Keeping with our tools theme for the quarter, here is a great little gem for those of us with policy-based (read: mandatory) screen savers on our laptops. Have you ever been in the middle of a presentation or demo when your screensaver came on that interrupted you? MouseJiggler comes to the rescue…
You can’t afford to suck at design
March 31, 2009 By
Usually I don’t insert entire outside posts but I think this one from Seth Godin is exceptionally relevant to our industry:
—
Why aren’t you (really) good at graphic design?
Ten years ago, you had a wide range of excuses for being a lousy visuals person. Starting with no talent, leading to no skill and going from there.
But now, in a world where it is expected that professionals will be able to make beautiful powerpoint slides, handsome business cards, clever bio photos and a decent website, it’s as important as driving. And easier to learn and do, and requiring less talent.
No, you and I will never be gifted designers or breakthrough designers. But there’s really no reason not to be really good.
I put together a page with some blogs, books and sites you can check out. An hour a day for a month and you won’t have to hide your face in shame. Sure, hire the very best in the world when you need a breakthrough. But you don’t have to pay for better-than-mediocre design. You can do it yourself.
—
I have heard more than once that you should leave marketing materials to marketing. I disagree. It is your responsibility to develop your own keen sense of design. Too often you need to create custom material for your customers. If you show slides like the one below to your customers, I guarantee you’re leaving a hell of a lot of money on the table. I know I’d have a tough time buying from you.
You can see a short list of my design resources here and here.
Winning the PowerPoint Wars: Professional Screen Shots
January 13, 2009 By
When you think about how much rests on our ability to effectively present, every small edge you can gain is critical. While many would argue otherwise, people form opinions and assumptions of your product based on the quality of your deck.
Many people notice the little things. Are you using complementary colors? Is the font easily readable? Do your bullets line up? The list is endless. And to a great many people, the smallest of details missed tell the customer (even if subconsciously) what to expect about the product.
One area that I see a great deal of mistakes is with the use of product screen shots in a presentation. Considering that many good presenters only use “action” slides with no bullets, your ability to do this professionally puts you ahead of your competition in many cases.
I’ve compiled some tips and tutorials below that should get you started creating exquisite slides. Enjoy!
Pitfalls to Avoid
Here are some very common mistakes I see.
- Not trimming the fat – Most applications, especially browser-based ones, allow you to customize the UI. Before you start snapping away, remove unwanted or excess toolbars and options. Keep it as clean as you can without detracting from the look and feel you want to convey.
- Being non-specific – I see this a lot. People take a screen shot of the entire application when all they are referring to is one capability within the product. Crop your shot so that only the subject of the slide is highlighted. This will keep your audience focused on your point and not endlessly scouring the slide for additional info while you’re speaking.
- Wrong shot selection – If you are speaking generally about the product, use a shot that obfuscates textual and other unnecessary detail. If you are speaking about a specific attribute, highlight it.
- Unreadable – Shot selection is so important because screen resolution is in such short supply. If you need your audience to read text in the console, you need to blow it up so that it matches the needed size for readability (24pt minimum). I cover some tips for maximizing readability below.
- Inconsistence – If you use more than one shot in a row, they need to be consistent in screen placement and size.
- Overlapping elements – One of the biggest offenders and oh so simple to correct. Most companies provide a standard slide master with company colors, logo, etc. Overlapping these elements won’t get you kicked out, but it is definitely something a design-oriented SE would never do. See my example below.
Here is the wrong way to position a shot on the slide. Notice how it covers up the border areas.
Here is a better way to accomplish the same thing.
When using large shots, don’t be afraid to take up the whole screen. Just don’t have other elements partially showing. This format allows me to make it bigger for more emphasis. Move any bullet points to your Notes section and just talk about them.
You can get more creative and use translucent boxes to capture your main point succinctly. Just make sure it’s readable.
Advanced Tactics
Here are a couple options that will definitely set you apart from your competition. I use Photoshop but most graphics programs can handle these tasks. PowerPoint 2007 also gives us some new and very cool capabilities that used to be daunting for non-Photoshop power users.
Creating your base shot
1) Here is a sample of a web-based application with all of the excess browser items to avoid.
2) Here is the same shot just with the extra browser elements removed. Much cleaner!
3) Get rid of the browser completely. You’re not being paid to show off IE or FF are you? The only time you’d keep it is if you needed to highlight the fact it was web-based.
4) Here’s where it gets trickier. If you want to do a full-screen shot, you need to size it correctly or you’ll need to stretch the image in PPT. Sometimes that’s OK, but usually it leads to blurry slides. It’s usually better to size them correctly up front.
To do this I use Photoshop. The ideal size for a PPT screen shot is 800×600. Even if you set your monitor resolution it will be hard to get it right. Just take the screen capture normally and open up your editor.
Invariably it will be some odd size after you’ve cropped off the excess. No problem. Create a new image with a 800×600 size.
Take your existing image and resize it so that either the height or width matches the 800 or 600 without the other being smaller than the required size. Meaning don’t make the width 800 if it makes your height 550. In that case make your height 600 and let the width be greater than 800. See below.
Copy and paste your shot into the new image file. Move it around until it lines up they way you like. Save it to a new file, you now have a properly sized shot for PowerPoint.
Advanced Image Effects
PowerPoint 2007 makes it very easy to add some slick effects to your images. Used properly and sparingly, you’ll have other SEs asking for your secret in no time.
In this example we are going to add 3-D and Reflection effect.
Paste your properly sized image file into the slide. It will likely take up 80% of the slide workspace. Make it a bit smaller so you can play around with it.
