Let’s start at the top: if we’re not presenting to top executives, chances are the majority of us aspire to do so. That’s where you get the best results, after all. But what is the hourly cost to a company of 5 top executives in a room? Depending on the company size and industry, many of those executives earn $300 an hour or more. Are they getting their money’s worth when you speak? They’re making an investment when they decide to listen to you. Is your preparation and message worth it?

Great leaders are obsessive about value, not cost. The point isn’t to consider whether or not your message just covers the cost of your audience’s time, but whether or not it can produce a multiple of that time in revenue or savings. In our opinion, if done with a certain panache, this can be a very compelling way to begin a presentation. Acknowledge the collective value of the audience’s time, that their willingness to invest that time with you isn’t taken for granted, and then summarize the ways in which you hope to deliver ROI.

This perspective works a different way, too: have you ever repeatedly sought an audience with someone or a group of people, only to feel as though it’s not a priority? Most of us are aware of the obvious initial hurdle of just piquing someone’s interest enough to get the chance to present, but sometimes our mega-claims aren’t enough to do it. Most people are overwhelmed with the big claims. What’s more tangible is a promise to deliver ROI on the amount of time spent. Usually, that’s fairly easy to accomplish simply by offering an educational, data-driven presentation that helps illuminate a business reality that they’d be hard pressed to understand without your expertise.

You have to give to get in this world.

Question: what are you giving your audience in return for their investment of time?

The frogs were opposites. Skinny frog was, well, skinny; fat frog was fat. Skinny frog saw the glass half-full; fat frog had poor eyesight and couldn’t really see at all—and that made fat frog cynical and pessimistic. Skinny frog was always getting kissed by princesses and spending weekends as a prince, and fat frog thought a princess’s place was in the kitchen and never made it to first base.

Somehow, though, they got along. For a while. One day, while hopping around, they both landed in a milk churner that was filled with milk. Immediately, fat frog said, “I’m lactose intolerant and hate swimming. Let’s just die.” Skinny frog, understanding that the ordeal would likely lead to publishing and movie deals if they could just survive, prevailed upon fat frog to swim and give it his all.

They swam for hours, waiting for someone to come and notice them in the milk. Fat frog felt that said event would spell certain doom—who wants frogs in milk? he argued. Skinny frog didn’t know how things would turn out; he only knew that they had to survive.

After a while, fat frog decided to give up and drown and he did. Skinny frog continued paddling, though he was tired, hungry and just a little flour and a hot pan away from being someone else’s dinner. But he kept paddling. And you know what?

Things just got harder. The milk seemed harder and harder to swim in. He couldn’t believe it. Just as he was running out of energy, too. He had to kick twice as hard to stay afloat. He felt clumsy, fighting for every breath in milk that seemed to be slowly solidifying around him. For a moment, he thought about fat frog, down at the bottom of the churner, and wondered who made the right decision. But he pressed on.

Suddenly, he realized something. The milk was getting even more dense. He still had to kick his hardest to stay afloat, but he could rest between kicks. He kept at it for a few more hours, and to his surprise, the milk had become completely solid. After a short breather, he simply jumped out of the churner.

When we hear this story, we see parallels to the lives of many of our clients and the great presenters we work with. For them, it’s always an origins story: presenters know that for years, nobody listens. Nobody cares. Presenters are optimists, so they call the room, “half-full”, but it still hurts to see the empty seats. It takes courage, hard work, constant refinement and an unswervingly positive attitude to keep on presenting, to keep taking that message to audiences, even when you doubt anyone cares.

Then, suddenly, it happens. There’s a breakthrough. A major turnout, tons of positive and engaging feedback. Progress. And yes, occasionally, book deals do happen.

For the presenters out there still waiting for the break, we wanted to share the classic story of two frogs once again. You know plenty of people who think it’s easier to give up. Don’t. Stick with it. Refine the message. Practice and improve, and enjoy the fruits of your labor when you change the world.

Question: How important is your message? How much would you sacrifice to make sure you overcame every obstacle to share it with the world?

