This is a guest post contributed by Rick Altman, a world-renowned presentation consultant, PowerPoint expert, author, and the organizer of PowerPoint Live.

It is rare in modern-day business presentations to see a problem or difficulty that isn’t in some way caused by an overabundance of projected text. Just off the top of my head...

• Speaker reading the slides
• Audience tuning out and/or developing eye fatigue
• Lack of emotion or energy in room
• No real connection created between speaker and audience

All of these pitfalls usually boil down to slides that try too hard, that compete for attention, and that become distractions. Here are the four typical reasons why you as the presenter might make this mistake and how you can best avoid it in the future:

1. You Do Not Know Any Better

In the first installment of this series, we spoke of the multitude of PowerPoint users whose bridge to the software was their proficiency with other Office applications. If you come from Word and you are new to PowerPoint, you don’t know that writing out an entire document in PowerPoint is the wrong thing to do. It might seem like a perfectly logical way to prepare: write down what you want to say and then say it. And hey, there’s this software program that will show you everything that you’ve written down, so your audience can see it, too.

Of the four problem areas we define here, this one is the easiest to address: You learn the fundamentals of good presentation design. You have no bad habits yet and few preconceived notions. You’re just green. You just need to buy a good book...

2. You Are Addicted

This problem is not so easy to solve and in our line of work, we see it all the time: the presenters who feels as if they cannot function unless fully-formed thoughts are on each slide. While this usually finds its roots in the 47-minute syndrome discussed in the first installment (this is how they learned to use PowerPoint and they never questioned it or tried anything different), if you suffer from this, it has grown into a crutch without which you believe you cannot stand.

No question about it, one of today’s most acute pain points is when speakers use their slides as notes. It leads to the first three universal axioms that we will put forth across this series:  

If a slide contains complete sentences, it is practically impossible for even the most accomplished presenters to avoid reading the entire slide word for word.

Watch for it the next time you attend a presentation: the more verbiage a slide contains, the more likely is the speaker to read all of it. This axiom leads directly into a second one:

When you read your slides word for word, you sound like an idiot.

This addiction needs to be kicked cold turkey: You need to force yourself to parse your bullets to the absolute bare minimum and then try speaking to them. At first, you might feel naked out there without your comfortable safety net, but in our experience, by the second time, you will begin to feel comfortable without the security blanket of all that text, and by the third time, you will thrive.

So many good things happen when you weed-whack your text, but above all, now there is the likelihood that the real person inside of you might come out, as opposed to the drone who was reading those slides before. Now your audience might really have an opportunity to engage with your ideas and feel the weight of your message. Once you get out from under your slides, you take the first step toward truly connecting with your audience on a level other than the intellectual. As presenters, that is our promised land.

3. You Are Trying to Create Leave-Behinds

How many times have you been to a presentation in which the speaker printed out his or her slides and delivered them as notes? How many times have you done this? In my opinion, this fails every time. In 15 years as a presentation consultant, I have never once seen a single slide deck function successfully as printed material and projected content. Not once!

There is just no free lunch here: If you prepare your slide deck properly, with engaging visuals and minimal text, it would be inadequate as supplemental documentation to your presentation. If you create fully-fleshed-out documentation that would be well-suited for printouts and you project them as your slide content...instant Death by PowerPoint.

This is a tough one, because I know that the unavoidable conclusion here is extra work for you. You must create two documents to do it right. With slide deck deadlines that are routinely “yesterday,” this is a tough pill to swallow and I have no illusions to the contrary. I refer you to our current Article of the Month for tangible and specific solutions to this dilemma.

4. You Are Required to

I see this more and more in my travels as a consultant: the presenter who feels compelled or is literally required to display and say out loud a lengthy passage of text. An annual shareholders meeting...a proposal at a city council meeting...safety guidelines for visitors at a public gathering...these often carry legal or fiduciary requirements.

But we have already established the high fire danger of displaying lengthy content and then reciting it off the screen. So what do you do?

The recipe for success here is the order in which you do things:

1. Offer up the most minimal bullet points for the required passage.
2. Recite the entirety of your required message.
3. Then display the entirety of your required message.

Doing it this way resonates at a profoundly different frequency; now you’re not a drone, you’re omniscient! Say it first...display it second—that makes all the difference in the world when you are faced with this type of requirement in a public presentation.

