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.  

In my experience, most people do not like to outline.  It's right up there with Brussels sprouts or flossing: things we know we SHOULD do, yet rarely do.  

That's probably because outlining, when it is taught at all, is taught in a very specific and didactic way.  There is little room for personality when you're following the teacher's rules for outlines.  Like little Stepford Students, we learned that a passing grade came when we described the prescribed Intro, Three points (with at least three supporting points each!), and Conclusion.  Yippee.

So, I'm guessing the minute you didn't HAVE to outline, you didn't.

But now, three years or three decades after you suffered through your last outline in English class you may wonder if there is something missing.  Something in your approach to writing that's a bit willy-nilly.  You might even sketch out an outline from time to time, but I'm guessing it doesn't get you where you want to go. An intro, three points, and a conclusion might get a B+ in high school, but it probably won't lead to a compelling sales piece or presentation.

So is there another answer? Something between the chaos (and occasional genius) of unplanned seat-of-the-pants writing and the rigid barriers of the perfect outline?  Yup.  Storyboarding.

You might wonder, isn't a storyboard an awful lot like an outline? Sure; the storyboard is the unruly cousin of an outline.

Where an outline tends to be very linear, a storyboard is organic. An outline has a standard path  (Well, if you're feeling frisky you can reorient your outline so that the AAABBBCCC structure becomes ABC ABC ABC, ooh, fancy). A storyboard has no required flow. An outline, in its perfect form, is extremely uniform and parallel.  If you have four supporting points for one idea, it looks naked to have only one sub-point on the next.

A storyboard is tactic, a process. You a play with your ideas, move them around, and see what works. Go digital and create the big blocks of your message in traditional tools like PowerPoint or newer apps such Trello, Scrivener, or Paper. Go low-tech by jotting your ideas on sticky-notes, and then use a whiteboard or empty table to see everything at once.  Combine text, graphics, photos and your best caveman drawings to express your ideas.  Invite others to contribute and play.  Whatever your preferred method, as you group, sequence, and re-group, you find the heart of the story you need to tell.  You become aware of the flow of the story, not just the logic-tree of individual topics of an outline.

An outline tends to suck the creativity out of the process of creation; a storyboard lets you bring fresh eyes and a fresh spirit to your business writing.   A storyboard focuses on the story, not the structure.  Where the outline invites convention, the storyboard invites invention. 

Smart people, creative people, people who really do know better...all these people routinely attend or host meetings in which there is no agenda.  I'm not talking about a physical, typed agenda, though I appreciate one. I'm talking about AN agenda...a reason for being there...a stated objective.

These smart, capable business people, who would never start a client project without a clearly defined scope of work, don't appear to realize how wasteful it is to gather co-workers with no compass or map.  

I think this happens because it *feels* like work.  It seems like you and your meeting buddies are being action-oriented and moving the project forward.  And maybe some of the time you are.  But I've sat in on hundreds, well thousands, of  meetings that had the wrong people in the room, went on for 2-3 times longer than needed, and danced around a decision.  

If you leave the meeting where the only resolution to have another meeting, you have failed. Period.

Meetings are vital to business, and when they are well-planned and well-run, they can ensure common understanding and shared vision.  When they are merely a response to a need to "do something," they are a colossal waste.  Look at your calendar.  Into which category will your meetings fall?

The good news: you can make a difference in your day simply by asking, respectfully, "What do we need to accomplish in this meeting?" at every meeting you attend.  And if it's YOUR meeting, drop the answer to that question in your invite.  Start a trend: un-hide your agenda!

When you were a kid, did you ever make flip-book movies?  You draw a stick figure on the corner of each page, make the tiniest changes on each successive page, and then you flip the pages and - voila! - your own mini-cartoon.  Whether it's a flip book or an movie playing at your local theater, the static images seem to move because of how our brains interpret them. 

Sadly, this same phenomenon can be incredibly distracting in a presentation.  Have you seen it?  The company logo nestled safely in the lower corner for 20 slides suddenly does a little dance on slide 21.  The table that has been supporting a content build over several slides sudden shifts dramatically to the left.  The headlines have a disorienting tendency to drift toward the top of the slide.

You might be thinking, "Oh, who cares about such a minor thing."  But like so many small details in life - a dirty fork at a restaurant, a spot on your favorite shirt, a ding on your brand new car - once we notice them we don't forget them.  

The good new is: Most of these slide twitches can be eliminated if you use PowerPoint as it was meant to be used.  The basic slide layouts anchor your content consistently across your slides.  I will occasionally see a slide deck that has been built entirely from text boxes floating on blank layouts, and I am dumfounded by the extra effort that was wasted creating each slide from scratch.  It's like using a screwdriver to try to pound a nail -- yes, it might work, but why not grab a hammer!?! When you work with the basic layouts, your margins and headlines will not shift around from slide to slide. 

That's not to say you have to use the "of-the-shelf" layout for size, color, placement etc.  Edit the SLIDE MASTER and you can customize the look and feel, without sacrificing consistency.  Place a logo on the SLIDE MASTER and not only will it automatically appear in exactly the same place on every slide - it will no longer be editable on each slide.  That means you won't accidentally delete, stretch, or move it.  Think of the graphic elements on the SLIDE MASTER as existing under a pane of glass.  You can see them, but you can't touch them, unless you go back to the SLIDE MASTER.

