Meeting Communication

We had an important meeting yesterday with one of our bigger clients. Since we are in the business of producing presentions, we often go presentationless for our own meetings. We’re often too busy meeting client’s presentation production deadlines to work have time to work on our own.

But we decided this meeting had a level of importance that demanded the attention and effort it would take to prepare a good presentation deck. About a week before the meeting, I started the process by putting together an outline of notes and pulling together some ideas to modify and build  few new slides to our core pitch deck.

 My partners and I emailed back and forth some notes about the meeting strategy and the key points we wanted to communicate. We decided that even if we did not end up using the slide deck, by developing the PowerPoint deck, it would be a good road map of our meeting communication strategy.

We met a number of times to dicuss the strategy and review the deck. In reviewing the deck and developing the individual slides we planned and strategized what we would say, what was important, how to say it, and what not to say. We asked each other questions, we asked questions we thought our client might ask and guessed reactions to the messages we were going to say and emphesize with supporting visuals. We added some slides, deleted others and ehanced the most important.

We did get to use our slides after a few anxious moments of room projector technical glitches. The slides with high visual value to ehance what I was saying as the primary speaker, kept us on track and I feel we did get to say all we planned to say and more. It was a good meeting. I’m not sure of the final outcome yet – as the agreement discussed has yet to be signed. But the slides helped get our message communicated. But they also helped us develop the message. We had time for questions during our presentation and time left over to discuss things further after the last slide. We were prepared to answer every question thrown at us, even the hard ones.

In the end we experienced first hand the added value we often speak of when we help clients develop a PowerPoint deck , that it is not only more effective slides you end up with, but the process of developing the better slides with high visual value – helps prepare for a successful meeting!

I spoke to a client today that said his boss and management team was very conservative in thier “look”. They did not like anything to fancy or polished. He said they refrain from too much creativity because they are afraid of looking too good and people thinking they spent too much money to look good. This was an executive in a Fortune 500 company.

This is nuts. These people don’t get the difference between a “pretty” slide vs an effective slide. The idea is to develop a visual that effectively communicates your message. That means the audience gets it quickly, or easy to comprehend and remember.

Maybe these companies that use this excuse for boring, ugly, distracting slides (but look like they did them themselves – cheap) would not be in such cost cutting modes if they had a culture that made the most of thier critical meeting time with effective visuals.

I have often wondered if I could create an investment fund based on the quality of the companies visuals – I would bet it could be a good indicator of a companies health and future.

I went to a meeting today attended by about 30 people.  It is a networking group I’ve been involved with for years and know the presenter for as many years. He’s an author and very good speaker. I always enjoy his presentations. He has an incredible amount of energy, enthusiasm, and always very knowledgeable of his speaking topic. He also has a great sense of humor that makes his presentations very entertaining.

But his PowerPoint today seemed to be 90% bullet points. He could have just as well handed out (after the meeting), a MS word document with an outline of his speech. He is a good enough speaker to probably get away with out speaker support slides. BUT, if he took the time, or had the time to develop his visuals to support his information rather than just be a duplicate of what he was saying, he could become an exceptional speaker.

He didn’t read his slides. He’s way beyond that in his presentation delivery skills. He basically paraphrased the bulleted text on each slide. Better visuals would help him keep on track and leave more time for his great improvising, personal stories, and humor. His slides would have been easy to enhance and could have made a good presentation into a great presentation.