Ten Signs Your Presentation Sucks

Last week we looked at the gap between presentation training and presentation technology training. The result of which seems to be terrible slides that undermine even the best speakers.  I am laying the blame for most of our terrible, terrible slides at the feet of marketing.

Now I know that once that pretty PowerPoint template leaves your hands, you can’t do a lot about it, but would it kill you to work up some guidelines? Some best practices? Some oversight. Even some examples of what it looks like when presentations suck?

Let me get you started.

#1:
If your presenter needs to walk to the screen to see what is on the slide, your presentation sucks.

#2
If your presenter is using the slides as a teleprompter, your presentation sucks.  Even a real teleprompter can mess you up, as Michael Bay discovered.

#3
If you have type smaller than 16 pts (actually 20), your presentation sucks

#4
If you have images with watermarks, you have stolen them and your presentation sucks

#5
If your slides have more bullets in them than the Alamo, your presentation sucks

#6
If you are on slide 8 of 30 with ten minutes to go, your presentation sucks.

#7
If you have data and you haven’t bothered telling the room what it means, your presentation sucks

#8
If you have cut and pasted a spreadsheet into a slide, your presentation sucks. Double points if you were dumb enough to put an image behind it.

#9
If your embedded video took five minutes to load and you needed another two minutes to make the sound work, your presentation sucks. At least this poor guy had the crack team of TED Talk dancers to bail  him out.

#10
If your images that look like your cat barfed them onto the slide, your presentation sucks and you may have a Feature Puke issue.

Marketers, just in case you think these sucky presentations are rotting away on a data stick someplace, guess what? Most of them are on SlideShare, where everyone can see them and they can suck in perpetuity.

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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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