Now, don’t get us wrong: PowerPoint remains the industry leader and there are several good reasons to default to a PowerPoint deck. For one, if you’re collaborating on a presentation with individuals whose technological prowess varies, PowerPoint is most likely to be familiar and available on a variety of computer types regardless of internet connections, operating systems, etc. Another obvious advantage is when it’s pitch time: many presenters don’t know if it’s their computer or some A/V team’s old PC in the back of the room that will be running the presentation. When in doubt, you obviously go for the most common presentation design software.

That said, there’s very little about PowerPoint’s actual presentation design toolset that makes it unique. Keynote, SlideRocket, and even Google Presentations (part of the Google Drive toolkit) all have many of the same design capabilities, though you can expect the interface to take some getting used to. While Keynote is a traditional app downloaded to a physical computer, SlideRocket and Google Presentations are cloud-based and may just offer that extra bit of cloud freedom you didn’t know you were looking for.

The #1 concern anyone is going to have when switching their presentation design application is compatibility. No one wants to show up to their Series A funding pitch and discover that formerly epic prose reduced to Wingdings. Don’t ask us why this happens: the Apple/Microsoft sabotagery has no bounds.

The notion of PowerPoint inter-compatibility is a myth, too. Different versions don’t always work well together, especially with any sort of advanced design, audio/video embeds, or animations going on. Font compatibility is only as good as the font book of the destination computer, and let’s not even get into what happens with a presentation travels from PowerPoint for Mac to PowerPoint for PC. Nightmare.

But when you build your presentation in the cloud, the only compatibility risk you run is the risk of not having an internet connection. These days, that’s a pretty minimal risk—especially if you have a smartphone and could just switch on mobile hotspot in a pinch. In many ways, the cloud-based approach actually takes a lot of risk off the table. You access the presentation through browsers, so regardless of whose computer you use, it always displays as intended. And meanwhile you access all the amazing collaborative benefits of working in the cloud: there’s nothing more thrilling (at least, to us workaholic geeks) than being on a plane 30,000 feet in the air and working on a presentation with a partner in real-time, seeing their notes and changes as they make them and building it out together. It’s the future, man.

So while it might not be time just yet to try and convince your entire office to abandon PowerPoint, it may be a really good time to set up a free Google Drive account (if you haven’t yet) and start fooling around with Google Presentations. When those last minute opportunities come along and you can’t afford a 4-hour flight to slow down the development of a presentation, it’s just the sort of tool you’ll want to use.

Question: Have you toyed around with Google Presentations or SlideRocket before? What were your impressions?

The brain works this way. What we think about most of the time becomes reality. We are the product of our own obsessions.

Most of us control our thoughts and expectations by asking, consciously or unconsciously, what is reasonable. What makes sense? We weigh our strengths and weaknesses, our history and past experience, what we think we know about the world and we use these preconceptions to create our vision for the future. What we think about most of the time becomes reality.

But this is true whether the premise is “reasonable” or “unreasonable”. The mind doesn’t care if you actually know the path to achieving your ambitions and vision; it just wants the picture, the end-in-mind. We hear echoes of this reality in the memoirs and musings of successful people time and time again. When they look back on their most humble periods, all they remember is an obsession with the way things were going to be. Success never makes sense until we look backward. Like the concept of creating something from nothing, these rise-from-the-ashes stories seem improbable. Yet they form the foundation of our country’s narrative about opportunity and have become a huge part of our national discourse.

The reality is that no one deserves or doesn’t deserve anything. Capabilities, education and circumstances are somewhat unreliable predictors of success; what we know is that people get what they want out of life. When our current reality doesn’t match up with what we think we want, we need to start paying attention to what we’re really thinking about. Chances are, even if we want something better, we’re thinking within “reasonable” confines. If you want “reasonable” results, that’s fine. But if you want something bigger, you need to think bigger every moment of every day.

