How To Win a Pitch: The Five Fundamentals that Will Distinguish You from the Competition by Joey Asher

Author:Joey Asher [Asher, Joey]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Persuasive Speaker Press
Published: 2009-05-03T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Visuals: How to Create Slides That Help You Win

The first thing you should know about your presentation slides is that they aren’t going to win the job for you. Companies spend days creating PowerPoint slides for new business pitches. And yet so much of the time spent is wasted. Why? No one ever wins business with great PowerPoint.

Here are phrases I hear all the time:

• “We picked this team based on the fact that they seemed to really understand our business issues.”

• “They seemed very well-prepared.”

• “They seemed like a group that we’d like working with.”

Here is a phrase I’ve never heard:

• “We picked them because they had really nice slides.”

I have worked with many clients who present and win without slides. Presenting without slides allows you to focus on connecting with the prospect. On the other hand, I know it’s impractical and often foolish to go to most presentations without slides. So here are some ideas on using slides effectively.

HOW POWERPOINT CAN SCUTTLE YOUR NEW BUSINESS PITCH

The first rule of using PowerPoint effectively is to make sure it doesn’t cost you the job.

When PowerPoint turned twenty-years-old in 2007, I wrote a column that revisited a particularly gruesome scene from the sci-fi action film Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In this scene, Arnold wraps a towel around his head and then sticks a metal probe up his own nose.

The probe then proceeds to crawl up into his brain and pull back through his left nostril a glowing red ball that looks way too big to make it out of his nose. Watching the ball slowly and painfully emerge, I cringed in my seat. As my ten-year-old daughter likes to say, “Now that’s gotta hurt!”

The ball was a “bug” placed into Arnold’s brain—sort of a human “Lo-Jack” that the bad guys secretly put there to track his movements. He had to get rid of it if he were going to save the country, planet, universe, etc.

American business needs a similar probe to remove PowerPoint from our collective corporate brain. I’m not saying that PowerPoint is evil. It’s a fine piece of software for creating visuals to illustrate a presentation.

However, in some critical ways, PowerPoint has grown beyond an illustration tool and merged with our corporate presentation psyche in ways that hamper our ability to connect with clients and give good presentations.

DON’T USE POWERPOINT TO DRAFT PRESENTATIONS

First, the process of creating PowerPoint slides has merged in our corporate brain with the process of initially creating a presentation. As a result, we’re creating terrible presentations.

Here’s a scene that takes place thousands of times every day in businesses across America. Judy wants to create a new business pitch. So, she sits down at her desk and opens up PowerPoint and begins using the program’s easy-to-use templates to outline her message. Before long, she has created thirty or forty slides, loaded with bullet points. She then goes in front of her prospect and narrates her presentation from the slides.

About two minutes into her speech, her listeners are busily thumbing their BlackBerries.

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