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Q: What is the value of a great presentation?
A: The amount of the deal you are trying to win.
Q: What is the cost of a terrible presentation?
A: The same.
The lights dim and you sink into the conference room chair, bracing yourself for yet another sales pitch. You preset your expectation dial to low while selecting the highest setting for your anticipated frustration. You’re ready. And then the unusual happens. You are instantly engaged by the introduction. The presenter’s preparation becomes obvious, as she conveys relevant, appealing and even inspiring messages. “What’s going on here?” you ask, as you realize that your time is not being wasted. “This person has what I need,” you recognize, “and she knows how to tell that story well.” You want to do business with her.
Why is this scenario so rare in today’s business environment? With so much riding on our presentations—in sales situations, funding requests, conferences and career negotiations— why don’t we knock the socks off of audiences and connect deeply with their hearts and minds every time ? The more important question is: how can we do a lot better?
Elisabeth Osmeloski, VP of Audience Development for SearchMarketingExpo.com and MarTechConf.com, handles the details of 80 to 100 speaker presentations per event. She has developed a keen sense of what differentiates great presentations from poor ones. “Lack of preparation is the biggest cause of failure across the board,” states Osmeloski. “Not having a clear message and actionable takeaways will leave the audience feeling like their time has been wasted.” According to Osmeloski, you can definitely tell when a presenter knocks it out of the park by audience reaction and comments. “The perfect presentation,” she continues, “has certain attributes, and will be engaging, entertaining, memorable, inspiring and actionable—all at once.”
A tall order, to be sure, but this level of performance is possible. If you want to read a great book on this topic, I suggest Oren Klaff’s Pitch Anything (McGraw-Hill, 2011). To understand how one company, AvalaunchMedia, is setting a new standard for the quality of their own (and their clients’) presentations, read on.
Business Case
AvalaunchMedia.com, a digital marketing and PR company in the Salt Lake City area, is among a new breed of firms leading the charge to increase the visual (and digital) impact of presentations. “We are asked to speak at a lot of SEO and digital marketing conferences where we have witnessed a number of boring and ineffective graphics and presentations,” observes David Mink, AvalaunchMedia Co-Founder and CEO. “Early on, we realized we needed to spice it up, big time. So we did, and other speakers started asking us to put their presentations together. We knew we were on to something when our peers saw our value, and we figured that if the digital marketing industry needed this, then every industry would.” That was the beginning of AvalaunchMedia’s outreach to a client base that is now engaging more audiences and winning more deals because of this seemingly simple, yet powerful upgrade in how they approach that critical moment when they have an opportunity to move people to a desired action.
AvalaunchMedia helps its clients overcome common pitfalls in presentations. These are problems we’ve all suffered through at conferences, continuing education classes, and regular business meetings. How can you improve the way you deal with some or all of these in your own pitches?
Pitfall #1: The presentation is not “story-fied.” A presentation is a narrative about something, and it should have a beginning, middle, and conclusion. How many presentations are comprised solely of facts and statistics being flung at us from the front of the room? This type of abstract info-dump is neither compelling nor memorable.
Pitfall #2: The presentation is just too much. It contains too much information and too many bullet points, taking too much time. People learn and recall best in 20- to 25-minute increments. The goal is not to inundate the audience with the greatest amount of information, but to make a lasting impact. According to Mink, this is best accomplished by keeping the presentation brief.
Pitfall #3: Presentations lack imagery. Graphics and visually appealing presentations are more interesting and engaging. Perhaps this is why ideas that are presented with visuals are 6.5 times more likely to be remembered, according to Mink.
Pitfall #4: Presentations are put together almost as afterthoughts, with insufficient time and money invested. Everyone has PowerPoint (or similar software), so we typically take a couple of hours and paste text (in bullet points) from our last white paper/progress report/training manual into a deck of slides, maybe add a few animations if we’re feeling really committed, pick a theme, and “BOOM!” we’ve got a really bad presentation. It’s dry, monotonous and forgettable because we didn’t invest enough to make it anything else. But if the efficiency and effectiveness of the presentation can be improved by 650%, maybe it’s time to re-think.
If you can up your presentation game, you will probably increase your success rate as well. Elisabeth Osmeloski, who has worked with AvalaunchMedia at many conferences, has high praise for their methods and outcomes. “AvalaunchMedia is a good example of a company who puts a lot of time into crafting the story they want to tell with their presentations. Along with clearly defining the type of information they want to share, they put the time into designing an engaging presentation, which also plays well in other formats, such as online sharing, so they get maximum mileage out of the effort.”
If Mink and his team have a challenge, it is that some clients occasionally don’t see their vision and consequently decide not to go completely along with their creative direction. Such is the curse of being on the leading edge of a movement. Outdated habits can be hard to break. Perhaps Mink should create a specific presentation to persuade more clients to take the risk.
