1: “I can’t tell you how many pitch tapes I see loaded with transitions and pushes and wipes throughout the whole thing,” Brant Pinvidic writes in his excellent book The 3-Minute Rule: Say Less to Get More from Any Pitch or Presentation.
“It just screams amateur,” he writes. “Bells and whistles now signal to the audience that you are trying to distract them. That’s not what we want.
“That’s why I hate PowerPoint. It is the single biggest killer of presentations ever. It’s a menace to society. It drives me crazy.”
2: What does our audience really want?
Information.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Brant notes. “Making our slides or presentation look professional is a good idea. It does convey something about our company. But I’ve never come across a company with a concise and compelling pitch that had cheap-looking or amateurish slides.”
3: Brant has developed his 10 Rules for PowerPoint.
Rule #1: MAXIMUM OF 10 SLIDES: This rule is consistent with the 10-20-30 rule put forth by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and speaker Guy Kawasaki: 10 slides, 20 minutes, and 30-point (minimum) font. In Brant’s case, our initial pitch is only 3 minutes, so limiting the number of slides is even more critical.
Rule #2: USE ANIMATION, TRANSITIONS, AND FONTS SPARINGLY. Enough said.
Rule #3: OUR HANDOUTS ARE NOT OUR PRESENTATION SLIDES: “If I could have people read and follow only one sentence in this entire book, I think this would be it: your handouts are not your presentation slides,” Brant writes. “Without question, this is the most common error I see across the board.
Leave-behinds are great. As the name suggests, we leave them behind after the presentation.
“They are usually detailed and purposeful with a ton of information. That’s great. I love a thick, detailed, glossy handout after everything is done,” he observes. “The problem is when you use those pretty pages as your slides and speak them. It’s a bad look and it’s bad form.”
What if we want to share a graph or description of our work? He suggests simply “removing all the text other than the headings and the conclusion.”
What must we absolutely not do? “Never give people things to read during your presentation,” Brant writes. “People will always read ahead. Always. It will be distracting and unnerving, and all the work we’ve just done on flow and timing and structure gets tossed away.”
Rule #4: SLIDES AND BULLET POINTS FOR CRUCIAL OR KEY ELEMENTS ONLY: We don’t need a slide or a bullet point for everything we say. Our slides are for the most crucial points only.
Rule #5: NO MORE THAN SIX BULLET POINTS PER SLIDE: “Don’t fill up your slide with text and lists,” Brant writes. “There is no point in listing fourteen different things on the same slide.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: When I create a presentation, how many of Brant’s rules do I currently follow?
Action: Commit to experimenting with Brant’s rules.
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