PowerPoint is a visual aide. Even if you remember this one fact it will improve your slide design 100%. This is because people use PowerPoint so badly they make their audience switch off. This is commonly called 'Death by PowerPoint'.
During the training day we will see which slide-decks add value to a presentation and why, and which ones detract and why. We’ll go in to detail around the purposes PowerPoint is used for and how you can approach its creation so as to help make it do more than one job if necessary.
A good PowerPoint slide-deck should be able to present detailed and complex content clearly and memorably. Therefore this is not technical training, this is about when to use it, when not to use it and what you decide to put on it.
After the day you'll be able to use a range of tools and strategies to develop your future presentations so your PowerPoint slide decks really end up aiding your presentations rather than damaging them.
Elevation Station’s personalised workshops challenge, support and contain plenty of confidence-boosting practice!
Robert had worked in sales for many years where presenting using PowerPoint was the standard. He came to me because he had noticed a gradual reduction of sales and an increase in stress. He found this peculiar as he would have expected, with experience, for the opposite to be the case.
Fairly on in the training, Robert volunteered to workshop his presentation, and by that I mean I and the other delegates would be his audience, and he would present to us as he would to any other prospective client. It became clear fairly early on what the problem was: Robert’s slide-deck was 95 slides long.
We didn’t look at all 95 slides. We didn’t need to. I think to we got to slide 7 before we called it quits and started to discuss how to move forward. At the end of the day, I thought Robert was quiet as he thanked me, which is not unusual. What I didn’t realise is how much change he was planning for his future presentations.
I’m always hopeful people have taken something from the training and will make some kind of change based on what they have learned. When I called Robert a month later to see how things were going, he told me about his massive change. He said he had reduced his slide-deck from 95 slides to 8. Yes, that’s correct, 8 (eight) and he said it was much more effective. Meaning, he was getting more sales and was a lot less stressed. Exactly how it should be for someone so experienced.
Robert’s story is not unusual as in my experience, training people in the use of PowerPoint is mainly about getting them to use it less. Which can come across and counterintuitive to delegates until they realise, like Robert, if it’s not helping you, it’s probably getting in the way.
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