It’s amazing how few words you actually need to include in your presentation slides.
Whether it’s shortening slide titles, reducing the number of words in the body, or simpler diagrams, you probably don’t need as many words as you think. The idea of a presentation is for your mouth to do the talking while your slides do the showing. If your slides do too much talking (i.e. using too many words), they will actually compete with what you’re saying. Your audience will spend too much time reading and not enough time listening. Your slides will become a distraction.
If you’re presenting your slides, let your mouth do the talking, not the slides. To make that point, here is a slide deck that has only 4 different words. (I’ll admit that two of the words are repeated on the last slide).
Taken alone, the slides show that Apple Watch is used by many different types of people such as runners, executives, hikers, the elderly, teenagers, travelers, and commuters. And they use Apple Watch in all sorts of ways – from tracking fitness to keeping in touch, to emergency alerts. Each slide clearly shows the type of user and some of the ways they might use the watch.
Here’s a sample slide – on the left side, the text-heavy slide is overwhelming while on the right side, the visual version is concise, clear, and even dramatic – it gets your attention. This is the perfect type of slide early in a sales cycle when you just want to pique someone’s interest. Later in the sales cycle you would want to focus more on specific benefits – but you can still use a visual approach anywhere in the sales cycle.
The 4-word presentation – can you do it?
Here’s a link to the full-size slides. But you probably don’t really need to see the actual slides since the smaller version conveys the point.
This article is in no way affiliated with Apple Corp. All opinions are my own.