Please take from this article one simple conclusion: Less text on your slides!

This is a guest post contributed by Rick Altman, a world-renowned presentation consultant, PowerPoint expert, author, and the organizer of PowerPoint Live.

Anyone in today’s workplace knows what’s wrong with business presentations and the software of choice for 99% of those giving them. Just about everyone has experienced Death by PowerPoint, and based on statistics, you have probably committed it on more than one occasion.

Everyone can cite the biggest offenses:

• too much text on slides,
• lack of forethought,
• little regard for message,
• unimaginative design,
• and those awful animations.

Indeed, Googling “i hate powerpoint” returns hundreds of thousands of hits. And the edgy title of my current book, Why Most PowerPoint Presentations SUCK… And how you can make them better, has struck a respondent chord among potential readers.

But these are the symptoms of the problems facing the business presentation community, they are not the reasons. Why are these things happening? What is the real problem?

You might think that it’s because the software is too hard to learn, but you’d be wrong. In fact, you would be as wrong as you could possibly be.

The problem is that PowerPoint is too easy.

We conducted a survey at the 2006 PowerPoint Live User Conference in which we asked a simple question:

How much time did you spend learning the software?

We asked this question of the 217 attendees, each of whom spent over $800 and took several days out of their work schedule in order to attend. In other words, we asked the most committed, vested, devoted users of the software that you’ll ever find.

The average time spent learning PowerPoint was 47 minutes. Most said they spent less than one hour learning PowerPoint and a handful put the number at 15 minutes. This is the tool to which they owe their livelihoods and prior to coming to PowerPoint Live, they had invested mere minutes in training time.

And that’s because the software is really quite easy to begin using. Both of my daughters created slides at eight years old. You don’t need much training to get around and do stuff.

And that’s a big, big problem.

I come to the presentation community from the publishing and graphics industry, where the software really is hard. If you want to learn Adobe Photoshop, you know you need help. We used to get 400 and 500 people to attend our seminars on CorelDraw and Ventura Publisher, and I wrote edition after edition of books on those subjects.

But the PowerPoint user is typically someone who either showed proficiency with the other Office products or was found to not be shy in public gatherings. He or she was asked to learn PowerPoint and was able to do it in short order, like 47 minutes, and has gone on to spend the next five years using only the tools and the maneuvers learned during those first 47 minutes...

If you stink at Excel, you do so in the privacy of your own cubicle. But if your PowerPoint skills are bad, entire roomfuls of people see it.

So no wonder!

The good news is that we see a change in this trend. Attendance is up at learning events, many more books are published discussing advanced concepts, and most of us active as presentation consultants are seeing upticks in businesses.

More important, companies are finally starting to get it. Historically, most organizations have invested far more on their printed brand than on their in-person one. They would spend millions of dollars on logo design and advertising, yet for what is usually the first impression – the sales call or proposal in the boardroom – they would send someone out with a 47-minute skill-set.

Now these same companies are beginning to realize the importance of presentation skills development, and this is welcome news.

What are the important skills needed by content creators, slide designers, PowerPoint jockeys, and presenters who have had their consciousness raised? That will be the subject of our next posting…

Make sure you read Rick Altman's next article on the root cause of many bad PowerPoint presentations, Too Much Text!

According to a study from Think Outside The Slide™, audiences find that text-heavy slides are the root cause behind most awful PowerPoint® presentations:

When asked to select the top three things that annoy them about bad PowerPoint® presentations, the respondents cited the following as the most annoying:

• The speaker read the slides to us - 67.4%
• Full sentences instead of bullet points - 45.4%
• Text so small I couldn't read it - 45.0%

All of three of these annoyances all have one root cause: too much text on the slides.

Fixing Text-Heavy Slides with Graphics

A picture is worth a thousand words, so why not use some pictures to cut down on that heavy text?

Here are five ways you can fix text-heavy slides using graphics:

1. Express Regional Information with Maps

If you’re describing a regional sales process, why not replace those bullets with a map? Maps are ideal for presentations because:

• They’re familiar
• They’re easy to digest
• They provide a great summary of the information that you’re presenting
• And they’re easy to remember!

