Answering Your Questions

It's been a busy month of keynotes and advising. The articles I planned for you need more work. So while I continue to work on editing them, let's answer reader mail!


1. What is the ideal number of slides for a presentation? 
Attention has shifted a bit over the past few years. Previous guidance was to develop half the amount of slides for the time you have. Now, it’s less about the number of slides and more about how you share the information and stories.

The moment you display a slide, people stop listening to you. They start trying to process what is on the slide and don’t listen to you again until they do. Which is further complicated by a lot of text or multiple ideas.

Slides should support what you are saying, not drive it. You could have a slide for each minute of your presentation if they support what you are saying. Bonus points if they are all images or no more than five words.

First, map out what you want to say. Then determine the visual aids you need for them. Split up concepts over multiple slides. Make it easy for the audience to see the slide, understand it, and quickly return their attention to you.



2. I don't know who my audience is - how do I plan a story without one?
Your audiences often share something in common and are easier to identify than you think. Figuring out your audience is a bit like the voir dire performed during jury selection. Potential jurors are asked questions about their hobbies, experiences, and what information they consume. The goal is to identify their ideal juror through the questions. Let's break down some examples of how you can dig into specifics for different topics:
 
Presentations:

• What is the reason your audience is attending? What do they share?

• If it is a conference, what is the topic? Why are people attending?

• If it is people in your company, what departments are you speaking with?

• Who is the majority in this audience that you are speaking to…not the outliers that need different persuading.

• I gave my TED Talk at a university. I realized I had two audiences: those attending the talk and those who would see the talk online. Students would attend in person. Those watching online were either in business or were interested in becoming better storytellers. Those categories allowed me to define the specific needs of each audience.

 
Product or service:

• What types of challenges does the consumer grapple with?

• What other things have they tried?

• If your product/service solves their problem, what would be different for them?

• Who might recommend the product or service to them?

• Who is not in your audience? Who might be the opposite of them?

 
 
Book:

• If you were seated across the table from your reader, who are you talking to?

• What is your reader’s profession? What other books do they read? What magazines, articles, and podcasts do they consume? What are their hobbies?

• If your book was on a bookshelf in a store, who would pick it up?

• Who would not read your book?

• One of my major audiences for The Perfect Story was “Business.” It’s broad, but there’s a whole genre for business books. I could have narrowed it further into sales, marketing, nonprofits, leaders, or even entrepreneurs. But my approach works in each of those categories. Instead of narrowing the book, I worked on examples that resonated with each.

 
Podcast:

• Podcasts are wonderful niches of ideas being shared, guests offering ideas, and stories being told. They tend to have very specific audiences. This one is also easy because you can look up reviews to see how people describe it.

• Who listens to the podcast?

• Is the podcast informative or entertaining?

• Are you in the audience for the podcast? If so, how do you fit in?

 
 
Article:

• What is the publication? Who typically reads it? The person who reads Harvard Business Review wants different things from an article than the person who reads People Magazine.

• Does your reader want to learn something or be entertained?

• Who would forward the article to your audience with the note, “I thought of you…?”

• Where might you see someone in public reading this article?  

3.  I have to present a dashboard slide. How do I tell stories with a template I don't have control over?

Dashboards are great tools to monitor progress, identify outliers, and inform decision-making. Often, so much information is packed on the slide that it’s too hard to process the information. There are things you can do to minimize people drifting off.
 
Leverage headers and callouts in what you submit: instead of titling the slide Q4 project status, change it to call out the takeaway. Or at least put it on a subheader.
 
Don’t read the slide, tell the story: A dashboard is to monitor defined data. What did you set out to do? What happened? What have you learned? What are you continuing to explore? You don’t need to tell the story every week or month, but any time you have new stakeholders, are approaching a decision, or notice an outlier, ground people in the story.
 
Use animation: Just because you submit a template doesn’t mean you have to present the full slide at once. Leverage animation to guide the discussion to specific pieces. Where possible, submit the dashboard, but put together a few slides that are visual aids for the story and takeaway you want people to have.
 
Guide people to what you are talking about: Dashboards are packed with information in 12-point font with ten different categories represented. Cue the listener’s brain to make it easy for people to follow you. Use specific statements like, “I want to focus you on the lower right.” Or, “The idea I want you to take away from this is....” Or “The number I want to you to focus on is…”
 
Include your recommendation. Is this a regular update? Is there something unexpected? Is there a decision? Is there something to monitor? Don’t just walk through the data, describe what you recommend the audience do with it.
 
 
Don’t be afraid to be different: Status updates seem to follow the leader. Whatever the first person does in their presentation sets the tone for the others. Don’t be afraid to approach it differently by telling the story of the data and guiding people to the takeaways. Just because you have to use a specific template doesn’t mean you are confined in how you talk about it.

***

Have a question for me? Send it to info@kareneber.com