Matt and Alper revisit the low-hanging fruit, the clients’ perennial favorite question: “I have a surprise presentation coming up in a few minutes, what are the quick things I should do first to get the biggest part of the improvement?”

Hint: They are: 1. Answer the Three Questions, 2. Follow a simple story structure like “man in hole,” 3. Make sure your headlines match your message, and 4. Use the “build” animation.

And just to confirm, no actual horses were harmed in the making of this podcast.

Episode transcript:

Matt Krause
Alper, there’s a topic that we’ve done a number of times before on this podcast, but it always seems to be a popular one, it always seems to be a helpful one, that always seems to be one of those topics that people can put to use right away. And that is what I call Pareto-ing your presentation. Pareto-ing your presentation.

Alper Rozanes
The horse, the horse that we keep beating and beating and beating.

Matt Krause
Yeah, the horse that we keep beating, but for some reason, people seem to love it. It’s like, how do I live? Cuz it’s basically how do I live my everyday life? And of course, everyone wants the answer to that. So…

Alper Rozanes
We’re not advocating animal violence.

Matt Krause
Yeah, we’re not, do not do not beat any actual horses. And by the way, just so everyone knows, no horses were beaten in the making of this podcast.

Matt Krause
So anyway, but anyway, let’s let’s do the Pareto-ing of the presentation. And by Pareto-ing I mean, you know, Pareto is basically saying, the 80/20 rule.

Matt Krause
So what are the the, the 20%, the small, quick things that you can do, that are gonna get you 80% of the result?

Matt Krause
You know, our lives is about getting the 100% of the result. But let’s, you know, in real life, a lot of times, you know, your boss pokes his or her head into your office and says, Hey, in 30 minutes, I need you to give a presentation. And so you don’t have time to get 100% of the results.

Matt Krause
So these are, these are the few things that you can do that are going to get you the bulk of the results.

Matt Krause
And the first thing on my mind, is answering the three questions. And we’ve done this before in this podcast, or we’ve mentioned this before on the podcast.

Matt Krause
The three questions are, who am I talking to? What do I want them to do? And why should they care? And again, you know, yeah, and if you’ve never talked to these people before, it might take you forever to go through these three questions.

Matt Krause
But, you know, a 30 minute presentation that your boss, you know, wants you to give in 30 minutes, you’re going to know who you’re speaking to. So it’s only going to take you about two minutes at the most to answer these questions.

Matt Krause
So it’s not a big cognitive load that that we’re suggesting, you you subject yourself to, it’s a pretty quick thing to answer these three questions.

Matt Krause
So again, the three questions are Who am I talking to? What do I want them to do? And why should they care?

Matt Krause
And it might be something really simple. Like, for example, if you are in the marketing department, let’s say you’re in the marketing department, and you are getting ready for an email campaign, you know, who am I talking to? might be as simple as the other people in the marketing department.

Matt Krause
The What do I want them to do? might be as simple as put out an email, the why should they care might be well, you know, if they hit their targets for the month, you know, open rates, and you know, conversion rates and all that stuff, if they hit their target for the month, then their lives are going to be easier.

Matt Krause
So that might take you all have, maybe it doesn’t even take two minutes, maybe it takes you 30 seconds to run through this step. So that’s the first step.

Matt Krause
And the second step that I have in mind is follow a simple story structure, you know, you’ve only got 30 minutes to do this. So you need something quick. And rather than panicking and just throwing up a bunch of graphs and hoping hoping for the best use a story structure, people respond to story structures really well.

Matt Krause
And don’t try to get fancy, just use a really simple one. And probably one of the simplest story structures that I’ve seen is man in hole, man in hole is basically one down one up, you know, what is the problem that we’re trying to solve? And what are we doing about it? What is the problem? And what are we doing about it? That’s man in hole right there. And so so again, if you’re using your let’s say your you’re talking about your email campaign to the marketing department, and the email campaign is trying to boost sales that have been flagging over the past month or two. So your man in home might be that sales are down and we’re going to try this the next month to try to get them back up. That’s man in hole right there.

Matt Krause
And so you’ve done your three questions. You’ve given your your presentation a basic story structure.

Matt Krause
And then the third step, the third step would be to make sure that your headlines match the message that you’re trying to give, you know, the people in the room, you’re going to have time to talk to them.

Matt Krause
And you know, they know you. So they’re going to be a little more patient with you. So and if they have questions, they’re going to feel a little more free to ask them. So face to face, you don’t really need this as much.

Matt Krause
But still, there are going to be some people like maybe your boss or your boss’s boss, or somebody like that is probably going to read this presentation, you know, in the back of a taxi cab on the way to the airport.

Matt Krause
And so you need to make sure that your headlines give your message if this if the person in the back of the taxi cab reads only the headlines, the person that person needs to know what was your message.

Matt Krause
And a key part of that is to give your headlines on each slide to give each slide’s headlines, some active verbs, you know, rather than just saying rather than than just saying Sales Summary for last month, you maybe you say sales are down or sales are down in in XYZ sector.

Matt Krause
And that gives your presentation, a little bit of movement. So when the person is in the taxi cab riding on the way to the airport, they’re not thinking this presentation is boring.