Maps are an obvious, easy substitute for text – there’s no reason to bore your audience with two slides riddled with bullets when you can make the same point using a map.

We’ve written about other various ways to utilize maps before; Laurence even put together an interactive electoral map for the U.S. primary elections.

2. Don’t Describe Processes, Show Them

Too many presenters describe their business processes or procedures with bullet after bullet after bullet; a flowchart will accomplish the same goal, informing the audience on how a particular process works, but it will do it that doesn’t put the audience to sleep.

Written descriptions of process, i.e. loads of bulleted lists, only describe processes – they don’t visualize them! The PowerPoint® itself shouldn’t even try to describe how any of your processes work, that’s something you should be doing as a presenter! Why would you want to bore your audience by reading a slide to them describing how your process works?!

Use a flowchart as a visual aid instead – you can describe your process verbally to your audience while giving them a visual to help clarify how the described process works.

3. Need to Explain an Organization’s Structure? Save Yourself the Trouble

Speaking from experience, it’s pretty tough to explain a complex organization without a visual aid. Written descriptions rarely help, and in the case of PowerPoint® presentations they are actually counter-productive.

Org Charts are easy to build, easy to explain, and don’t pose any “data dumping” problems for most presentations. What I like best about using them in presentations is that they are mostly self-explanatory – it doesn’t take much time at all to make your point regarding a specific person or position within a company when you can instantly illustrate exactly where that position rests within the organization.

4. Illustrate Statistical and Financial Trends with a Chart

Bullets are fine for demonstrating one or two specific figures but when you want to explain a trends or relative values to your audience then the easiest way to do that is to use a chart as a visual aid. Charts are simple and are very good at demonstrating significance, deviation, and relative values.

Many people often avoid using charts in their PowerPoint® presentations simply because it’s difficult to build a free-form chart in Excel®, or because they can’t get their data-driven charts to look right in Excel®, or because the Office Charts® simply suck.

SmartDraw actually makes it pretty easy to build slick, free-form charts and we’ll demonstrate that in an upcoming screencast, but rest assured that the payoff for using a chart in your presentation is well-worth it. Charts get the point across quickly and memorably.

5. Use Prototypes for Explaining GUI Designs

If you’re trying to present a new Graphical User Interface, like a new website layout, then isn’t it insane to present something graphical using nothing but words? Use a simple UI mock-up or a prototype to support your explanation for specific design changes.

There are probably thousands of other ways to eliminate dense blocks of text from your PowerPoint® presentations, but I have personally found these five techniques to be helpful in my work here at SmartDraw and in my spare time as a freelance software developer. Feel free to leave some feedback in the comments below.

Also, if you want to learn how to incorporate SmartDraw diagrams into PowerPoint® presentations and Word® documents then click here.

When I was in college I had to endure painfully long meetings for all of my student organizations; every presenter at every meeting had some sort of self-important need to prattle on and on about every irrelevant piece of minutia. This resulted in endless, agonizing, uninteresting meetings.

From that point onward I always looked at meetings as inescapable personal productivity sinkholes. However, once I got into the driver's seat and ran a couple of meetings I figured out a few ways to keep meetings short and to the point. Here are a few of the techniques that I'm familiar with:

1. Time Boxing

Time boxing, when it comes to meetings, is a pretty literal concept: use other events to box your meeting into a fixed, inflexible window.

But flexibility is good, right? Not when it means having a 30 minute staff meeting run for an hour past its deadline because two of your managers are long-winded.

The idea behind time boxing isn't to limit the number of discussed items; it's to coerce the meeting's attendees to get to the point quickly.

Here's an example of time boxing for meetings:

All of these meetings use the same conference room; neither the staff meeting nor the sales meeting are going to be able to run long, given that the people in subsequent meetings are going to be pounding on the door trying to get in. The first meetings are boxed in by the subsequent meetings, thus they can’t really spill over into someone else’s meeting.

This is my favorite technique simply because there is no “bad guy” when you have to cut someone off from speaking any further; you’re simply the peace keeper between your own meeting and the next one.

2. Moderation

Well-run organizations self-moderate, where the attendees and presenters help each other stay on track and keep things short without any nudging from the meeting organizer. If someone is running too long then the attendees simply say “we need to move on” or something along those lines; moderation, if anything, is an implementation of brevity-seeking mentality.

