Death by Powerpoint - or not?

Was Steve Jobs right?

We all miss the charisma that Mr. Jobs exuded during his product launch love-ins such as the famous iPhone announcements.When Steve did present he only used a few slides. During the lead up he would talk and "story tell" and work the audience into a frenzy. Each slide was simple, clean, and elegant -much like Apple's overall branding message. I don't recall seeing any bullet points - if there was text - it was a short impactful message that he expanded on and punctuated it in a very confident and unique manner.

Let's face it, sales people are not CEO's and all don't work for cool companies like Apple. We are the front line to the customer (and prospective customer) and we constantly make our "pitches" using our PPT Decks. (Powerpoint Presentations for those not up on the PP lingo) because that's what we have done in the past. We present what our marketing departments deliver to us (with some augmentation). In many cases we are the marketing department as well as sales - so we essentially build our own decks.

We recently presented to a new client and prior to the meeting decided to distill our 48 slide PP Prez. down to 8 slides. This was extremely tough - as you can imagine as we agonized over which slides would stay, produced new slides that summarized 10 others, and so on. The presentation went extremely well - but what was particularly interesting was - as we kicked the meeting off we informed our clients that our usual PPT Deck was 48 slides but we had reduced it to 8 slides just for them - to which they both sighed and said "Thank You - we appreciate that" and we all shared a laugh.

The most interesting comment after the presentation was the client asking - "would you mind emailing us the 48 slide deck for reference?" - which I agreed to do along with an electronic version of the 8 slides.

Perhaps this is a method we can use for future presentations - present the concepts and benefits in 10 slides or less - but have the complete Deck as a backup. We do our own version of "Steve" with a creative front end - and follow it up with the complete Deck so the client has something to read on the next flight.

Death by Powerpoint is a great moniker as in many cases - it is true - 60 slides are the norm these days. If we can reduce the deck down to 20% of the original. This gives us more time with the client - discussing issues, answering questions etc, versus powering through the entire deck without time for qualification.

What a concept - spend more time with the customer understanding their needs.

Great read: http://www.amazon.com/Death-Powerpoint-Michael-Flocker/dp/B000WCTNF4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348779463&sr=1-1&keywords=death+by+powerpoint