Cliff Atkinson points out how the PowerPoint Nazis rule corporate life. [here]
Cliff’s message in Beyond Bullets is simple: escape the drudgery of a point-by-point breakdown your ideas. Tell a story. May it evocative, descriptive, invigorating, or even scary. If the audience hears a story, it is far more likely that they will remember what you said, rather than the quality of your PowerPoint Template.
I personally hate PowerPoint. I use it; but I hate it. I get most passionate when I can take a real-world example and explain it to my audience, and link it back to the core concept I am talking about. When I do that, I never look at the slide, I look at the audience.
If you spend more time looking at your own slides, or even the printed handouts you have in front of you, you might as well not be there. Your audience needs to feel that you are the one speaking to them, not Faceless Corporation, Inc.
Beyond Bullets ties directly into the concepts you can read at Scott Jones’ blog. As a member of the SalesBuilders team, they have helped moved solution and consultative selling to a new level. But the trick to this is that you have to develop a relationship with the person you are selling to (Parts 1, 2, and 3).
For introverted geek types, like myself, the hardest part of relationships is the relating part. But if you have a compelling story, and a means to show how compelling the story is, then the difficulties simply melt away.
Find the one topic you can talk to hours on, and live that message.