Other organizations have the meeting organizer handle all of the moderation himself. Moderation is often employed in tandem with general time limits for meetings.

3. Discussion Limits

Larger organizations limit discussion time for large meetings, Congress being an example. Discussion limits can work in one of two ways:

• Before the meeting is held the agenda is distributed to all attendees and any attendee who wishes to speak during a certain agenda item must say so beforehand and will be allotted some time to speak accordingly. Each action item has a fixed amount of total discussion time and that time is divided among the speakers.
• There is no planning beforehand, but each agenda item has a fixed amount of discussion time; the discussion will continue until time runs out and a decision is rendered.

Discussion limits might be overkill for smaller organizations, but they are essential for really large meetings.

Once your meeting runs beyond a certain time threshold then each additional minute becomes less productive than the last; keeping your meeting framed under real-world time constraints is essential to ensuring productive meetings.

I hope you’ve found this helpful and feel free to leave some comments below.

In this screencast I show you how to embed SmartDraw diagrams into Microsoft Word and PowerPoint; as usual, it's pretty easy to do this in SmartDraw. Leave your comments below!

Download a free trial of SmartDraw here.

In this screencast I will show you how to export any SmartDraw diagram to Portable Document Format, more commonly referred to as PDFs. PDFs are the best way to share SmartDraw documents with coworkers and associates who may not have SmartDraw installed, so watch this screencast if you're interested in learning how to export SmartDraw documents to PDF format (it's really easy.)

Download a free trial of SmartDraw here.

A sale is an arduous, grueling process; you begin with a large number of leads, determine which ones are interested in your product, determine which ones have the authority and resources to actually make the purchase, and finally, at some point in time, complete the sale.

This sales process often leads to what is referred to as a sales funnel – you start with a wide base of leads and funnel your way down to a number of completed sales.

In my opinion, most sales teams are so focused on getting those sales that they don’t take the time to inspect their sales processes and determine where they might be losing a disproportionately large number of leads. Our most recent Working Smarter article, "Working Smarter with Sales Funnel Charts," addresses this issue and explains how your sales team can convert more leads by refining their sales process using Sales Funnel Charts.

Why Sales Funnel Charts?

Sales funnel charts are very intuitive; the top of the inverted pyramid is the widest because you have the most leads at that point of the sales process – as you qualify your leads based on interest, authority and ability to buy, you move to narrower and narrower sections of the pyramid. The last section of the pyramid, the narrowest section, represents all of your final sales at the end of the sales process.

Sales processes are large and complex – if you wanted to optimize and refine your sales process right off the bat, the task would be impossible due to the complexity of your sales process. There are simply too many steps, too many leads, and too much information to try and optimize your entire sales process at once.

The value of the sales funnel chart comes from being able to break down your sales process into sequential steps. By breaking down your sales process into a funnel, you can accomplish the following objectives:

Sales Funnel Charts Simplify the Entire Sales Process

Breaking down your sales process into individual steps makes it much easier to appreciate how the entire process works. So what does this do for your business?

Well, for one thing, it makes it infinitely easier to communicate your sales process to new employees, to investors, and to your superiors in the company!

Sales Funnel Charts Quantify the Sales Process

It’s the year 2008; if you can’t measure the efficiency of your sales process in quantifiable terms, you’re doing something wrong—period. Using historical data, you can use your sales funnel to determine:

• How many leads result in sales
• And how much money it costs you to convert a single lead into a sale.

Take this example, for instance:

• You distribute emails to 20,000 prospects;
• 500 prospects request additional information;
• The telemarketer qualifies only 20 prospects as having the authority to buy;
• And 10 prospects agree to purchase the product at the given quotes.

Notice that I followed the steps laid out by my sales funnel in my analysis – what does this data tell you? Without the sales funnel, you would have known that you converted only 10 of your original 20,000 prospects—a conversion rate of 0.05%.

However, with the sales funnel you learn some additional facts about your sales process – for instance, most of the prospects who were interested in your product do not have the authority to buy. You're losing a disproportionately large number of leads at the qualification phase! This means that your initial email campaign is targeting the wrong people!

