Stop Making the #1 Mistake in Presentations

Ever hear this story?

VP of Sales:  “Hey, how did the sales training on the new presentation go?”

VP of Marketing:  “OK, well, you know, pretty good.”

VP of Sales:  “Why are you hemming and hawing?”

VP of Marketing:  “Well, I could tell they didn’t love it.”

VP of Sales:  “Do you know why?  I do.  They told me it was a great looking set of slides, but it felt more like an analyst pitch than a customer presentation.”

What’s gone wrong here?
It’s simple.  Marketing made the #1 mistake that managers of all ilks make when it comes to creating presentations:  they start with what they have — instead of starting with what’s needed.

What does that mean?
Marketing probably just came back from a few days of analyst briefings and when they needed to make a revision to sales presentation, they re-used a bunch of the slides from the analyst deck.  Those slides, created for analysts, talked about company strategy, positioning, and messaging.  Customer slides need to talk capabilities, benefits, and customer testimonials.

The slides, never designed to be used with customers, are thrown into a deck, and marketing feels great and super-efficient because they’ve re-used materials and presumably even increased message consistency in the process.  #wow

But it’s a #fail.  They broke the first rule of presentations:  it’s all about the audience.

Know thy audience
Presentations are all about the audience.  The first step in creating any presentation should be asking:  who I am speaking to and what do I want to tell them.

It’s not about you; it’s about them.  Which brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from Frank Capra, director of It’s a Wonderful Life.

“I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.”  — Frank Capra

It’s not just about marketing
While I started with a marketing example, this isn’t just a marketing problem.  Here are some other favorite examples:

• Making a board presentation from an operations review deck.  Yes, they both have a lot of data and analysis about the business, but the ops review deck is created for an audience of your peers, for people who want more detail and who are far closer to the daily operations of the business.  One great way to hang yourself in a board meeting is to paste a bunch of slides from your ops review deck “to save time.”

• Making one sales presentation from another.  This might work if the two customers have a lot in common, but if they don’t it will be a disaster.  My favorite quote here comes for a story about an Atlanta-based salesrep who kept referencing Coca Cola to Delta Airlines.  “Stop telling us about Coke.  We are Delta.  We fly airplanes.”

• Making a product introduction presentation from a product management presentation.  You instantly doom yourself to feature-itis.

• Making a vision presentation from a sales presentation.  Sales presentations about motivating benefits and differentiation.  Vision presentations are about what’s wrong with the status quo and how to fix it.

• Making a roadmap presentation from a product planning deck.  Not only will you forget to pad the dates, but you will likely end up turning your product vision into a laundry list.

I could go on and on.  But the key mistake here is simple.  Instead of starting blank-slate with what’s needed based upon the audience, you start with leftovers.  What you have lying around from a prior presentation or meeting.

The road to Hell
Don’t have the good intentions of maximizing re-use when you make presentation.  Instead focus on your message and your audience.  That means starting with what’s needed instead of starting with what you have.

What’s the trick?
Most people condemn themselves at the 5th second of the presentation-creation process by double-clicking on PowerPoint and then hitting “open.”

Don’t do that.  Never do that.

Instead hit “new” and “blank presentation.”

Then think about the audience.  Think about your message and start roughing out an outline to achieve your goals and the slide structure (often just titles) to do that.  Let it sit for a while.  And then do it again.  Put your early energy into the structure of the presentation, not the slides.

Then — once you have a clear outline for what you want to say and how you want to say it — and only then, should you go looking for existing slides that will help you say it.