You’ll solve all the problems along the way and most of the time won’t know how to get from point A to point B, but the only thing that matters is having a clear picture of point B, and making sure that it’s really and truly the biggest vision you can manage. Stick to it, think about it always, and it will manifest itself. The #1 most important thing in life and in business is thinking big.

Question: Could you be thinking bigger?

To take this point a step further—a step higher, actually—when we present, we have to capitalize on the opportunity to distinguish ourselves as a better partner, not just a better product or service. The word better, as it pertains to products and services, is highly subjective and changing every quarter. Mouthy startups threaten to disrupt even the best and most established brands in a variety of sectors. Better, as we said earlier, is just the entry fee. That’s when the competition begins.

Everyone needs a partner these days. Positions in marketing, sales, engineering, and accounting used to be specialist roles; now they’re generalists with cross-functional responsibilities. We can’t do everything well without identifying partners who can help us when we tread in unfamiliar waters. We’re 50% looking for the products or services that fill the immediate need and 50% looking for experts we can trust for all the uncertainty we feel while we try to do our jobs.

The #1 best way to differentiate yourself as an ideal partner is to demonstrate that you have the information and insights they need. And the way to do that is with market data. As aforementioned, our access to information is greater than it ever has been. But it would be a mistake to think that our understanding is greater than it ever has been. There’s so much information out there, and many of us don’t really know how to synthesize all of the data into reliable action plans for that critical question, “What’s next?”

By taking the responsibility to gather credible market data, organize it into thematic and simple messaging, and distribute that messaging to your audience, you communicate to them that you’re a solid candidate for the role of go-to partner in their organization or world. They’ll know that now and in the future, when they have misgivings or uncertainty regarding anything in your area of expertise, they can come to you to be educated (not sold). By using data to educate on trends instead of focusing on products or services, you do something far more valuable than just stacking up features and benefits: you justify the creation of a relationship. That’s a far better place for selling, after you’re an established partner.

Now, all this being said, it’s important to know that we do still have to pay that price of admission, and have really great products or services. By educating on trends and using market data, though, you create a logical and credible space in your presentation to explain your products and services. In fact, the goal should be to demonstrate that your products and services are what they are because of what you and your organization see in the larger market place: you created the ideal product or service because you understood the pain points.1

Question: How do you go about gathering market data when you put together presentations?

It’s a hyperaware culture. We feel dizzy, we google “feeling dizzy” to see what obscure disease we might have. We get half our news and most of our product recommendations from social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Awareness, more and more, is the easier part of the equation for people with a message to share with the world; it’s differentiation that causes struggle. And since none of us compete in our own backyard anymore, and some upstart from Arizona or Brazil or England can compete for our deals and exposure at a moment’s notice, it’s no longer wise to sit back and let the audience just compare features and benefits and make decisions. We have to engage more deeply.

We hear and read a lot these days about the loneliness of life in the digital age—how Twitter and Facebook don’t replace real relationships. There are a lot of blog posts out there about signals vs. noise. The best presentations we’ve ever seen were conceived from a certain viewpoint: people are still people, and meeting people’s core needs transcends time and technology.

It used to be that if you built a solution, product or service with features that matched up with the audience’s needs, that was enough to answer the core buying motivation: do you understand me, and can I trust you enough to get started? There wasn’t, or they weren’t aware of, too many other options to what you offered.

How has this changed? We assume, from the get-go, that our audience has tens, hundreds, or thousands of options for what to buy or who to listen to. Creating quality products or services that meet needs is just the entry fee to the rodeo; we still have to ride the bull. The key to success, to moving past the hyperawareness and hyper-access of our audience, is to sell pain relief. Our quality products and/or services warrant the conversation, but it’s our ability to understand and address our audience’s pain, to demonstrate that we would be an excellent relationship for removing that pain, that makes us the winner.

When your next presentation opportunity rolls around, and it’s time to brainstorm the central theme and angle, try white-boarding all of the audience’s pain points, organizing them by severity and priority, and identifying the ways in which you can address their pain during the time allotted for your presentation. It may feel like you’re spending too little time on the actual features and benefits of your product, but chances are they already know the gist anyway. Better to help them understand how valuable you can be to them, how you can take away their pain. If you do this, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to talk features and benefits later, when they ask you as a trusted partner in solving problems.

