Want to lose your audience? Of course not. But when you put up spreadsheets and complex charts, that's exactly what you're likely to do. Audiences can't uncover the story you want to tell by looking at a slide with 5, 10 or 50 data points.
In this episode of P3, we tackle one of our top 3 problems with practical tips on how to bring your data to life, and let it enlighten your audience, rather than lose them. Your data has a story to tell. Make sure it's being heard!
Prefer to read? Transcript:
Welcome to the Perfect Presentation Podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, your host, and co-owner of Perfect PlanIt. Since 2005 our company has created more than 7,000 presentations for conferences, tradeshows, road shows, sales meetings, board of director meetings… pretty much any presentations you can imagine, for use around the world.
I mentioned at the start of our first episode, we’ve been at this a long time, and along the way we’ve seen practically everything when it comes to how people create presentations, good and bad. Today I want to talk about one of “the bad” and how we turn it into “the good.” (I’m doing air quotes here, which isn’t very effective in a podcast).
I’ve had quite a few sales calls lately with prospective clients. Having done hundreds of these throughout the years, you start to hear the same things over and over. When I ask prospects what they struggle with most, here are the top three things we hear.
First, their presentations are poorly designed, and they don’t have good resources to help them improve. Second, they don’t feel like there is any consistency to how people in their company present. Everyone has their own favorite way, and often their own deck they use that might not look much like anyone else’s. And third, people put all of their content on a slide and simply read the slide.
That’s the one I want to focus on today. And I’m going to give it a bit more of a slant that will provide more of a focus. Because at this point everyone knows that they should put their content in the notes section and not read off a slide (even though they still do).
Our clients are exclusively business-to-business companies. And many are technology companies, but it doesn’t matter that much what they do, because ALL of our clients have one thing in common. They deal with a lot of data. We are awash in data in a way we’ve never been before. The rise of the infographic is an attempt to treat data in a way that makes it more understandable for a reader. We intuitively know that it’s hard to make sense of a huge spreadsheet, so what do we do? We try to make it more visual. Enter the pie chart. Or we go for comparisons. Enter the bar chart. And by the way, these are all infographics in their own right. They are all attempts to display data so a reader can make sense of it. And since we respond better to visuals than to raw numbers, we can process a chart or a graph more quickly.
The problem is, when you present, you’re always walking a tightrope and looking for this very fine balance of information conveyed on a screen, while not losing your audience’s attention from what you’re saying. And that’s hard! Think back to our golden rule of presenting. Listen or Read, your audience cannot do both. Not a seasoned executive, not a multitasking gen x-er. Your brain doesn’t operate that way. We prove this during our training sessions. I put up a slide that says listen or read and explain the rule. I practically telegraph that I’m about to prove it. The next slide is content heavy about the importance of great content on each slide, and as soon as that slide comes up, I talk a bit about something off topic like baseball, then stop. Once everyone looks at me again, I ask what I was talking about. Blank stares. They have no idea because they were reading the slide. It’s a fun little experiment, but it underscores one of your biggest challenges.
So let’s operate under this assumption. When you present, you’ve got data you want to share.