Highlight the image and you’ll see Shape Effects on the Home ribbon tab. Experiment with adding shadows, 3-D views and reflections. The screen shot below used all three and was created in less than a minute.
While this in no way is a comprehensive PowerPoint tutorial, I hope this gives you some things to try (and things to avoid) next time you’re putting together a presentation.
Great Presentation Tool – ZoomIT
November 6, 2008 By
Here is a great little presentation tool someone pointed me to the other day. The tool is called ZoomIT and is from the Sysinternals team at Microsoft. It gives you the ability to zoom in on regions of your screen and also allows you to draw with your mouse. It’s a very professional touch to be able to zoom in and highlight a portion of your screen on the fly. As the drawing feature on tablet PCs was something I was a bit envious of, this provides a great alternative. I highly recommend you give it a try.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx
You can find all of the Sysinternals tools here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/
SE Presentation Skills
June 7, 2008 By
Fortunately for us today there are a myriad of resources for us as Sales Engineers to improve our presentations and presentation/public speaking ability. Rather than go into a lot of specific tips, I think it is far more valuable to cover a roadmap of resources that I and other SEs I know have used to improve over time.
Learning to Speak Publically
I am fairly soft spoken by nature. I generally prefer to listen and reflect internally versus verbalizing my thoughts. It took me many years of practice before I considered myself well versed. Early in my career I’m pretty sure I wasn’t considered a bad speaker, but I did have to rely heavily on preparation and mastery of content. After studying presentation methodology more throughout the years I learned that it is far more important to master the style and non-verbal aspects of speaking—something I sorely needed to address (and still continually work on today).
I know several people that swear by Toastmasters. In fact, if you’ve had experience with them, drop me an email and I’ll post the responses. My personal route has been through professional presentation skills training. Mandel Communications has a course specifically tailored for sales and sales engineers. I have also attended various courses hosted by communications consultants. The experience of being video taped and judged by your peers is a very difficult one, but in the long run these are by far the most valuable. Trust me, it’s way better to fail (ok, learn =) in front of your peers than your customers. When you have detailed notes from your peers and manager and can study yourself repeatedly, that’s when the real insight happens.
Mastering Speaking Aides
In today’s environment, for us that means PowerPoint and whiteboard. When I first started delivering PowerPoint presentations I did what a lot of people do because I didn’t know any better. I would take the stock 65 slide deck provided by marketing and then go torture my subjects for an hour by going through the endless arrangements of text coupled with cute bits of clip art. If you were one of these people, first, let me apologize.
As I gained experience and comfort with tailoring messages to my customers, my slides got inherently better. I would spend hours crafting what I thought were superior decks. I now know I was still making a great deal of mistakes. I continued down that path until I realized that I was the focus of the talk, not my slides. I consider that one of the major turning points in how I chose to communicate with my customers.
I arrived at a point where I no longer wanted to use PowerPoint. I felt like that was the quickest way to get people disinterested. I don’t blame people either just given how I used to use them. My preference was the whiteboard—to make it interactive.
Today, I no longer deliver many customer presentations—mine are made mainly to internal audiences. I have come full circle and use PowerPoint if I need to, though in far different ways. There are a few resources I can point you to that I try to model. SE or not, if you’re in the position of making presentations in your job, you owe it to yourself to check these out. In somewhat specific order:
Presentation Skills Training
Check out the Mandel training or use Google as your guide to find a local expert. This is expensive but in my mind well worth the price. You can move forward with this while working on your slideware education. ToastMasters may also work well for you and it’s free.
Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson
This book is an excellent resource for learning how to properly convey information so that an audience can remember the contents. It focuses heavily on incorporating stories into your presentations and also has a script and PowerPoint template that can start using immediately.
Presentation Zen
Once you’ve mastered presentation strategy I recommend you read the Presentation Zen book and blog. The author, Garr Reynolds, does an excellent job of breaking down slide construction and teaches you how to maximize effectiveness at the slide level. Combining his slide style within Cliff’s framework provides a very effective foundation from which to build your presentations.
TED
For mastery, it’s a matter of practice and exposing yourself to other presentation styles. TED and YouTube are excellent sources of presentations (though with YouTube you need to already know what you’re looking for). The great thing about reviewing these presentations is that you can learn about other topics while reviewing presentation styles. Though you can really begin this step at any time, you get the most out of it after you’ve been through the other resources. You’ll no doubt recognize good presentations when you see them, though it will be much harder at an early stage to discern why they are good. When you’re ready, I highly recommend Steve Jobs for his excellent use of slideware, Seth Godin for his anecdotal storytelling style, Randy Pausch for emotional connection with the audience and unexpected twists, and Larry Lessig for level of preparation and timing
For the tactically minded, impatient, or ADD afflicted among us, here is Darrin’s top twelve list for delivering technical presentations to customers:
12. Be interesting and do the unexpected
11. Keep slide text to 15-20 words or less.
10. Try and stick to 10-12 slides max.
9. Always use pictures instead of text where possible.
8. Don’t be too serious.
7. Use either professionally done or purposefully shoddy images. Stay away from average and anything 90’s.
6. 20 minutes or less. Anything longer and it’s training.
5. Use anything canned or corporate at your own peril.
4. Leave at least as much time open at the end of the meeting as you spent talking (for Q/A and wrap up).
3. Minimize Q/A during your presentation, otherwise it’s a discussion.
2. Leave the audience wanting more. Never data dump.
1. Present stories, not data.
SE managers can do a lot to help their folks in this department. Minimally you should be funding skill development in this area and also doing ridealongs several times a year in order to provide objective feedback. Investment here can have a huge return over time given how many (and how important) presentations are to the success of the account team.