Talk Selling

Presentation resources – Garr Reynolds goes beyond bullet points

Theory and practice is constantly progressing in the world of presentations. We are connected to some of the world’s leading practitioners in this area and in this article I’d like to bring three of them to your attention.  I’m not going to go into the detail of how because the books speak for themselves but reading and applying any one of them will take your presentations to the next level.

Presenting information is only part of the story

If I offered you the chance to sit through a presentation from the Finance Director or the Chairman from a FTSE 100 company which would you instinctively prefer? When we apply our Achieving Yes approach to improving presentations a very common issue is that there is not much story and not much emotion. Yet stories and the emotions that go with them are part of the fundamental way that the human psyche understands and evaluates messages.

We distinguish four different styles of presentation that, when combined together correctly, significantly increase the chances of your audience taking the action you want. The four styles come from two ways of dealing with information and two ways of working with emotion.

PowerPoint anniversary slips under the Windows 7 hype

It seems to me that the last few months from the marketing behemoth that is Microsoft has been all about the birth of Windows 7. Yet do any of you remember 35mm slide carousels? Or maybe you still have an aging OHP sat at the back of some of your meeting rooms?  Twenty five years ago PowerPoint was launched running only on Apple Mac by a company called Forethought. A quote from the New York Times when Microsoft bought the company back in 1987  said: