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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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An indisputable fact of life in every company, every industry, every vertical, every geography, is that salespeople sell features when they should be selling benefits instead. This mistake is also chronic in presentations because presenters too often focus on their own message to the exclusion of their audiences, causing them to think: “Why should I care?” or “It’s all about you!”
Politicians fall into the same trap. A recent scientific study about persuasion in the political arena found that each side of the political spectrum tends to appeal only to the principles of their base and not to those of the opposition. Doing so not only fails to move any voters beyond those who are already committed, but it also drives the wide wedge in our polarized country ever deeper.
The latter problem is the equivalent of a presenter from a startup company pitching for financing only from an existing investor, or a salesperson selling only to existing customers. The salesperson thus gives up the possibility of gaining a new client or, better still, capturing a competitor’s customers.
One of my clients, a senior executive at a major telecom equipment company, learned that a potential client company he was pursuing decided to go with a competitor. He asked the client for one more chance to pitch. He began his presentation by complimenting the clients on their choice, listing the positive features of his competitor’s product. Then he stopped and said, “But…” and proceeded to list how his own company’s product features would better serve the client’s requirements. That’s a double down of the benefits.
He won the deal.
The authors of the scientific study described how politicians could double down their benefits in a recent New York Times article:
Clearly, tailoring benefits to each unique constituency produces a greater impact. This same approach is applicable to anyone attempting to convince anyone else to act; to vote, to buy, to invest, to approve, even to donate. Understand your audience. Who are they? What do they want? What are their fears, concerns, and hot buttons? Whether you are a salesperson, a presenter, or a politician, make your answers to those questions an integral part of your message.
If politicians were to do that, it just might begin to bridge the gaping chasm that is now dividing our country.
This blog post by Jerry Weissman was first published on his site at Forbes. He has written five books on presentation skills. His most recent, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations, published by Pearson, is available now from Amazon.
Jerry is among the world’s foremost corporate presentation coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intuit, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix, RingCentral, Mobileye, OnDeck, CyberArk, and many others.
Jerry founded Suasive, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco IPO roadshow. Following its successful launch, Don Valentine, of Sequoia Capital, and then chairman of Cisco’s Board of Directors, attributed “at least two to three dollars” of the offering price to Jerry’s coaching. That endorsement led to more than 600 other IPO roadshow presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.
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Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Jerry Weissman, Opinion, Presentation Skills
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Kurt Dupont, based out of Belgium heads PresentationPoint, a company that creates several amazing PowerPoint add-ins. After his Computer Science studies, Kurt started with Andersen Consulting (Accenture nowadays) in Brussels. After three years he moved to the Brussels Airport Terminal Company that runs the Brussels airport – this last placement inspired the start-up of Take-off (now known as PresentationPoint) in 1998.
In this conversation, Kurt discusses Dynamic LIKES, an add-in that lets you promote your Facebook page on your PowerPoint slides, continuously updated.
Geetesh: Kurt, tell us more about Dynamic LIKES – what motivated you to create this add-in that displays Facebook likes on a PowerPoint slide?
Kurt: Thanks Geetesh. You know that PresentationPoint stands for dynamic PowerPoint presentations. So no static text in text boxes on our slides. No. Dynamic information, that is linked to a data source and gets updated whenever you open a presentation. Or when you run the slide show, then the information could be updated every second or minute.
Next to database information about production and sales figures, we wanted to have something on social media. People, organizations, and companies want to get as many people to “Like” them as possible to send their pictures, stories, and news. Nowadays this is often done via a hand-written paper or flyer, and that does not get the attention it needs.
Geetesh: Can you share some real world scenarios where Dynamic LIKES can be used? Also, can Dynamic LIKES be used along with your other add-ins on the same slide?
Kurt: Imagine that you are running a shop. You use a computer screen or television, connected to a computer. The brightness of a television, the animation of slides and shapes, are a real eye-catcher for your audience. On your PowerPoint slides, you can add your opening hours, running promotions, upcoming events, announce holidays etc.
