The four basic points are:

The Goldilocks rule

Include only the data needed, nothing more.  Anything else is distracting from the message.

The Rudolph Rule

Do something to make the important data stand out- a different color, size, seperate it, anything, just make it different than the rest.

The Rule of Four

The human mind can visually capture about four pieces of visual data at a time- so keep your slides broken down to four batches of data or less.

The Birds of  a Feather

Organize like information in groups.  It will help people process those groups of information like a single piece of information, better enabling them to intake the information in question.

Great stuff.  Try it in your next presentation!

Before going for a formal presentation, work on relationships first. Try to meet and know, or at least know about, all of the key players that you are presenting to. Don’t forget the ‘secondary’ players either. It is very seldom that anyone on the client side is invited to a presentation by accident. Usually, these folks are trusted advisors. Being armed with some knowledge of these people will help you build a better presentation.

If you cannot manage to meet and start a relationship of credibility with the audience beforehand, try to find someone with whom you have credibility who also has a relationship with the audience and ask that person to lead the meeting. Their introduction and testimonial will help to establish some level of credibility for you. If the audience trusts your meeting leader, and she establishes that she trusts you, then in turn you have gained an opportunity to be trusted as well. It’s just like meeting a new circle of friends when you go to a party with a friend- if you’re good enough for their friend who brought you, then you have a foot in the door.

Some of this information here is elementary, but nevertheless it’s important and should never be forgotten. Credibility is easy to build if you know how, but it is also amazingly easy to destroy, and once destroyed, nearly impossible to rebuild.

I have posted in the past several times with various pieces of advice on PowerPoint.  Now I offer one more piece of advice, and it’s a simple one:

Your PowerPoint slide presentation is a road map for a journey- a journey that you want to take with the people in the room.  Like a vacation plan, you are more likely to have fun if you wander off the path.

Great… thanks, Stacey.  What the heck does that mean?

What it means is this:  most all presentations are effectively a sales pitch- you are presenting an idea that you want people to buy into.  If you do your presentation without varying from the road, you will, and I guarantee this, fail to get the people in the audience actually involved in a conversation with you about the idea.  If you don’t get them into a discussion, your odds of closing the sale are much longer than if you get them involved. 

Granted, getting off your planned path can be dangerous at times.  Here are some pointers to help you in this dangerous territory:

• If the discussion brings up a point that you will be addressing later in the presentation, do not be afraid to say “That’s a great point, and we’ll be coming to that shortly,” then get back on task.  This is okay because a) you’ve engaged them and acknowledged them, b) you’ve gotten back on the road, and c) you can guarantee that they’ll pay attention, waiting for their point to come up again.

•  Don’t be afraid to say “That’s a great question.  I am sure we have those details, but I will have to get in touch with our experts on that to get you the details.  Can I get your contact info at the end, and I’ll get you that information?”  People don’t expect you to know everything.  They are turned off if you panic when asked about something you don’t know, though.  It shows a lack of confidence- and no one buys anything from an un-confident salesman.

• Do watch your available time.  If you’re getting too far off the path, do not be afraid to ask “You know, I think we have a lot more we can share about that, and we still have quite a bit of material to cover.  Can we schedule another meeting for you so that we can explore that part in detail?”  When you do this, you’ve acknowledged their interest, gotten back on your time schedule, you’ve gained commitment for another meeting and more face time, and most importantly, you’ve gotten the audience to commit to think about your idea more and invest more time in it.  Investment of their time thinking about your idea is investment in their buy-in to your idea.

Remember- conversation is key to buy-in.  Don’t be afraid to vary from your presentation in the name of making an idea sale.  The goal of any presentation is to sell an idea, not to show every PowerPoint slide in your deck.  The best sales presentations are the ones where you make the sale without even finishing your presentation.

This one is a personal topic for me because, frankly, at one time I did everything on this list and more besides.  It’s something I have worked on over time to improve.  In addition to that article, I recommend the following:  work at it one thing at a time.  Start with the items that make you seem less open to hearing others first, such as crossing your arms and avoiding eye contact- after all, if you don’t listen to people, they won’t listen to you.  People will be more tolerant of your idiosyncracies, too, and listen more, if they believe that you listen to them.  Just keep focus- defeat one habit, move to a second, then monitor yourself for both as you take on a third.  ALWAYS remember to monitor for old habits to return.  Over time, you’ll get better and better at it. 

 Body language may not seem that important, but believe me, it is.  Of the self-improvements I’ve made in life, I have seen more results in my career advancement and in my personal life since I set out to change this about myself than any other thing I’ve done.  Do this for yourself, and do it now.

 Wait.  Tragedy?  How so?  Look through your company’s (or better yet, your former company’s) project portfolio.  I guarantee you will see at least one, maybe many, projects whose scope is large enough and complex enough, and the roadmap deep enough, that it’s impossible to describe it in a single paragraph.  Or drawing.  Or even a single meeting.

Why is this bad?  Beyond the difficulty of illustrating your vision and gaining adoption (you want adoption, right?), there’s the difficulty of communicating it.  Consider this:  the typical person’s short term memory is 5-7 items.  That means that if you are describing something to them, and there’s more than 5-7 bullet points to it, they will most likely lose part of the message.  There’s a great article on Church of the Customer illustrating a great case study of this very thing.  If your ideas get too big to remember and comprehend easily, you’re in trouble.

So what am I evangelizing here?  Small projects for all?  No, not necessarily.  What I recommend is finding ways to group your ideas.  Most products are actually aimed at one or a few goals.  Most of the features that you’re planning are probably designed to contribute to one of those goals.  Some of the goals, in fact, probably contribute to bigger goals.  That’s the thing.  Build a tree of goals.  Get hierarchical if you can, but a network diagram works as well.  Let people learn your 3-5 things (you want to keep it under their short term memory tolerance, remember, so it’s easy to remember), then branch to what’s under one item, then the next, then the next, then branch deeper… each time, again, relate it to the idea above, then the idea above that.  By relating it back, you are also using memory techniques. 

 We all learned these memory techniques to get through all those boring 100 level college courses, remember?  Leverage them!  Use them to communicate your vision!  Build a picture that is easily memorable and understandable.  This will help you spread your vision.  It will make your vision easier to understand.  It will even make it easier to manage. 

No matter how complex, Keep It Simple, Stupid… and they’ll remember and respond, just like you just did ;).

The Gettysburg Address, as it might have gone if Powerpoint had existed back then.

This is great fun, but let it be a lesson too… just think back to this the next time you consider what to do for your next project presentation.

So was I, for many years.  It was at one time a point of pride for me that I had made it so long in my career without using Powerpoint.  Nowadays, though, I can’t really do my job without it (the business folks catch us all sooner or later).

Being the type of person I am, though, once I started using it, I knew there had to be a Better Way.  It turns out, if you have access to the Internet, time, and a little patience, there is always a Better Way.  And someone’s probably blogging on it.

So, without further ado, below is a list of five articles I’ve found indispensible when understanding how to do a truly great presentation. 

1. Five rules for Powerpoint (Working Smart)

2.  The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint (Guy Kawasaki)

3. What’s good Powerpoint design? (Presentation Zen)

4. Better Presentations (43 Folders)

5. Great Presentations (Tom Peters)

And, as a bonus, here’s a great guide to what not to do:

Microsoft’s Twelve Tips for Creating Better Powerpoints (which is really a guide to using all the extra bells and whistles in Powerpoint to make your slides scare people)