PowerPoint Has Been Killing Us Since 2001

Hello, my peeps! This blog is going to be the bomb diggity.

That was painful to write, and I’m sure painful to read. You probably thought I was having an aneurysm. Or perhaps had suffered a head injury, blacked out, and woke up thinking it was still the early aughts. Do not worry. I am fine, and I promise never to write (or say) those phrases again.

Instead, we’ll be exploring how to avoid “death by PowerPoint.” I was surprised to learn that that phrase was coined in 2001, around the same time as those other words I have now promised not to write. But while “bomb diggity” (I’m sorry, last time, promise) makes us all cringe, “death by PowerPoint” still feels timely.

We have been saying this phrase for 23 years, and it’s just as relevant now as it was in 2001—which clearly means we have not yet mastered sales decks and other presentation slides.

DO I EVEN NEED A SALES DECK?

TL;DR (also coined in the early aughts), yes. Let’s be clear here that we’re talking specifically about sales decks. If you’re planning a TED talk and want to give it sans slides, go for it. As a sales professional, however, some of the factors that are working against you make the deck—whether for an intro call, discovery call, or onboarding—a necessity.

A mere three percent of the population considers salespeople to be trustworthy. When you’re meeting a prospect for the first time, you’re already fighting an uphill battle. Prospects are coming in expecting you to be unprepared and not interested in what they have to say. You need to immediately show them that you are a true sales professional. You’ve prepared, and they will see this when you pull up your presentation slides with their logo.

Having a sales deck with an agenda slide up front and asking the prospect what they’d like to add to it also lets you immediately quell the fear of the unknown. Especially in an intro call, your prospect is wondering what they are in for. Are they going to have to listen to you ramble on for 20 minutes? Is this going to be a waste of their time? By providing the agenda and asking what they would like to add to it, those fears and questions subside.

“It’s the psychology of showing someone that you’ve prepared something,” says Maestro founder Will Fuentes. “There’s a plan for the conversation, right? I’m trying to overcome the fear of the unknown, and I’m trying to overcome the biases against salespeople that they’re just going to ‘show up and throw up.’” (Also a phrase that’s been around for decades.)

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON POWERPOINT

(Fun fact: We’ve been playing on the “This is your brain on drugs” quote since 1987, proving that, even if you remember an ad, it doesn’t mean it was successful.)

People have made all sorts of
rules and guidelines around what makes
a good slide presentation. There’s the
6×6 rule: your slides should have
no more than six lines and
fewer than six words per line.

How does that look to you? The section above is an example of 6×6. In theory, it’s not necessarily a bad idea, but now pretend you’re trying to read that text while someone is talking to you about slide backgrounds. Guy Kawasaki, Chief Evangelist at Canva, takes a different approach, the 10-20-30 format: no more than 10 slides, no more than 20 minutes, no smaller than 30-point font. Because, according to Kawasaki, “a normal human being cannot comprehend more than 10 concepts in a meeting.”

Do you know what else a normal human being cannot do? Process written text and auditory content at the same time. Research from the University of New South Wales revealed that, when participants were shown a diagram with written descriptions while listening to an explanation, they had a harder time learning. These individuals had to reattempt the interactive exercises twice as much in order to get them right versus those who saw a diagram and written text only. Explaining a diagram without text works, but explaining a diagram that includes text, even if you’re saying the same thing that’s written on the diagram, decreases people’s ability to understand.

When it comes to words on slides, less is more. It’s fine to send over an informational deck after a presentation—we have clients whom we encourage to do so!—but that does not replace the need for a good, clean presentation deck. In fact, you may have two versions of a deck—one for the presentation and another to serve as a leave-behind. Which brings us to…

ARE THERE RULES FOR A SLIDE DECK?

If you’re looking for hard-and-fast rules like “never more than X words on a slide,” then no. There are no rules that can truly fit every situation. We have plenty of suggestions, however.

1. Create Different Decks for Different Folks
   Think about your target audience, how they will consume the information, and how much you have interacted with them. A discovery-call deck should look very different than an onboarding deck. You shouldn’t be doing most of the talking on your discovery call, which means your deck shouldn’t be sharing too much information, either. Later on, when you understand their pain points and are covering details of how you can solve them, more text may be warranted.
2. Less Is More
   When you are delivering a presentation, less slide text is better. Recall that people cannot read text and hear what you’re saying at the same time. Your slides should support what you’re talking about, but don’t include so much text that they become more of a distraction.
3. Practice
   Sounds obvious, we know. But sometimes, pricing plans get changed or new products become available, and suddenly, you’re presenting a slide you’ve never seen. Always make sure you’re practicing with the deck you’ll be presenting.
4. Double Check and Check Again
   Remember when I said it helps you build trust when you pull up a slide deck with your prospect’s logo on it? You lose trust when you pull up a presentation with another company’s logo. Yes, we have seen this.
5. Be Flexible
   The presentation deck should give you a proposed path for your meeting, but it must allow you some flexibility. If your prospect brings up an agenda item that you weren’t planning to discuss, you need to pivot. This is one reason Maestro’s Level 0 deck has eight slides and very little text. You don’t yet know which is your prospect’s greatest pain point, so your presentation must leave room to move in a number of directions.

“Death by PowerPoint” has out-survived so many trends and phrases. It’s no coincidence that “show up and throw up” has also out-survived most of its peers. Let’s put these two phrases to bed. Let’s ensure that in five years, “death by PowerPoint” sounds as outdated and cringy as “phat.” If “death by PowerPoint” were a person, it would have a job by now. Yo, dawg, that’s hella crazy. Sorry. It’s possible I did hit my head.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to create effective decks and have more successful sales conversations, reach out at mastery@maestrogroup.co.