This post by Kevin Sasser is the eighth in our Slide Tips series.
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(This post is a continuation from last week’s article….)

Famous last words of a sales person…
“…so I’m going to just blow through a few of these slides and then we’ll get right to the demo.”
…right before they dive into 30-45 minutes of slides.

In our first post, we discussed some fundamentals in building a sales presentation. To recap

Tip 1: Your Prospects Time and Your Slide’s Real Estate are Both Precious, Treat Accordingly

Tip 2: Follow Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule (Available on Slideshare)

Tip 3: Take advantage of innocent bystanders (practice with people not directly involved in your pitch)

Once you these basics mastered, the following two tips will put you on your way to creating and delivering effective sales presentations.

Tip 4: Clean is Good

If you haven’t watched a Steve Jobs presentation, please do so now, you can find some on SlideShare and on Apples’ website. I’ll wait.

In case you didn’t want to leave, here’s one slide from a recent presentation.

Do you know what he’s talking about? Most do.

Did you see precious real estate dedicated to extraneous logos or words? No.

The typical sales slide would look like this:

The image below is a screen shot of a presentation that contained a photo of Steve Job’s iPhone presentation, so an image capture, of an image capture, of a photo, of a presentation. Got that? Notice you can still clearly see the text, and you know what he is talking about. That’s the goal.

Steve Jobs is an uber-expert in design and has been the lead on one of the most successful corporate turnarounds in modern times, if anyone has earned the right to spew facts, figures, and other meaningful tidbits into a presentation it’s him.
However, Steve’s genius is reflected most in the simplicity, yet effectiveness, of his presentations. Think about that the next time you are almost overwhelmed with the urge to put a mission statement somewhere it doesn’t belong.

For your next presentation try this. Start with a blank template; change the background to a darker color.

Create your pitch using only a 32pt font and key words, no more than 3 bullet points per page, and no more than 3 words per bullet.

Run through the pitch and refine until you get the flow.

Now, at this point, to make any adjustments, you must ask yourself

“Will this help convince my audience to purchase my solution? If so, why?”

For example: “Will adding a photo image to this slide strengthen the point I’m making?”

If the answer is “yes”, crop the image down to it’s most relevant point, especially if it’s a screen shot of your solution or a website.

Tip 5: Credibility Rules

There are two measurements of credibility that apply to every sales presentation. The first is the accuracy and honesty of the content that is being presented. The second is the believability of the presenter.

You want to gain credibility and engage your client, start off with a very specific problem that when solved with your solution results in a tangible benefit.

For example:

“After implementing our Knowledge Management program, our clients in your vertical have lowered employee attrition rates on average of 18%, and some have experienced annual savings of over $60 million dollars, resulting in an ROI of 654%”

Remember a few years ago when several college football coaches were fired after it was discovered that some “creative licensing” was applied to their resume’s? One coach lost a multi-million dollar job with a major university; another was done in by a reporter who simply used a simple internet search to uncover the fraudulent details.

While the professional sales professional maintains his integrity at all costs, there are hidden dangers when making unsubstantiated claims.

Sales Rep: “Our customer service is superior”

Audience: “Really? How?”

Sales Rep: “Uhhhh….well…I know those guys and they are really good.”

Audience: “Thank you, please leave your name badges with the front desk”

If you are going to make a claim, be prepared to back it up. Remember, your audience will have web access and can double-check you at any point in your presentation.

This is where the tour is housed (it has a page of its own); feel free to embed it in websites & blogs.

| View | Upload your own

Off course, all the current .net URLs work as before… no change there.

Now to the news! SlideShare has secured a Series A investment to the tune of 3 million USD from Venrock, one of the prominent venture capital companies in Silicon Valley. With this investment, David Siminoff, managing partner at Venrock has joined SlideShare’s board of directors. This rounding of funding includes smaller angel investments from some prominent technology stalwarts- Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, David McClure (of 500 Hats), Saul Klein (founding partner of The Accelerator Group & ex Skype VP), Hal Varian (Chief Economist at Google), Yee Lee (ex Slide.com), Ariel Poler (former Chairman of Stumble Upon).

This funding will help us grow Slideshare better and stronger- bigger & faster servers, more engineers & employees to manage the website, bizdev folks etc.

And what better way to announce this than Meet Henry, the intensely popular & hugely infectious presentation genre that has inspired some many of our users (big thank to Ethos3 for creating this). Press releases are just so boring… they put you to sleep… why not let the lovable Henry (actually Dave, in this case) spice up the announcement just a little bit!

| View | Upload your own

This post by Kevin Sasser is the seventh in our Slide Tips series.
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I remember the day my father brought home our family’s first microwave oven. While we were far from the first on the block to own this modern culinary marvel, we still viewed this event as the catalyst that would catapult us deep into the heart of the middle class.