You just add one more slide to promote your Facebook page. Put on the thumbs-up icon of Facebook and your Facebook address or URL. You can even use a Quick Response (QR) code to let people scan the Facebook URL.
When they are on your Facebook page, they just have to like it to subscribe to news and promotions. On your slide, you display the number of likes in real-time. And whenever someone likes your page, this number is automatically incremented. The person that liked your page will feel accepted with this positive feedback on the screen. This is a motivation for others to test this out!
And to answer your other question; Yes, Dynamic LIKES works fine with our other PowerPoint add-ons. Next to the number of Facebook likes, you can e.g. display real-time RSS news and weather information of your city.
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Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Dynamic Likes, Facebook, Interviews, Kurt Dupont, PowerPoint, PresentationPoint
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Shapes in PowerPoint are very useful in representing design or content, or in showing a process or a sequence. However, when you create a slide that has many such shapes, you’ll find that most of your shapes may be the same size and may also share other similar attributes. Yes, you can go ahead and insert the same shape into PowerPoint repeatedly, but that will consume much of your productive time that you could have used elsewhere! There are quicker alternatives for duplicating shapes.
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PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Duplicate, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Shapes, Tutorials
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The new Smart Lookup feature in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows is an option that brings up definitions, images, and other results from various online resources about a word or phrase, right within PowerPoint. PowerPoint’s online documentation sometimes calls this feature Insights, and it looks like the terms Insights and Smart Lookup are the same features.
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PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Interface, Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Reference, Search, Smart Lookup, Tutorials
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Bob Befus is passionate about helping scientists and clinicians present the results of their research. In the 1980s, he co-founded a company that eventually became Research Presentation Strategies (RPS). RPS developed and manages SlideSource.com, a presentation management tool that lets you organize and share your presentations from one secure online library anytime, anywhere.
In this conversation, Bob discusses presentitis.
Geetesh: Bob, what exactly is presentitis? Also, are those who suffer from presentitis aware that they have a problem?
Bob: Presentitis (pre-sen-TIE-tis) is a serious, slide-related stress disorder that is common among all types of PowerPoint users. It causes a wide range of chronic health problems for both presenters and the people who create and manage their presentations.
Recent studies have shown that presentitis is on the rise around the world and often goes undiagnosed. It may affect as many as 26,000,000 people in the United States alone. But sufferers may not even realize they have this serious, debilitating condition.
Diagnosing presentitis can be tricky. Symptoms can be vague or extremely similar to other ailments like gallbladder problems, bladder or urinary tract infections or gastritis.
One of the first symptoms sufferers become aware of is a profound and chronic state of frustration resulting from disorganized PowerPoint slides and presentations. The second is often an overwhelming urge to sleep during the day due to anxiety and sleeplessness at night. While other symptoms may vary greatly from one sufferer to another, the most common symptoms occurring in the majority of sufferers include:
Geetesh: Can you tell us more about the cure for this state?
Bob: While presentitis is a common and serious disorder, it is largely preventable and can be cured even after symptoms appear. Preventing and curing presentitis is simple, and the cure has no adverse side effects.
Managing individual slides and presentations in an easy to use online library will prevent the onset of Presentitis… and quickly cure it once it has developed.
Years of research and clinical testing have gone into the development of SlideSource.com, the only approved cure for presentitis. SlideSource.com brings powerful slide and presentation management to every PowerPoint user and presenter in an easy to use cloud-based solution.
With SlideSource.com, users report 100% elimination of the symptoms of presentitis… along with increasing feelings of control and confidence because they always know where the most current versions of all their slides and presentations are.
If you are wondering if you might have presentitis, you can find excellent resources and even take a self-assessment test at Presentitis.com.
If you know you are a presentitis sufferer and want to move right to the cure, visit SlideSource.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.
See Also: So Many Slides: Conversation with Robert Befus
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: Digital Asset Management, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Management, Presentitis, Robert Befus, Slide Management, SlideSource
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