to include them, reorganize your slides so your top-level bullets become headings of their own.

Don’t bullet sensitive information

Bullets are perceived as abrupt and efficient. Don’t use them when what you really need to communicate is sympathy or warmth.

(The wrong way)