Dad unpacked the mammoth machine, as mom and I rushed to the store to purchase our first collection of prepackaged microwave dinners. On the drive home, I envisioned how my taste buds would react to the overwhelming, bountiful flavor that surely would erupt as soon as we introduced the cardboard boxes in our grocery bag to the powerful, yet controlled, radiation contained within our new oven.

As we prepared for the maiden meal, the atmosphere was careful and serious, like a crew preparing the space shuttle for launch. My father read the instructions to some feast-in-a-box emblazoned with the word “Gourmet” while I confirmed the verbal commandments and executed the dictated tactics.

“OK, cut a slit in the top of the box.”

“Cutting slit in box….check.”

“Put box in microwave. Set power on high.”

“Box in microwave, power on high…check”

“Set timer for 75 seconds.”

“Seventy-five seconds?”

“That’s got to be a typo, it takes 15 minutes to boil water, try 10.”

“10 seconds?”

“10 minutes”

“10 minutes…check.”

After we put the fire out, it dawned on us that technology, when not used effectively, can deliver havoc and wreck the most noble of intentions.

In that light, Powerpoint has been blamed for everything from lost sales opportunities to the death of personal verbal communications. While it was no more our microwave’s fault for the charred debris that had previously been destined to be my family’s dinner it is not Powerpoint’s function or responsibility to elicit effective communications.

We are an instant-gratification, I-want-it-now type of animal; however the majority of sales presentations are built on the false assumption that our audiences will find the value of our proposed solution as engaging and compelling as a new Harry Potter novel.

Successful sales presentations begin with the understanding that the objective is to persuade your audience to purchase your solution. You are not there to educate, entertain, or impress, however these are meaningful byproducts of your efforts.

Your primary goal in presenting is to latch onto audience’s attention span, stimulate their minds with information that is relevant and meaningful, and aid in the construction of the mental vision of a better world in which their challenges and goals have been met via the use of your products or services.

Tip 1: Your Prospects Time and Your Slide’s Real Estate are Both Precious, Treat Accordingly

The question you should answer before clicking on “File -> New PPT” is: “What’s the reward for my audience?” If you ask a group of professionals to stop their day sit still and listen to you for an hour, what’s in it for them? Can you save them money? Can you increase revenue? Can you give them a competitive edge?

Assume that your primary decision maker is going to be called away from your presentation after fifteen minutes. Structure your slides so that when this happens, he or her leaves knowing exactly why they should purchase your solution.

For some reason, in the beginning of a presentation, many vendors feel the need to state the obvious, especially if it’s stated by an industry analyst. For example:

Consider these two vendors – key points after 15 minutes

• Vendor A = A mid-tier player in the enterprise space with over 200 clients in the perverted arts vertical.
• Vendor B = The company that can help with my widget problem.

When planning your sides think more “elevator pitch” than “War and Peace”

Tip 2: Follow the 10/20/30 rule

One of Guy Kawasaki’s greatest contributions to mankind is the 10/20/30 rule for presentations.

10 Slides

20 Minutes

30 Point Font (min)

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

If you are selling a complex, enterprise solution you may need to go past 10 slides, but break up your presentation into sections, each tailored to a specific group of decision makers. Each section should be as succinct as possible.

For example:

• For the Executives, clearly state how your solution will make/save their organization money.
• For the Business Users, clearly state how your solution will meet their goals. For example, “This is how we will help your team open new business development opportunities”.
• For the Technical Audiences, if you have a sales engineer, keep your mouth shut and let them talk. Clearly state the expected impact on their internal infrastructure and any skill sets needed to manage the system.

Keep this thought in mind, to purchase your solution; your audience will most likely have to answer to a higher authority who will ask the questions that demand the answers above. You want your messages to be as clear and concise as possible.

Tip 3: Take advantage of innocent bystanders

Practice your presentation on people who know very little about the technical aspects of your solution. Our receptionist, secretaries, and administrative staff are my favorite victims.

If after 3 minutes, they do not understand and are not following your presentation, throw it away and start over.

Stay tuned for Part 2 next week.

Here’s a slideshow that shows how to do it.

| View | Upload your own

Extra-geeky footnote: like many other integrations with our site, the Plaxo integration was done using our RSS feeds: no API authentication or complications required! RSS is a surprisingly powerful interface for making mashups like this, since we load up our rss feeds with all kinds of multimedia goodies (specifically thumbnails and embed codes for the slideshows in the feed).

This post by Lisa Lindgren is the sixth in our Slide Tips series.
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I don’t usually write articles; instead, I am usually the one for whom others write. For almost a decade I published the Presentation Pointers newsletter and managed the Presenters University Web site. We brought solid presentation-oriented advice to hundreds of thousands of people. It was satisfying work.

