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Organizing a messy page full of logos into an neat grid can be a pain. Most of the time, I use a simple PowerPoint table to do this. Figure out the required number of rows and columns, draw a table, reformat to a white background with very thin grey separator lines. Now you can plop in the logos in the right position, and best of all, if you have to insert/delete rows/columns, the grid gets adjusted in a second.
The big problem in webinars and web meetings is the upload bandwidth. If you are running the presentation live from your computer, then the speed at which attendees can download your high-res images, video, or animations is the speed of your upload connection which in most cases will not be much more than 1Mbps. Download speeds are much higher (I have gone up to 50Mbps recently).
The solution for this would be to upload the bandwidth-heavy content beforehand to a server, and only use your live upload connection for the audiotrack. Some web meeting solutions such as SalesCrunch (disclosure, a client) allow you to upload presentations beforehand. But video does not work (yet). Do any of you know a solution or a workaround that allows me to use video in a live webinar?
P.S. An earlier post about how I use an iPad to log in as a participant to monitor what my audience is seeing during a webinar.
Here is the easy way to embed a video in PowerPoint or Keynote:
There are more advanced control features available, but these basics should do for most users.
SalesCrunch (disclosure a client) is an online meeting platform that gives your real, hard statistics about how effective your meetings are: how many people pay attention, what % of your presentation is read, etc.
They analyzed the aggregate statistics of their entire client base and boiled the data down in an infographic. The key points will not surprise regular readers here: shorter meetings are better, shorter decks are better, and listening is better than doing all the talking. But for the first time, everything is backed up by hard data. Download the high-res version of the infographic here.
For a client proposal, I had to go back over the past 12 months and see what is the sort of work I do. Here is a breakdown in number of projects (can still be different from hours spent). The majority of my work is in investor and business development presentations for the high-tech industry (including biotech and medical devices).
This tweet by Michael Arrington says it all: investors are human, take it slowly and answer the very first thing what is on their mind: what is it that you are actually doing. You might have been working on this startup for months now, an investor hears about it for the very first time. You suffer from the Curse of Knowledge, and remember, an audience who is guessing what you do in the back of the mind is not paying attention to all the other things you want to say.
Just read an entire investor presentation, twice, carefully. No idea what this company wants to build or sell.Maybe sensors. We’ll see. — Michael Arrington (@arrington) March 21, 2012
Michael tried reading the deck twice, most investors will not do that.
Photographs with a strong perspective are always the most interesting ones to use in a presentation. See the example below. Strong lines leading to a bright spot that almost makes you squint. When adding PowerPoint objects make sure to align them properly with the flow of the image.
I will be heading to Munich (again) next week to speak at a conference about investor and sales presentations. Ping me if you want to say hi.
Image by Storm Crypt
The wide-spread use of smartphones has given almost anyone a camera in their pocket, all the time. So it has become really easy to collect some great pictures for your company presentation, even at the last minute. You could take them yourself, or email a colleague in a remote office to go out on a photo shoot. The images you are likely to get are going to be far better than the shot of the corporate logo behind the reception desk.
Even if you cannot use all these images as slides in your deck, these photos can make great backgrounds for separator pages that divide up the sections of your deck.
At McKinsey, we used to call this Business Dynamics, mapping reinforcing and opposing forces using arrows. The concept is borrowed from systems theory in mathematics and physics. These circles can make a great chart to show the main growth drivers behind your business.
The notorious US army spaghetti chart is a more complicated execution of the same principle. Contrary to many critical review, I actually liked it as a visualization of the incredibly complex situation over there.
UPDATE: There is now a PowerPoint slide template with 3 reinforcing loops available in the template store.
