The best PowerPoint tip you’ll ever hear is this: When you create a PowerPoint presentation, do not start by opening the software. Start sketching instead.
I recently met with a group of sales leaders at a major Internet company who give presentations every day—PowerPoint presentations that can lead to multi-million dollar deals. Their challenge—how to stand out from their competitors who are also pitching the same advertisers, often with similar marketing-related PowerPoint decks.
By applying the following 3-step approach, we managed to take a sales deck of 26 slides and 500 words and reduce it to 12 slides and fewer than 50 words. The final product was far more interesting and immediately led to some big wins. I’d like to show the before-and-after slides but the project is far too proprietary and this particular company would not want to reveal its secret to its competitors. Suffice it to say the two presentations looked so completely different that it’s hard to tell they were from the same company. Regardless, anyone can adopt the 3-step process to improve their presentations.
Step 1.
Unleash creativity. We held brainstorming meetings with the people who know the story best, outsiders who have never heard the story, and internal design experts who will work on the final presentation. Nobody was allowed to open PowerPoint at the initial 2-hour meeting. They were only allowed pen and paper or markers for the whiteboard.
Step 2.
Brainstorm ideas the old-fashioned way. The next step is to draw, sketch or whiteboard. I like to say that a gifted presenter like Apple CEO Steve Jobs made his money in the digital world of bits and bytes but prepares his presentations in the analog world of pen and paper. Think of a presentation as a movie director would prepare to shoot a film. A director doesn’t start the process by picking up his camera. He storyboards each scene first, creating an artistic rendering of the scene. Your slide is your scene. Sketch it out first.Here are two slides introducing the same product. The first was created to look like a typical slide—with no thought given to the visual display of the information. The second is the way the product (an Apple notebook) was actually presented to the audience after this process of sketching and brainstorming took place.
Slide Before Process
Which slide is more captivating, memorable, and interesting?
Step 3.
Choose supporting elements. What other elements are you going to add? Will you include video, images, or a demonstration? The choice of elements and the order of those elements will influence the look, style and flow of your final presentation.
Only after Step 3 is it safe to open PowerPoint.
I don’t believe in death by PowerPoint. PowerPoint is a powerful tool to support your story. I do believe in death by people who create PowerPoint. The software is not the problem. It’s the person behind the keyboard. Think like an artist and your PowerPoint presentations will truly look like works of art.