Breaking down your sales funnel data using a sales funnel chart as a guideline can help lead to additional insight like the kind I demonstrated using this simple example.

In addition, a sales funnel chart also enables you to understand just how much work goes into converting each lead into a sale – based on the example sales funnel chart that I’ve included in this blog entry, you can tell that your sales team has to contact the lead five times before a sale is completed:

1. Once to simply email the prospect;
2. Once to send information to an interested lead;
3. Once to qualify the lead’s authority to buy;
4. Once to deliver a price quote to the lead;
5. And once to close the sale.

Using that information, you can determine how much money it costs you in terms of the sales team’s time to close a single sale. It would be much harder to make this determination without breaking down each sale into a process of sequential, measurable steps.

In conclusion, it’s a good idea to use a sales funnel chart to communicate your sales process easily and, more importantly, to help measure the efficiency of your process.

Learn More about Optimizing Your Sales Process

If you'd like to see how to draw and use a sales funnel chart, please view our screencast "Refine Your Sales Process with SmartDraw."

Also, if you'd like to try SmartDraw, you can download a free trial of SmartDraw.

SmartDraw 2008 Owners: To get the templates discussed in this document, download and run this file: http://www.smartdraw.com/downloads/sd2008/sd2008_Marketing.exe

In this screencast I show you how to refine your sales process using a Sales Funnel Chart, a chart designed to help you map out your sales process and discover where you might be losing a disproportionately large number of potential sales.

Download a free trial of SmartDraw here.

Learn More

If you'd like to learn more about this topic then be sure to read our companion PDF - Working Smarter with Sales Funnel Charts.

Just before I began working for SmartDraw I worked as a consultant who specialized in building online marketing solutions.

One time when I began working with a new client I sat him down at our first meeting and asked him “who are your customers?” He told me “anyone who is willing to buy what I have to sell.” Immediately I concluded that this client would need a better definition of his target market if he had any interest in actually selling anything.

I wish I could have sent him our most recent Working Smarter article, “Working Smarter with Market Focus Diagrams.”

The premise of the article is that you can use market focus diagrams, more commonly referred to as Venn diagrams, to help you identify a specific target market within the context of larger, broader markets.

The market focus diagram is useful for quickly explaining who your target market is to members of your organization, investors, or potential partners. However, it’s really the process of creating the diagram which benefits small business owners and managers.

Venn Diagrams Aren’t Obvious, Contrary to Popular Belief

Venn diagrams are a simple concept but not an obvious one.

The first step to understanding the value of a Venn Diagram is understanding the significance of the sizes of the circles.

As you probably know a Venn diagram is meant to illustrate the commonalities between different groups. A market focus diagram is a specific application of a Venn diagram meant to show overlaps between different groups of customers.

In our SmartDraw example, we defined SmartDraw’s broad “target market” in our unique selling proposition as “Office Users.”

We start with the circle which represents all Microsoft Office users:

This circle is going to be largest given that it’s the broadest definition of our target market. Most of our potential customers will be contained inside this group.

The next group that we want to add into our market focus diagrams is “managers” – people who manage something, whether it’s people, projects, or operations.

Notice that while both groups mostly overlap, some managers fall outside the purview of “Microsoft Office Users.” This is something that we thought about when we were going through the process of determining SmartDraw’s target market: do all managers use Office?

Naturally, there are some who don’t and they are not our ideal customers because chances are that if they do not own Office then they will not be interested in SmartDraw either.

As the SmartDraw marketing team pondered our ideal target market some more, we determined that there was another important group of people who need our software: presenters. We defined presenters as “anyone who has to invest significant resources into preparing presentations on a regular basis.” So we added them to our market focus diagram:

There are more managers than there are presenters, thus the “presenters” group is smaller than the “managers” group. However, there are still a large number of managers who have to make formal presentations to their supervisors, investors, or customers, thus there is a decent amount of overlap between the two groups.

And this is our ideal target market – “managers who use Microsoft Office to prepare presentations.” The process of drawing a market focus diagram makes it easy to spell out a relatively specific target market like the one I just provided.

Learn More about Market Focus Diagrams

If you'd like to see how to draw a market focus diagram, please view our screencast "Find Your Target Market with SmartDraw."

Also, if you'd like to try SmartDraw, you can download a free trial of SmartDraw.