Sales presentations. You have three options for your slides:
- No words, only pictures.
- No more than 3 bullets a slide, 10 words per bullet.
- Have fun with the text, write what you think is necessary.
There’s a reason that editors exist in any field that involves professional writing. It’s because people that write love to write. Scenes that could be a page take 15. Dialogues that could be snappy get overloaded with repartee.
For most of us that write for sales and that’s about it, there are no editors. We must police ourselves and that means that anything goes if we aren’t careful.
I must confess to being an engineer. If you ask me to pick colors you are going to end up with an eye sore. If you ask me for the preferences of a population of people around red versus green, I’ll come up with a method of determining it and get you an answer to four decimal points. There’s not a lot of in between.
If you ask me to write a sales presentation I will struggle because I will want to write out every benefit, value, pro, con, risk, and requirement necessary to accurately portray the topic completely and accurately. The problem with this approach is that it ultimately ends up conveying less information than having no words at all because it becomes one big eye glazer.
Rules are important because the rules become our editor. If you force yourself to have no more than 30 words on a slide with no exceptions you will ultimately communicate much more effectively.
Did you hear the one about the CRE company that could do technology? Sure, but I didn’t understand a word they said and their slide had a bunch of charts that looked like something I’d eat for dinner.