SHORTER PRESENTATIONS! Four simple steps…

15th October 2024

I review lots of PowerPoint presentations.

Virtually all of them suffer from four problems:

  1. The start isn’t engaging – so, a weak first impression
  2. The end doesn’t ask the audience to do anything – so they won’t
  3. It’s far too long – hard for everyone
  4. There’s far too much on the slides – Death By PowerPoint

So here are the four solutions. I love these, because they’re super quick, super easy and have a massive impact. For example, I recently reviewed an 18-slide deck, full of wordy slides. Ten minutes later, it was a 6-slide deck of sparse slides.

The four steps are:

  1. Add their #1 benefit to the #1 slide – the first slide is your first impression. It must show the audience how they’ll benefit from listening to it. So add their #1 benefit to this first slide. For example, if your presentation will save people two hours every week, add a sub-heading called “How you can save two hours every week. Forever”
  2. Add a Call to Action (CTA) at the end – the audience will only do something if you ask them to do something! Therefore, replace the current final slide (which will probably be “any questions” or “thank you”) with a CTA. For example, head it up “Our next steps”, and then list the next actions that you want them to do
  3. Shorten it with KEEP/BIN/APPENDIX – for each slide, ask yourself “is this slide so critical that I need to KEEP it? Or, could I just throw it in the BIN? Or, if it is useful information, can I put it in an APPENDIX? This is how I turned the 18-slides into six – seven went in an appendix, and five went in the bin
  4. Simplify your slides with these three rules – the best slides have (1) good titles, (2) few words and (3) look nice. So, (1) improve the title – engage the audience (2) press “delete” and remove as many words as possible – leave only the key ones on (3) make it look nice – add some colour; maybe use one of the templates from Smart Art etc

You will get two outcomes from this Tip – a happy one and a sad one:

  • The happy one – your presentations will be better and shorter. So will everyone else’s who reads this Tip; but…
  • The sad one – it will make you even more intolerant of other people’s dreadful presentations! Sorry

Action Point

The next time you review a presentation – either yours of someone else’s – apply the four rules above.

It will take you just a few minutes to transform – and shorten – the presentation.

And when that happens, everyone wins.

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