Matt Krause
So Alper, those are the three things that I recommend, if you’re if you only have a few minutes to Pareto your presentation. So is there anything that you want to add about that or anything that I should be clarifying?

Alper Rozanes
Well, before I add something that comes to my mind, don’t let my calm listening fool you. I have my set of questions and pushbacks, to some of the things that, by the way, not complete pushback, because if someone asked me, okay, I have 30 minutes for this presentation, give me three tips. Those would be exactly the same tips.

Alper Rozanes
So you and I are completely on the same page. But I mean, due to my nature, I’ll give some pushback, especially on on the first three questions.

Alper Rozanes
I mean, you also said when you were talking about them that I know who I’m going to talk to, I know what I want to tell them and I know what I want them to do. So why should I, I mean, I have 30 minutes to an important presentation that my boss is asking me to do.

Alper Rozanes
If I already know the answers, why do you think I should dedicate any remaining minutes or time to figuring about some questions like that, which I already know the answers to?

Matt Krause
Two things come to mind. One is that it’s going to be really short, since you’re speaking to people you know, so you’re not going to be spending, you’re not, you’re not going to be spending five or 10 minutes of your 30 minutes on this, you’re going to be spending maybe, maybe just 20 seconds on this.

Matt Krause
But the reason that I mention it no matter how short the time, whether it’s 20 seconds, or five minutes or 10 minutes, whatever you spend, it can be as short as 20 seconds, maybe even 10. Maybe you already know the answer.

Matt Krause
But the reason that I include this step is simply that it’s so important a step to presenting in general, that it needs to become habit. Do not get even though you already know the answer, and even though you only have a few minutes to put together the presentation, do not get so lazy that you skip this step.

Matt Krause
Because this because this step will be critically important in future presentations, where you might need to think about them for a couple of days. And you’re going to need this step then.

Matt Krause
So you may as well get used to the practice of including this step even if it’s only 20 seconds, and you have to give a presentation in 30 minutes, get used to this step. Make it a habit. So that’s that’s why I include it.

Alper Rozanes
Okay, I I agree with you. And I think it’s a great habit to have for any kind of speech, or any kind of presentations. It’s good to hear that from you.

Alper Rozanes
I don’t think I hear more pushback. I feel kind today.

Alper Rozanes
I have one more recommendation.

Alper Rozanes
We’re treating each other so nice today. It’s Friday afternoon.

Alper Rozanes
I think one recommendation that I would add to those three wonderful questions would be on the technical side.

Alper Rozanes
And that would be going through your slides one by one and it’s not going to take too much of your time, but go through them one by one and see if any of them are coming across to you as crowded and if they are, it is very easy to do, you can just slice them up into two slides or three slides.

Alper Rozanes
But this may be a little bit time consuming, I understand. So if you feel you don’t have that kind of time, just start selecting objects on the slides and assigning them the build animation the most basic nothing fancy, nothing intricate, just the regular appear build slide, what that will do is when you’re talking about your slides, everything will start coming one by one.

Alper Rozanes
And what that will provide the audience with will be, they will enjoy being able to focus on you when you’re talking because there won’t be anything else on the slide to focus on unless you talk about that. And you’re and you hit your remote or your keyboard or whatever. And for the for the item to come onto the slide.

Alper Rozanes
The reason I say that is, it’s one of the tools, which I believe has the strongest impact in terms of audience attention, and retaining their focus on you. And it’s the simplest and easiest one to do.

Matt Krause
And let me make sure that I understand what you mean by builds, you’re talking about, like, for example, bullet points, making sure that the bullet points, you have five bullet points, for example, a build is making sure that all five don’t show up at the same time. First, one shows up and then the second one shows up and the third one shows up in the fourth. So okay, okay. So go ahead. Go ahead.

Alper Rozanes
I’m not even questioning why there are five bullet points. And I think we have 90 minutes left into the presentation, we’re not going to go into philosophical details or content limitations on each slide. No, the presentation is on, you have 18 minutes. Now, we just wasted one more minute. So for the sake of argument for the sake of making things easier to follow and understand, yeah, just start selecting things and giving them build animations.

Matt Krause
Okay. Sounds like sounds like a good suggestion. So to sum things up. So this is our suggestion for Pareto-ing your presentation. So your boss sticks his or her head in your office door and says, Hey, in 30 minutes, I need to give you a presentation, I need you to give a presentation to the marketing team or something in 30 minutes, I need to give you a I need you to give a presentation. Good luck with that. And so now as the fear is welling up inside of you, and you’re thinking, oh, man, I need to do a presentation in 30 minutes. These are the things that you can do to get the biggest bang for your buck. Basically, these are the four things that you can do.

Alper Rozanes
I think they will drastically improve your performance. And the the investment for that is minimal. But the returns are pretty high.

Matt Krause
That’s true. All right. So thank you very much, Alper.

Alper Rozanes
Thank you.

Matt Krause
We have we have once again, beaten a dead horse. But again, I wanted to state that today, no horses were actually harmed in the industry filming of this podcast.

Alper Rozanes
And I’m sure this won’t be the last beating. I have the sensation.

Matt Krause
Yes. I’m sure that we will beat this particular horse again. Thank you, Alper, I’ll talk to you later.

Alper Rozanes
Thank you. Bye bye.