Selling an Idea

Presentation skills

I guess that you — like me — spend lots of time selling ideas. Trying to get funding and resources for the projects and improvements that you want to do.

My standard approach is to bang a load of information into PowerPoint and hope for the best. I want to show the man from upstairs that I know what I am talking about. The tightly packed text and tables on my slides are a prop, just in case he starts to pick holes.

The professional

Nancy Duarte is a woman who has made a career out of slides. She advises big business on the best way to structure presentations and conversations. Her premise is that ideas are powerless if they aren’t shared — communication is everything.

Here is a handful of her pieces of advice on how to make sure your great ideas get invested in, not someone else’s mediocre ones:

On content

Your vision must be clear.
Have a call to action. What do you want them to do?
Think about resistance. How is your audience likely to derail the conversation? Can you anticipate your audience’s objections and respond credibly? If you can then you will draw them into the idea.

On structure

Tell a story. We love stories. Most presentations don’t tell a story and so they just flat line.
Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. At the risk of asking the bleeding obvious, does your story have a beginning, a middle and an end?
The start of your story should show the gap between the current reality and where you want to be. Your idea is only a big idea if it is a big gap.
Stories have highs and lows and oscillate between the two. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy loses girl. Boy and girl are reunited. You get the gist. Your presentation should oscillate between the good and the bad, keeping your audience interested.

On approach

Don’t jump to PowerPoint. Start by sketching the idea out, visualise the story on a piece of paper.
You are trying to create a bond with the person you are presenting to. Don’t force technology between you and your audience, you want them to look at you, not at a screen.
If you can; sit down with paper and pencil and sketch out your idea sitting side by side. You could use your presentation as a notebook to scribble on. This approach is far more collaborative. It says look what we have created together, the pen gets passed back and forward and it is far more engaging.

On style

You are not a hero, you are a mentor. Your job in a presentation is not to be a performer but to facilitate people’s thinking. To guide them towards your new idea. The audience should become the heroes by grabbing the idea.
Engage. Did the audience laugh? Did they clap? If your audience aren’t reacting to you then they aren’t engaging with the idea.