Converting verbose slides into simple diagrams - BuyAPresentation

Converting verbose slides into simple diagrams - BuyAPresentation

  A few months back I met up with one of my friends who sells mission critical software to financial institutions.  His pet peeve is that in his industry sales cycles are very long and the competition is tough. It is difficult to get the decision makers to sit through a presentation.

As my company is into presentations, he discussed his problems with me.

 He said, “These sales presentations are killing me. I just don’t have the time to sit and make ‘good looking’ slides.”

He is quite an expert in his field and knows his banking and software inside out. But his problem is in translating that knowledge to slides that convince his audience.

This is what I told him. 

 

First off, most presenters don’t realize that, creating apresentation involves two very different types of activities that demand two different skill sets: 
1.      Ideating the content for your presentation

•  Ideating effectively requires a strategic bent ofmind, a thorough understanding of the situation at hand, practical ideas tosuggest alternatives, and a clear vision to drive execution.

2.      Translating the content into effective slides

• Slides need to hold your audience’s attention and influence their purchasing decision.

• To translate effectively, you need visual thinking,design sense, knowledge of the presentation software and loads of time

As you can see, the two are very different skill sets, and itis not fair to expect a presenter excel in both.

But, unfortunately – the market doesn’t care about that reality. A lot of wonderful ideas get completely ignored by the audience, just because the presenter could not translate his ideas into an effective presentation. On the other hand, beautiful ‘Zen slides’ may entertain theaudience, but not deliver the results.
Let us try to address this problem.
If I look at the above two skills – ideating and translating, it seems your job is more to do with ideating than translating. You are paid to think about the strategies that work, anticipate the moves of your competition and devise plans to counter their attack.
The second part of the work, is about translating and requires specialized technical skills and time.Unless you have years of specialized experience, it is not possible to createprofessional and clear slides in a short time.
My friend agreed to this and said, “I realized the issue, so I hired a graphic designer to rework my slides. But, it didn’t really work out. The slides looked good, but the message was lost. “
For which I said:
There are 2 ways in which presenters try to address this translation issue:
1.     Hire graphic designers: There are 2 issues with this.

• They are expensive and time-consuming
• There is always a huge gap between what you have in mind, and what a graphic designer comes up with on his slides.  Though the slides look ‘beautiful’, they do not help you make your point effectively. This is because most graphic designers specialize in print media. The rules that apply to print are very different from the rules that apply to slides.

2.  Get free presentation templates: The issues here are different:

• These free templatesare in reality just some gaudy backgrounds. The designs are not veryprofessional.
• They add verylittle in terms of providing clarity to your message

My recommendation to him and to you is to visit our site www.buyapresentation.com and take a look at the concepts and diagrams templates. They offer value to you because:
1.      Created by professionals, for professionals:The templates are created by professionals with years of corporate experience and a flair for design. They understand what you need as sales and marketing professionals to make your presentations effective.
2.      Unique templates with diagrams and concepts to help add clarity: There is a whole range of templates to help you explain all the concepts in your presentations. Each template is professionally animated and is editable to save you time.
3.      Reasonably priced: They are very reasonably priced at a $1 or less per template.
When you make a one time investment on the Mega Pack and download the folder to your desktop, you can create insightful presentations quickly and for years to come.

Isn’t that a smart thing to do as a sales and marketing presenter - use someone else’s technical expertise with your ideas? Go try it. Happy selling!

How to create insightful diagrams for sales presentations

In my previous posts, I have shown you how ‘flea market’ slides and ‘zen’ slides can kill your presentations. In this post, I will answer the questions raised in those articles – that is – how to open up your audience’s mind using slides the right way.

The simple and most powerful way is to use diagrams. A presenter doesn’t require any specialized skill to draw insightful diagrams. In fact, you don’t even need to know how to draw a stick man to create good diagrams. 

Just pick up a piece of paper and a pencil. Learn a few fundamentals. You’ll be well on your way. In a series of posts from today, I wish to introduce you to this useful tool. 

Let us start by understanding what a concept diagram is. 

A concept diagram is nothing but a visual representation of objects and their relationships.

 

Let us understand this with an example. If asked to explain how an earthen pot is made, most presenters would use sentences like: 

 “Take some clay. Mix it with water till you get the desired consistency. Mould it into the shape of a pot”. 

Let us try to represent this idea as a diagram.

This is a simple representation of the images that pop up in my head, when I read the explanation above. As you could see, this simple diagram represents objects and their relationships in a natural way.

These rounded rectangles represent the objects in the idea: 

These circles in dotted line highlight the relationships:

Once we are clear with the relationship between objects, we can choose to represent the objects in the way we want, as long as we label them clearly. In the following case, I have not even used an image to represent the objects. It represents the idea just as well. 

So, the focus is not on the objects, but on the way relationships are represented. Of course, images or icons make the diagram look elegant. 

No matter how grand or complex your idea is, the underlying principle to represent it in diagrams, remains the same. But, the challenge is in identifying the objects correctly, and finding ways to representing the relationships accurately. 

More about this in later posts. Happy selling!

Visuals are your brains native language

Compare these slides

Here are two slides that make the same point. Which one appeals to your emotions better?

The first thought that came to your mind on seeing the text heavy slide was, “It looks COMPLEX". You hesitated to read through the text. Even if you did, it wasn’t easy to process it straight away.

The second slide gave you the idea instantly. The image of the dead bird triggered your emotions. You were compelled to read the caption. You were absorbed in the slide. 

Our mind thinks in visuals

The reason is - as humans, our mind thinks in the language of visuals. We learnt to draw long before we learnt to speak. 

 

Even now, our mind translates words into visuals before processing its meaning.

As a presenter...

What does this information mean to you as a presenter? 

Yes. When you present your idea visually, it gets understood faster, and retained longer than when it is presented just with words.

Even better – show your ideas in visuals, and support them with verbal explanation. This way, you engage multiple senses of your audience, which increases the retention of your message by as much as 65% (as per Cognitive load theory).

However, there is a slight hitch here. Using visuals in your slides is easy. But, using the RIGHT visuals is not. I know of so many cases where presenters have killed their presentations with inappropriate visuals. Since visuals attract the attention of your audience faster than words, wrong visuals can directly lead you to disaster.I have seen a lot of people use it the wrong way, read this article to see why.

How to use visuals – the right way? You’ll learn the answers to all these questions in my subsequent posts. Happy selling!