Question: How do you and your team identify your audience’s pain points?

To start with, creativity is probably somewhat misbranded. When we see children being creative, usually what we’re really witnessing is problem solving. Children’s creativity stems from curiosity—they want to learn and experiment and toy with the realities of the universe. Every creation has a purpose. The kind of creativity that adults practice (and we’re talking about the artsiest interpretations of the word “creativity”) is much different, much more abstract. Children’s creativity is pragmatic and utilitarian. Even if the primary purpose is fun, the fun part is in the discovery.

Adults in the workforce employ creativity on a daily basis, but we don’t call it creativity. We call it problem solving. And this is truly the pinnacle of true creativity. Groundbreaking technologies, businesses, sales, etc. all stem from problem solving.

How does this apply to presentations? The #1 self-deprecating comment we hear from our clients is that they’re not creative. It’s simply not true. Our clients represent the peak of creativity in their daily lives; they just associate “artsiness” with true creativity. And we suspect if this is true of the people that approach us for presentation design and content services, then it’s true for the broader population as well.

But just because you’re not skilled in Adobe Creative Suite, didn’t study visual arts and the effects of type treatments, imagery and graphics on human retention and understanding, and haven’t practiced the art of story-based presentation writing doesn’t get you off the hook. Yes, we help people do these things, but even if we’re not doing the work, you have both the ability and the responsibility to try to solve the problem at-hand: communicating your ideas clearly and engagingly.

Therein lies the key: it’s a problem to solve, not a creativity gap. And just like you solved other problems in your career, you can solve this one. How did you solve those other problems? You got curious—you learned everything you could about the subject. You researched the client and competition, maybe you went to graduate school, you joined LinkedIn groups, read discussion threads, trade blogs, followed industry leaders on Twitter. Successful businesspeople are masters at learning, because they’re always seeking new opportunities to solve the problems others can’t or (more often) won’t bother to solve.

So whether you enlist our help or go it alone, understand that not being “creative” is no excuse for phoning it in with bullet points and bare slides. You didn’t get this far by taking the easy route; you took the best route, and you succeeded.

Question: What is the best route for getting your ideas across? How can you improve your presentations, even if you’re not a professional designer or content writer?

Then they print out black and white handouts on flimsy paper with badly designed themes and layouts.

Granted, the hope for any presentation is that the ideas stick with the audience and they always remember the things we say. But the handouts are the things they actually take home and might look at next week when you’ve flown back home (or, at least, don’t have their attention anymore).

So what are those handouts saying about you and your presentation when you’re not there? Memory fades pretty quickly, and a good handout will convey the same professionalism and communicative clarity that you did when you were giving the presentation.

Here are three tips for putting together great handouts for your next presentation:

1. Invest in good design: When you present, you can control impressions with your preparedness and professionalism. You can’t do this when they look at your handouts without you there. Make sure the design of the handout is every bit as professional as you are.

2. Print like you mean it: Even the most oblivious audience member will notice when your handout is printed on quality paper stock in vibrant full color. By contrast, thin, cheap paper communicates cheapness, not always a desirable quality.

3. Keep it Simple: The purpose of the handout isn’t the same as the purpose of your presentation. The presentation should be thorough and illuminating; the handout should summarize key points and drive follow-up and personal interaction. Place an emphasis on where audience members can go online for more info, or how to get in touch with you, after a brief summary of the highlights of your message and next steps.

Whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of walking in empty-handed. A big portion of every audience will need some time to digest your presentation before acting at all; handouts are one part of a comprehensive follow-up strategy that will really help you drive action and engagement after the presentation is made. When we make the mistake of thinking that the presentation ends with the last slide, we miss out on major opportunities to get more out of the total effort than we otherwise would.

Question: What do your handouts say about you and your business?

