Making better presentations - Presentation Zen style

One of the critical skills for starting a business is creating powerful presentations that sell.  You could be selling to customers, potential partners or raising capital.  I have working on improving my skills in this area and had the chance to talk to someone who prepares presentations for Oracle's top level management.  My question was, "What two books do you recommend reading that will improve my presentation skills." Her answer was Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen and Nancy Duarte's Resonate.

I feel confidant about my ability to talk in front of audiences but have struggled with the slide presentation piece of this, so I resolved to read and apply both books.  I started with Presentation Zen.  It has a killer slide deck at the start by Guy Kawasaki selling "Why buy this book?", which I have used several times to show entrepreneurs the basics of the book.

The bottom line is that each slide should consists of a beautiful image with as few words as possible.  The presentation consists of you telling stories around the point you are trying to make.  You should not put everything you are going to say into the slide.  Shockingly, people can't read the slide and listen to you at the same time.  If the audience requires a written explanation with full details, leave behind a handout.  The point of the presentation is to get them interested in engaging with you about your idea further.  They are not going to write a check at the end, so overwhelming them with details will kill their interest.

The best outcome is a group of people leaping out of their seats wanting more information and further interaction.  Once I reframed the purpose of the slides as to support my storytelling, it became much easier to create the slide deck.

Another part of the process that had stopped me before was sourcing the images for the slides.  I would get overwhelmed or tell myself I couldn't find images that matched my point.  So I challenge you to do the same thing I did to put this into practice.  I took an existing slide deck and sat down over several days and forced myself to convert it to the "Presentation Zen" style.  I used iStockPhoto.com at a cost of $1-$2.5 per slide for images that knocked my audiences socks off.

The results were gorgeous.  I have never presented such high quality slides to support my speaking.  I will share one which turned out great.  One of the lessons we have to convey to new entrepreneurs is that hiding their ideas is not a good strategy, since without a track record, they will be lucky to get anyone to listen to, much less steal, their ideas.

So here is the slide I used to communicate this idea with:

There were several stories I shared while showing this slide, but the slide was a great visual support.

Next post, I will discuss what lessons I learned from Nancy Duarte's Resonate and how I was able to up my game from Zen.