If you have never explored to the SLIDE MASTER, it is very much worth your time.  Not only will you better understand why slides behave the way they do and have more control, you will also save significant time because you can edit once and have it impact 50 slides.  This is a skill worth pursuing.

After you've aligned the SLIDE MASTER to your will, you might still want to drop a graphic or other element onto several slides. A good example of this is a flowchart that you want to build in several stages, and you don't want to use animation on a single slide because you want the handouts to print individual steps on separate pages.

If you try to eyeball the placement of individual slide elements, you might get lucky.  But there is way to create the look of seamless animation over several slides. (And if you started using PowerPoint, as I did, in the early 90's, you will remember this is how we did it before there was an option for "animation").  

Create the FINAL slide in the series first.  In the example of the flowchart, capture every step in the process.  Be sure you're happy with it, before you move on to the next step.  If you need to get buy-off from others on your team, get their OK before you move on to the next step (trust me, you'll thank me).

Copy your FINAL slide and place it before the final slide in slide sorter view.  Edit the new copy to remove elements for the next-to-last slide. Then copy that slide, and strip off more elements.  Continue until you have the desired steps in your series.  Watch your series in SLIDESHOW and the slides appear to build.  

The secret is that you locked in the placement for the last slide FIRST.  Sometimes, you will realize you forgot something or need to make a modification that impacts all the slides in the series.  The risk of "twitchy" slides is highest when we think we can make exactly the same edit in multiple places.   If you need to adjust every slide in a series, I strongly urge you to modify the final slide and then repeat the copy-remove process.  

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?

There are big problems in the world today - heck, gigantic problems almost beyond our ability to comprehend. Hunger, war, disease, ignorance...these hover over us and around us, and if we allowed it, these could consume our every waking thought. So we stop thinking about them.

We bring our worry closer to home. The worry-beads for medium-size problems go through our mental fingers: paying the mortgage, the leak over the garage, the kids' braces, the spouse's linger glance at the tennis pro....these, too, can overwhelm if we become too focused. So we stop thinking about them.

And then we're left with small problems. Issue that won't save the planet, won't change our lives, but at least we feel like we can get ahandle on them, maybe solve them. Or can we?

Here's one that's infinitesimal in the scheme of things - but it's haunted me for decades. How do you get people to type consistently in databases. I hear you guffaw. "Who cares?" you scoff. And yet, as soon as you have "Jones Co" and Jones Co." and "Jones Company" in the same database, you may as well be writing on cocktail napkins for all the data manipulation you'll be able to do.

Do you go behind and try to clean it up like the poor schmuck who follows the elephant in the parade? Seems unending and thankless.

Do you try to put controls in place? Sounds good, but if Facebook and Twitter have taught us anything it's that control is illusory at best.

Do you just live with the inconsistencies and count yourself better off than if you had no database?

Or do you whip out the cocktail napkins and start writing - enjoying the cocktail as you go? 

OK, how many of you remember diskettes? Cute, little, portable, magnetic miracles that let you store - gasp - 1.44Mb of data. Yes, that's right...1,440,000K (and change). Now I know you young folk with your rock-and-roll music may not appreciate this, but at the time, it was a break-through. [Quit smirking, or I'll make you sit still while I ramble on about that heady day when Lotus 1-2-3 finally enabled us to make text BOLD and COLORFUL (albeit on a separate file) with Allways.]

Today we have so much space on our computer drives that it boggles the mind....so much space that I rationalize keeping things that I should delete. The funny thing is, within my circle of friends, I'm actually one of the more ruthless deleters (is that a word?)...deletitions? Deletionists? Hell, I have fewer than 100 emails in my inbox --- as opposed to several collegues who have (I am not kidding) +13,000 sitting in their inbox...with as many as 3000 unread. And the only reason they stop at 13,000 is that IT forces them to archive occassionally.

Here's my question....why do I save all this crap? I mean, I know what I think I save it. I think I may need it one day. But I alsoknow that when I do need something, 4 times out of 10, I can't find the right email. I could go off on a rant about people who send me emails with subject lines of "question" and "tomorrow's meeting" so that there's no chance of identifying the true topic, but that's not really my point.

Why do we do this? Why do we save 14 versions of a project that's long since been delivered? Why do we save ever iteration of an email string? Why do we faithfully store every crappy presentation that our collegues thrust upon us? It's part lazyness, part covetousness, and part paranoia. Covynoia....that's that's the technical term.

I've yet to meet an ascetic business person....though it would be interesting. "Hello, my name is Pat, and I keep everything I need on this single 1.44MB diskette. When I receive new information, I simply delete the old. So for the near term, I look forward to interacting with you. At some point, though, your contact information will be over-written by a new bit of data, and we will lose contact. Until then, as long as you don't send me any graphic or sound files, I will enjoy our interaction. Hey, don't be sad; it's a FIFO world."