And when we fill the space—especially when we have no prompt or explicit questions to answer—we have a natural tendency to seek harmony. We don’t know why. Silence is dissonant to the communal mind; we’re compelled to get back in tune with our counter-party. 

Great orators and speakers understand and wield the power of silence to great and terrible effect. Before massive, roiling crowds, Hitler used an unnerving pattern of piercing rhetoric with potent silence, and we all know the damage that was done when the crowds sought harmony out of the silence. He didn’t ask questions; he issued declarations of shockingly frank, challenging non-truths. In the silence, they harmonized their conscience with unthinkable rationalizations. His control from the podium was complete.

At the other end of the spectrum, Nelson Mandela, too, exhibited the power of conviction that is necessary to employ stark silence from the stage. He used silence to underscore the moral purity of his message, and to allow the audience to fully absorb the context and intent behind his words.

When what we say is truly challenging, truly important, and truly groundbreaking, we cannot afford for audiences to misunderstand us. We cannot even afford for them to miss the opportunity to ruminate and harmonize their thinking with ours. We have a responsibility, with messages that count, to combine our most powerful statements with the kind of pregnant pauses that elicit an introspective and self-critical response from those we seek to mobilize, motivate, and convict. 

As a presenter, don’t be afraid of the silence. Indeed, your faith in your message is revealed when you demonstrate a willingness to allow the audience to think. Identify the most challenging parts of your presentation and plan, in advance, the poignant moments where you will temporarily suspend your role as narrator of the “conversation” and instead allow them to engage their minds and seek alignment with your message. The psychology of silence is a powerful weapon; use it for good and you will increase the mobilizing power of your next presentation.

Question: When have you seen the power of silence used to great effect?

A NASA study has also revealed that short naps can improve pilots’ performance by 34%. 

One thing we all know is that, when we step on stage or stand up in the conference room to deliver a presentation, our #1 hope is that we’re the smartest, wittiest, best-looking version of ourselves we can be. We don’t always have control over this—blame circadian rhythms or whatever you want, but sometimes we’re just on and sometimes we’re just a little off. But we can control the healthful, restful state of our minds, and that’s controlling a lot.

The aforementioned studies are just two of a great many sleep studies that have demonstrated the profound effects of quality rest on human performance. From studies that show the positive effects of a 20-minute power nap to studies that demonstrate the importance of a full-night’s rest, it’s pretty much indisputable that if we want to do well, we should probably prioritize sleep.

To some, this may come across as counter-intuitive or at least contrary to established habit. We’re all somewhat accustomed to a busy, maxed-out lifestyle. A lot of us picked up some of our worst work habits in college, when the demands of multiple courses with heavy work loads would force us to pull all-nighters cramming for exams or churning out major papers. Our careers are no different, and many of us are in a constant state of “winging it” as we try to be the efficient multi-taskers that society apparently wants us to be.

But while this is the norm in life, it’s not the facts. The facts show that steady, pragmatic, focused execution creates more quality work and promotes creativity and problem-solving. We do worse when we’re exhausted. We do worse when we multi-task (just read any study on multi-tasking, all of you “great multi-taskers” out there). 

If you’re starting to get opportunities to present, or if you’ve been presenting for a while and feel like you could be doing more with those opportunities, consider taking a step back and focusing on your resting habits, the amount of focused time you spend on your presentations, and your overall state of relaxation and stability. Presentations aren’t standalone career obligations; they’re part of a bigger picture, just like that college thesis wasn’t a task but a reflection of years of study, synthesis, critical analysis, and creativity. If we don’t approach these kinds of opportunities from a state of holistic health, we have to understand that, on some level, we’re not functioning at our best and as a consequence we run the risk of not performing at our best.

We may not ever see an obvious punishment for any of this, but as with many things in life related to taking care of ourselves, the potential opportunity-loss is always harder to see but often the biggest consequence of our actions. From time to time, it’s good to consider what we might be missing out on. Maybe it’s time to take a little nap!

Question: How do you work relaxation, rest, and health into your busy professional routine?