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Successful presentations: How to create best-practice PowerPoint slides

T: +44 (0)151 231 1186 [email protected] www.andybounds.com

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Ensuring your pitches/presentations are the

best in your sector

Best-practice PowerPoint slide development

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The best – and worst - ways to produce Power-

Point slides

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Quick Tips for producing effective slides

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Alternatives to bullet points

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Copyright © Andy Bounds Ltd 2008 All rights reserved and asserted.

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Best-practice PowerPoint slide development

Implement the simple techniques in this White Paper, and you will achieve greater success when delivering PowerPoint presentations.

The techniques are simple to apply, and applicable for all presentations, including sales pitches, briefings, workshops, conference presentations, and so on.

Andy Bounds Ltd’s techniques have transformed the way its clients make presentations, leading them to win £billions of more business, gain greater employee engagement, enhanced clarity, and save dramatic amounts of time by more efficient communication.

This White Paper outlines the reasons most PowerPoint presentations fail, the rationale behind best-practice slide development and examples of slide layouts that work.

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The best – and worst – ways to prepare PowerPoint slides

What makes a good presentation? It is not just your content, your slides or even your delivery. The only true gauge of how effective a presentation is, is what the audience does after it. An effective sales pitch causes the customer to buy. An effective workshop - delegates perform better. An effective briefing - attendees change behaviours.

So, to be effective, presentations must have an impact on the audience, which means every aspect of your presentation must be audience-focused. This includes your slides.

Yet, presenters tend to focus on themselves – and not the audience. For instance, when preparing slides, have you ever thought:

• I want a comfort blanket, so I’ll use slides as Speaker Prompts, not Audience Aids

• I don’t have much time: I’ll see what slides I’ve got, and base my content round them

• I’ve left it too late to practise, so will put extra words on the slides, to remind me what to say

Or, when given a presentation to create, do you open up PowerPoint, and think … “I’ll start by writing headlines, then bullets, group common topics in boxes, add a bit of shading, a bit of ClipArt …” Unfortunately, this approach rarely works, and means:

1. PowerPoint becomes the way you think, rather than a tool to convey your thinking

2. The audience (and what you want them to do after your presentation) is ignored

3. Since nearly everyone prepares presentations in this way, nearly every PowerPoint looks the same – cover slide, table of contents, table of contents with Topic One highlighted, text-heavy complicated slides, Topic Two highlighted, repeat …

So, the best way to use PowerPoint is the total opposite of common practice:

• Start by thinking what you want to happen after your presentation – and not what your content should be – and let this govern your entire preparation.

• Think about what’s best for your audience, not for you

• Go to PowerPoint last, not first. In other words, create your content, and then transfer the relevant elements to your slides (Sections 3 and 4 show you how to do this)

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Quick Tips for producing effective slides

1. Reduce the words on your slidesYour slides should accompany, not duplicate, you. So, they must not tell the whole story, or there’s no point you being there.

A good rule of thumb: if your audience were to see your slides before your presentation, would they know what you were going to say, just by reading them? If so, you have too much information on them.

Only put key, simple, digestible words – and relevant visuals – on your slides, for you to elaborate on.

2. Ensure your slides and visuals are congruentAudiences will equate the quality of your slides and visuals with the quality of you/your message. It is not congruent to talk about your ‘best-practice methodology’, when presenting alongside worst-practice, poorly designed, text-heavy, unclear slides.

If you do not possess PowerPoint design skills, delegate slide creation to someone who has, or click here for help.

3. PowerPoint is a visual medium … use it for visuals80%+ of people prefer to receive information visually – a picture really can paint a thousand words. And PowerPoint is an excellent tool for communicating visual messages – graphics, charts, flow diagrams, graphs, images etc.

However, PowerPoint is not a good way to communicate full sentences, reasoned arguments etc. You, the presenter, are better at doing that.

So either create visual, text-light presentations; or wordy, text-heavy documents. Don’t create something that is both and, thus, neither.

4. Slide titles should contain benefitsSlide titles traditionally describe the content - “About us”, “Our process” or “Summary” and so on. However, such titles do not engage audiences. And, if the title doesn’t engage, they will – and do – switch off.

Best-practice slide titles are interesting, clear, and – where appropriate – benefits-rich. Replace “About us” with (for example) “Why we are uniquely placed to help you”; and “Summary” with “The three areas where we will bring most value”.

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5. Use slide animation … alwaysIf you show a slide with six points, your audience will read ahead. You know this to be true – after all, you do it!

Unfortunately, the audience reading Points 2-6 while you discuss Point 1 means they won’t be fully focused on any of them.

So, click to bring up each new point.

A further hint: don’t animate by having new points pinging in from the left, or flying up from the right. Audiences tend to hate that. Make the point simply appear.


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“AFTERs-focused”

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Alternatives to bullet points

Two indisputable facts:

1. PowerPoint is a visual tool, and

2. Bullet points aren’t visually appealing

Unfortunately, the vast majority of presentations contain slides riddled with bullet points. The main reason for this, of course, is that they are the easiest slides to create.

However, audiences find bullet points uninspiring and – after seeing the tenth set on the trot – dull.

So, avoid using bullet points. Here are some alternatives:

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How to prepare quickly…so it worksHow to prepare quickly…so it works


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How to prepare quickly…so it worksHow do these make you feel?

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How to prepare quickly…so it worksHow to find customers' AFTERs

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Sales

18 months

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Ensuring your pitches/presentations are the best in your sector

Follow the advice in this White Paper, and your slides will definitely improve. And, the better your slides, the more likely that your audience will engage with, buy into and act on what you say.

If you, or your organisation, would like further guidance and support when preparing sales pitches/presentations/PowerPoints etc, click here to see how Andy Bounds Ltd can help.

For further guidance on best-practice presentations, click here to buy Andy Bounds’s book The Jelly Effect (the title of the book refers to the presenters’ habit of throwing lots of jelly at an audience, hoping some will stick ... instead of simply giving them what they want!)

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T: +44 (0)151 231 1186 [email protected] www.andybounds.com

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http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jelly-Effect-Make-Communication-Stick/dp/1841127604/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227788932&sr=8-1

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