Differentiating Intent of your presentation slides

One thing I commonly come across is this comment — there was a lot of content, well presented but too many slides. This is always a Chicken-Egg problem. How many slides is too many? What if you have a lot of content? But then it also boils down to what information you want your audience to take away.

In this context, in my mind, I phrase slides into ‘Awareness’ and ‘Anticipation’. Let’s look at it in little more detail. Assume a scenario where you are presenting something to Sales.

Awareness

• Slides or content that you want your audience to be aware of. It is good information which will help them when they are talking to customers or prospects.
• It also helps them get some data points or validation from customers or industry people they talk to.
• Information from Awareness slides could be very good tools to check the pulse of the market in an indirect way.
• Things like Roadmap, Key Features, Competitive Analysis, New Ideas you are working internally — it could be new business models, new products etc. While there is a lot of homework you will still have to do, letting Sales know will help them have this in mind. It will not help them increase sales, but identify warm prospects.
• Could serve as an accelerator on priority work internally(through external validation)

Anticipation

• These type of slides in my view can be categorised into two questions: What to expect? When to expect?
• Typically these slides could roll-out plans, new price list, early availability of new products(Alpha/Beta/MVP) that would help the Sales team.
• You have concrete dates, milestones etc, it is something your audience or senior management will be look for — it is something they will anticipate.

Typical product sales could be High Touch(where you have to work with the customer to help the understand the benefits, do the demo, let them evaluate before they can buy) or Low Touch(where the product is very intuitive that a few demos and some reading material could get the customer locked-in). Awareness and Anticipation classification would really help sales team focussed on High Touch Sales.

This approach could be used for other cross-functional presentations also. I could be over-generalizing here but then, you get the point. For the audience, what do you want them to leave the meeting with? What do they internalise and how do they internalise from your presentation is the fundamental point of this post.

Note:

If this applies to you — Good! Incorporate/adopt as much as possible!

If this doesn’t apply to you — Good! You are awesome!

If you did not learn anything new — Good! There will be other things you might learn, keep coming back!