How many pages should there be in a book?  Of course that's a silly question, because books come in all shapes and sizes.  There are common sense rules that it should be too heavy to hold or have so many pages that the bind breaks. But even these can be broken, as those of us with dog-eared, rubber-band-bound copies of Michener's Hawaii can attest.  If you're writing a book, you don't worry about how many pages it will be; you worry about telling the story.

The same is true for creating sales artifacts: we must FIRST worry about telling the story. But we must tell the story within the appropriate parameters. We have to consider the right amount of content for our delivery, how much of it should be reinforced on our slides or handouts, and what pacing and level of interaction is appropriate for our audience. 

And yet, so many presenters think they can bend time and space.  They KNOW how long the audience is available, and they know how long their deck is, yet they seem surprised when things go amiss. They cram 80 slides into a 20 minute meeting.  They present slide after slide with block paragraphs of 8-point text.  They drop 14-column Excel spreadsheets into slides that are ugly to look at and impossible to read.

Have you falled into any of these artifact traps?  Here are two tips to get back on track:

Assess Your Presentation Rhythm
Some people can tell a compelling story in an hour using only 3 slides; others are equally effective with 100 slides in a hour. The number is not important; the outcome is.  If you regularly present from slides, jot down the number of slides and approximate presentation time of your next dozen presentation.   Until you assess your actual times, a good rule of thumb is 30-90 seconds per slide.  So a 20-minute presentation will usually be in the range of 13-40 slides.  When gauging your presentation, you might want to omit any section break slides from your count and give extra weight to slides that you know take longer. The point is not the exact formula you use but that you are aware that your content has to fit into the time allowed.

Nix the Eye Chart
Important corollary to the rule of thumb above: The way to get your presentation from 50 to 20 slides is NOT to simply reduce the font size!  Be honest: Has your audience every seemed startled by the amount of text you put on a slide?  Do they suddenly reach for glasses or squint at the screen at a certain place in your presentation? As a presenter, you never want to make your audience uncomfortable, distracted or annoyed.  Guess what?  Teeny-tiny fonts do all three!  

Remember that the reason we still call them "slides" is because they were originally designed to be projected.  Yes, PowerPoint (Keynote, etc) can be used to create other types of documents, but their primary purpose to support YOU in a group presentation setting.  Consider how you change your speaking volume when you are addressing a group of 20 versus talking to one or two people.  
Font size is the volume of your slide, so turn it up.  
The bigger the room, the larger the font.  Even in a more intimate boardroom setting, 16-points should be your absolute minimum font size.  If your content doesn't fit on the slide at that size, you are using too many words or trying to convey too many ideas on one slide.  

Airplane travel disorients me.  The sameness of the clouds or the ocean or tiny towns, roads, and rivers shifting beneath the plane makes time stretch and bend.  Hours some times fly by in the blink of an eye, and on other flights, each minute seems to last forever.

Some planes are outfitted with video screens that show you a flight path and a tiny plane icon moving along - just like the ones in old movies or Indiana Jones!  This addition made long flights much more palatable to me.  There is magic in knowing "you are here."


Strong presenters know that the audience craves that sense of an overall plan and current position.  

Right off the bat, let me acknowledge there is a HUGE exception to this rule: master storytellers frequently employ an element of surprise or suspense and a few unexpected turns to hold their audience in the palm of their hands.  Think Steven Jobs.  He had the charisma and control to hold an audiences' attention as well as content that had us all literally reaching for our wallets before he finished speaking.  If you are in that rarefied class, congratulations!

The rest of us need to help our audience be a good audience, and one effective way to do that is to provide presentation GPS: that is, a map of our destination, our current location, and our route.

Some presenters choose to rely on their voice-over to guide the audience through the presentation, but here's the Catch22: if you know your presentation inside-out (and you really should!) it's hard to identify points of potential confusion. The flow makes perfect sense to you, but the first-time viewer may not follow your logic or, perhaps more likely,  they may make assumptions that muddle your stellar approach.   

A better solution it to incorporate presentation GPS elements into every presentation. There a many ways to do this, including:

• Agenda  - the simplest and most overlooked tool you can use to set expectations... and meet them
• Break Slides -  highlight upcoming topics and indicate the current section
  
• Headlines - combine primary and secondary to  tell them overtly "you are here"
  e.g., this is the Finance section and we're still discussing Seasonal Discounts
  
• Iconography - create icons that corresponds to each topic and repeat them on content pages to orient the audience to the larger outline and flow
  
• Color - select your background, border or headline color to subtlety communicate a change in sections
  

There's an old, yet accurate piece of presentation advice: Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. Tell 'em.  Tell 'em what you told 'em.  I would add one more element: Tell 'em where they are.  

Why the newsroom matters in the boardroom.

Today's news is delivered with a fractured focus that can completely distract the viewer.   A talking head remains the center of any TV newscast, and he or she usually has a still image over one shoulder to provide a visual clue to the story.  