Well, all good things eventually end, and sometimes we need those endings to shake off the cobwebs and open our eyes to the changes happening around us. As I leaped from 1998 to 2008 to become the publisher of PresentationXpert, I was struck by how many changes had occurred in the Web world. From blogs, RSS feeds, and wikis, the Web has gone from a one-way, broadcast-type tool to a participatory medium where anyone can get the information that they want, when and how they want it, and have fun while doing so.

Have presentations changed similarly? Can we draw parallels between the evolution of the Web and changes in presentations? Like the Web, I think most of the changes have occurred in how the information is delivered and how the audience participates. And although changes have occurred across all aspects of presentations, many of the premises upon which good communications is built remain eternal.

Presentations sit on a three-legged stool

Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design may have been the first person who shared with me the analogy of presentations being like a three-legged stool, but this presentation concept is timeless. Effective presentations sit on the legs of a compelling message, clear visuals that support that message, and a solid delivery that does not detract from the first two fundamentals.

If you compare presentation advice in 1998 with today, there have been some shifts and changes for all three legs of the stool.

Visuals – From Better Bullets to Relevant Images

By far the presentation leg that has received the most press and attention are the visuals. In 1998, it was standard for most people to present slides consisting of primarily text-heavy bullet points. In fact, the advice of the day was to just cut down on the number of words. “Old-timers” may recall the 6-6-6 rule: no more than six words to a bullet, no more than six bullets on a page, and no more than six bullet slides in a row. And then you had to insert a chart or something for some visual relief!

Then there was the trick of putting the words inside different shapes to disguise the fact that they were really bullets. Here is a good example, and although better than a list of bullets with complete sentences, bullets they are nonetheless.

While many will argue that there are still too many mindless slides filled with copious numbers of words and bullets, the industry has changed, and started to do so seriously soon after the turn of the century. Edward Tufte famously declared that “PowerPoint is Evil” and Death by PowerPoint became a rallying cry to change presentation visuals from something that impedes comprehension, to graphics and design that actually supported the message.

Microsoft may have been alarmed about the animosity directed towards PowerPoint in particular, although probably not too much. The popularity of Corel Presentations had dwindled with the decline of the WordPerfect Office Suite, Keynote wasn’t yet very well known, Impress had a small following and the Web-based presentation tools weren’t yet available. So PowerPoint was, and still is, the main game in town. But the pointed attacks on PowerPoint may have played a part in Microsoft Press publishing Cliff Atkinson’s book, Beyond Bullet Points, which advocated writing your script first and then choosing simple photos and images to use as visual props and prompts for the vocal delivery.

For those who are interested in the research behind it all…

The use of simple images and narration as the basis for effective audience comprehension has its roots in Allan Paivio’s 1986 dual-coding theory— that visual and verbal information is each processed along distinct mental channels. Thus looking at a photo and listening to a narration relative to that image can help with comprehension because the visual and verbal information does not compete with each other. (…still with me?) But, written bullet points do just the opposite, according to Dave Paradi in his remarks at the 2007 PowerPoint Live Conference. As I understood what Dave said, when we see written words on a screen, we almost can’t help but read them to ourselves. Thus we have created narration in our heads while also trying to listen to the presenter, and by doing so overload that channel and decrease comprehension.

So should your presentation consist solely of photographs and images supporting your verbal comments? Possibly (and if you do, follow these steps from Geetesh Bajaj’s Compressing Pictures in PowerPoint to reduce file bloat), but that isn’t always practical. For many SlideShare presentations, those without accompanying audio, you need at least simple titles to act as the narrator for your story, as was delightfully depicted in Ethos3’s “Meet Henry.”

| View | Upload your own

I have one last point about visuals, and that is about business graphics. A photo isn’t always going to do it, especially if you are presenting data to your client or to your boss. In Designing Winning Business Presentations, Mike Parkinson reviews 10 rules for presentation graphics. In my mind, rule #8 is the most important. All visual elements should have a specific role in the explanation and a reason for being chosen and incorporated. The important point is that the graphic is relevant to your message.

Which brings us to content…

Content—From Mechanics to Emotion

The content leg of our stool has incurred more subtle changes than visuals in the last decade. As I perused the presentation articles of the late 90s, the emphasis was on a repetitive formula of “tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them.” Presenters were advised to use a strong opening, with perhaps a startling fact to get the audience’s attention, then follow one of the then-prescribed models to inform or persuade—depending upon your objective—and finally end with a memorable conclusion that you knew cold and could launch into at a moment’s notice if the decision-maker suddenly announced that you needed to “wrap it up.” It was all pretty mechanical.

What was just then beginning to emerge was a focus on the audience. You didn’t just decide what you thought was important to tell them. You needed to understand where they were coming from, what was important to them, how to connect with them emotionally and collaborate so that you journeyed together through the presentation.

Where we are today is the dominance of storytelling as the means to share your content in a manner that resonates with members in the audience. A story demonstrates the human quality of your presentation. People have been using stories to inform and persuade since prehistoric times, so there is nothing new here. But perhaps the advances in technology, specifically software that could not only make snazzy visuals, but allow them to be changed on a whim, got in the way of relating the story. Today there are many resources to help you with your story, two of which are Scott Schwertly’s The Power of Story or Doug Stevenson’s YouTube demonstration of Leadership Story Presentation Skills.

Bert Decker wrote in his recent SlideShare post that YOU are the presentation, when he was talking about personal delivery. And in 1998 I would have agreed with that statement. In fact, I routinely gave a presentation on behalf of the now defunct Proxima Corporation that declared just that. And I do still believe it. YOU are the presentation when it comes to a powerful and well-crafted delivery. But I would argue that YOU are the presentation when it comes to your presentation content as well. It is YOUR message, supporting YOUR purpose, and above all, it’s YOUR stories, ones in which you are personally committed, that will get the job done.

Content will always be king. That’s why you do it first. Then you craft your visuals to support, not interfere with your story and finally deliver it in the most meaningful way possible.

This brings us to the final leg of the stool…

Delivery—A World Wide Difference

In looking for parallels between changes in presentations and the changes in the Web from 1998 to 2008, delivery is where I found them.

It all has to do with the control now demanded by us, the audience. We don’t have to physically show up for a presentation. We can see it on the Web—or in Second Life. If you missed it live, for sure there will be a link where you can access it later when it is convenient. And if you do show up live, you want the presenter to cover the content in the order that you prefer and address your questions as you go along, rather than sit end-to-end through a linear slide deck. So the presenters have had to adapt. Ellen Finkelstein offers one approach to dynamic presentations in Use a Menu to Create an Audience-Centered Presentation.

For the presenters giving Webcasts, slidecasts, podcasts and the like, new delivery skills are required. How do you physically change your presentation style when your audience can only see you from the chest up, or the neck up? What about if they can only hear your voice?

For those giving in-person presentations, the advice for 2008 is remarkably similar to the advice in 1998. You need a relaxed presence and good eye contact with the members of your audience, so that you are conversing with them as you share your story. But it doesn’t end there. You need to engage in what Jim Endicott of Distinction Communication calls purposeful movement—specific and planned body movements that you make with intent in mind. Here is an example. When beginning a story to make a point, move forward, towards your audience and stand close to them. All eyes will go to you and the audience will be drawn to what you are saying. As you complete your point, back up towards the screen, which is your physical cue to the audience that you are now moving on with your presentation. (This technique also works great if you have a disruptive audience member in a small setting who keeps interrupting your presentation. Walk up close to him or her. Actually get into their physical space. You’ll get their attention and the rest of the room’s too. Then you can back away towards your screen while speaking and take back control of the presentation.)

Technology—the Fourth Leg?

The tools we use, from projectors to software, all influence our presentations. Our goal should be that we use the technology to complement our efforts and not let it be a distraction. Where will presentation technology take us a decade from now? For a peek, see what Robert Lindstrom found when he was Trawling the CES Floor in Search of Presentation Treasure.

So much has changed since 1998. Ten years doesn’t seem like a lot of time, but when it comes to presentations, like the Web, sometimes it’s a generation.

1. del.icio.us
2. Firefox
3. Google Reader
4. Skype
5. Google Search
6. Wordpress
7. PowerPoint
8. Gmail
9. Audacity, Blogger
11. Google Docs
12. Wikipedia
13. Moodle
14. Slideshare
15. flickr, iGoogle
17. Ning, Twitter, YouTube

This list was put together by The Center for Learning and Performance Technologies after a survey of learning professionals. You can find the complete list here here.

Just for the record, last year we were nominated in the 26th position; so that’s a sure improvement. Next year, lets hope to break into the top 10!

Thanks for all of you who have written in with your message of support. This is a tough time for us and we really appreciate knowing that you are with us. We should be back on air very soon. If you are missing SlideShare, add a note, comment here….

Thanks for using SlideShare!

Right now the site is down. More updates as they become available.

Update (Apri 19th, 7 AM PST) : The site is back to normal now…

Update (Apr 19th, 2 PM PST): Several people are reporting problems, though others can reach site. Attack continues though it is weaker than before.

Update (Apr 19th, 3 PM PST): All clear now. Attack is no longer on. You should be able to reach SlideShare without problems. If you do have problems, please let us know and we will look at it.

Update (Apr 19th, 10 PM PST): The problem seems to be have resurfaced … the site is currently off air.

Update (Apr 20th, 4 AM PST): The problem seems to be under control at the present moment.. the attacks are continuing but have reduced in intensity.. slideshare is currently operational… stay tuned for updates…