Is the best presentation the one that isn’t shown?
Why the real value of a presentation often happens before the meeting even starts.
I was working with a client recently on a presentation for an important customer initiative. It was a critical moment, they were trying to get a major account back on track.
The plan had many moving parts: assessing what had gone wrong, tracking the issues, understanding resource constraints, securing executive buy-in, and aligning on timelines and costs for both teams. A delicate matter to say the least.
One of the account executives gathered the small mountain of data we needed to review, and we got to work sorting through it and figuring out how to present it in a way that people could quickly understand.
That’s the fun part.
Turning complexity into clear diagrams, simple visualizations, and easy-to-follow charts. A few well-chosen facts presented clearly can make information easy to consume, highly likely to get the consensus desired, and leave everyone feeling ready to get engaged in cleaning things up.
It’s interesting working on a deck. It usually starts with a big pile of ideas, notes, and pieces of information gathered from all over the place. I might call that the “making notes” phase.
Slides start filling up with notes, copied pieces from previous decks, and screenshots. It always looks like a mess, and it’s often the mess of a gang of people involved in their own ways. Like The Great Escape (dating myself here), there’s the technical guy, the sales guy, the AE, all adding their own pieces to the pile. The real work starts by sorting through that pile and identifying the story that actually needs to be told. We work hard to look at the material through the customer’s eyes, and sometimes we even involve them in the process.
Slowly, the real focus of the presentation begins to emerge. One collage becomes an elegant table, another a compelling diagram with a flowing style, or a visual with a bold statement. Through multiple rounds of iteration and refinement, we arrive at a lovely, crisp, clear set of slides, ready for the meeting. And a set of slides that, indeed, might get completely used on the call.
Often, the presenter knows the material so well that after the first slide or two, the meeting naturally turns into a conversation. The customer feels comfortable, engaged, and ready to discuss the path forward.
As we neared the close of our work together, it was mentioned, “We almost don’t need a presentation deck at all,” and “We might only get to slide two on this in the actual meeting.” It was a funny yet great observation, and if I’m being honest, it stung a little to hear it, but it made sense. Upon thinking it over, we had spent so much time developing these slides, the ideas behind them, and the flow of them, that the team had really become fully indoctrinated on the topic. Like, knowing the back of your hand indoctrinated. It made me think of what the actual value of doing this work was.
Was all that fuss worth it? You bet. But it’s not necessarily finding the expected use. Lo and behold, used or not during the presentation. It’s the perfect leave-behind, and the customer now has just what they need to share the experience with their boss, whoever missed the meeting, or anyone who needs to see it.
And with care and attention going into the design of those slides, they often become symbolic representations of the big job they represent. They will be used again in a subsequent progress report, the afterlife of the slides, if you will.
So funny enough, the best slides might be the ones that don’t need to get shown.
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BayCreative is a B2B brand and creative agency based in San Francisco. We work with technology companies to close the post-sale communication gap — helping Customer Success teams show up for their customers with the same craft and intention that wins the deal in the first place. baycreative.com
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