But that simple set up has erupted into a veritable three ring circus, all designed to stop us from changing the channel.

• A line of text (or sometimes more than one) scrolls across the bottom to offer information on other stories, scores, or stock markets.  
• A bullet list of the next few stories hovers to one side, just in case the current "breaking news" is not of interest to us.  
• A headline and pithy sub-headline offer context to the story if we happen to have the sound muted.  
• A single frame of news footage could be studied for an hour - yet the a new visual assault appears mere seconds later.
  

They do this because, sadly, it works.  Like a car wreck on the highway, we are unable to look away. We, the viewers, have taught them that the only way to hold our attention is to bombard our senses with information.  And it might hold our attention, or at least pause our remote controls, but attention is not comprehension or engagement.  This approach washes over our senses; it doesn't draw us in.  The next time you are watching the news, try to notice if you are spending more attention listening or reading the screen.  Does the presenter become an annoying hum in the background? Do you find yourself turning down the sound to "read the TV" like you would a website?

Go back fifty years and you'd see a presenter, almost always a man, sitting at a desk, holding papers, filling the lens with nothing more than his own gravitas.  And telling the story of the news.  Now you may argue with only 3 channels, they didn't have to worry about keeping eyeballs glued their broadcast.  Yet, if you watch the news from, say, the BBC, you'll see a very simple set-up, more in depth discussions of current events, and you will probably find the stories suck you in.

How does this apply to sales artifacts?  Let's look specifically at presentations.  I would argue that the slides should augment your message, not replace it.  Think of the images-over-the-shoulder on a newscast.  The images - a fire, a politician, a police car - do not tell you the story, but they offer context.  They support the spoken story.  A good slide does that, too.   

You can take the other option - fill the slide with everything you plan to say, plus background information, plus graphics and charts, plus conclusions.  You can choose to make your slide the star of your presentation, and many do.  But is that what you want? 

An audience can either read or listen - we literally cannot do both at once.  We might switch between them very quickly, but one sense must "grab the controls."  Overfill your slides and you are asking the audience to stop listening.  

Your slides are not your presentation; you are the presentation.  The slides should complement your spoken word: offering clarity on complex issues, providing reinforcement for the visual-learners in the group (many people have to *see* something to understand it), and sketching the arc of your story.   Remember that Walter Cronkite and his peers could hold a nation's attention with a desk and a stack of notes.

Start from the story, not the slides.

If you've ridden an airport tram, you may have noticed the automated announcements tend to rephrase and repeat each element of the trip.

"The next stop is Terminal C."

"The train is stopping at Terminal C."

"The doors will now open Terminal C."


The airport does this because they know most of us will (a) miss the first announcement because we were talking or texting, (b) hear but not retain the second, and (c) finally pay attention to the third.  A friend and I named this the reassurance repeat.  And even with three reminders, invariably someone on the train will look up with wide-eyes and ask, "which terminal is this?" as the doors open.

They teach people who work with elderly patients to repeat everything at least three times because it great increases the patients' comprehension.  But the truth is we have a hard hearing things the first time at ANY age.

We need to keep this in mind as we create sales artifacts and craft presentations.  The old saw, "tell 'em what you're gonna say; tell 'em; tell 'em what you told 'em" is excellent advise.  Certainly that means include an agenda and a summary to bookend your presentation, but you can also employ the reassurance repeat at a micro level.

If you are conveying an important concept, express it in text on the slide, illustrate it with a graphic, chart, icon, or photo, and then emphasize it in your spoken presentation.

I have witnessed many presenters assume their audience will "get all the jokes," and they assume that their briliant prose or insightful image can do the work all by itself.  Sometimes presenters think repeating key points will be perceived a "talking down" to the audience, and certainly I'm not suggesting you take a pedantic tone

But think about how many times you've become distracted as an audience member.  A dentist appointment later that afternoon, the message from your teenager's teacher, last nights gme, the cramp in your left big toe..... The world is full of distractions, and as presenters, we have to be prepared to bring our audience back to your agenda again and again.

The reassurance repeat is an effective way to reinforce your message and help your audience follow your conclusions.  

Let's say you agree with my premise, but you're not sure what part of your message you should repeat.  Here's an easy tip: ask yourself "so what?" Literally go through your presentation, either alone or with your team, and challenge each slide.  

For example, imagine a slide that shows the failure rate of your product is consistently better than that of your competitors.  So what?   Well, a lower failure rate means less downtime for your customers.  So what? Less downtime means higher productivity and higher profitability.  Keep asking "so what?" until you find the idea that will matter to your audience then repeat it - on the slide, in handouts, and in your spoken comments.

Don't bemoan the fact that most people are bad listeners; prepare for it.  Find your key ideas, and share them in multiple ways.  The reassurance repeat will increase audience retention and keep them focused on your best ideas.  Shall I repeat that?