The White Rabbit

Matt and Alper expound on choosing images for your presentations, including the idea that maybe, just maybe, a less-attractive photo might help you more than a more attractive photo.  They also go into the need to distribute questions throughout the presentation, rather than saving them up for the famous "Questions?" slide at the end, and better alternatives to the traditional "Thank you" slide.

The conversation starts out with the impossibly handsome or beautiful "people" shown on website testimonials these days, and then turns into a general conversation about stock photography. When to use it and when to stay away? Is stock photography about stock photography, or is it about something else?

Matt and Alper, having given trainings on the 6 principles of persuasion, revisit a couple of those principles and ask themselves how their understandings of those principles have morphed over time.

Alper goes into three tools he uses a lot (remember, no PowerPoint, we have to take that one out), and his rabbit hole. His rabbit hole is a mean one. Even Matt heard about it and thought, "Oh, man, that's like Kryptonite!"

Matt goes into his love for Grammarly and his unfortunate relationship with Wordpress plugins. BTW, his words about Netflix just might help you defend yourself the next time your spouse says you watch too much TV.

Matt and Alper go into actionable items that normal people can use to make their presentations better, without hiring a fancy presentation coach or a dedicated visual designer just for them.

Matt and Alper venture further into the existential question that came up last week: Does anyone benefit from training, or should we all just go home? Fortunately for the training industry, the answer comes back that training is good for some, but a complete waste of time for others. Along the way, the debate winds through pro basketball players, catered lunches, and internal conviction.

Matt and Alper, joined by guest Andreas, dig into whether they should or should not be offering service guarantees. No definitive conclusion is reached. In fact, the debate explodes into a larger subject that will need to be addressed in future episodes. But for today's episode, they stick to the narrower subject of guarantees.

Alper continues the "Business of a Presentation Business" theme by outlining the milestones of his own business, including the evolution from his first slide design job for a Toastmaster, to life in the high-stakes world of entrepreneurial pitches.

After more than 8 months of dispensing weekly presentation tips, Matt and Alper decide to give something back to the community: Talking about the business of running a presentation business. Having run their own presentation businesses for more than 10 years each, they weigh in on one of the topics newbies in the business often ask about: What are the milestones one can expect to go through? This...

Matt and Alper tweak a story-telling structure they've mentioned before, and then can't decide whether to rag on an author or give him props.

Matt and Alper go into the importance of making a strong start in your presentations. Almost no one says, "You know what you need to do? You need to start weak," and it's probably not the first time someone told you to start strong, so Matt and Alper try to offer up some tangible ways to start your presentation.

In this episode, Alper discusses Blair Enns' book Win Without Pitching, and in particular a few of the main principles that got him started righting the ship in his own business. Note that as much as Matt and Alper are both big fans of Blair Enns, they are not paid shills, just enthusiastic readers and listeners. For more information on the WWP, you can visit their website at: www. WinWithoutPitch...

Matt rereads a famous messaging book, Chip and Dan Heath's Made To Stick, and recounts the six ways they recommend overcoming the Curse of Knowledge. Suffering from the Curse of Knowledge is so deeply embedded in the human experience that you'll probably never get over it completely, but these are six things that'll get you closer.  

Alper goes into 4 things that really get in the way of your most important job in any presentation: Connecting with the audience. Do not let these 4 things interfere with the mission. They include corporate templates, stories, and more. These 4 things are not just any pet peeves, they are things that show you are worshipping the wrong god. 

Lots of people hold up the Hero's Journey as the end all and be all of a great story structure, but who has time to study it? So in this episode, Matt and Alper provide an alternative that normal people can actually use in their daily lives.

Matt goes into six tips you can use when doing what he calls "putting your head in the lion's mouth" -- presenting to people who might be way above your pay grade. Alper and Matt also discuss whether these same techniques can be used in other cultural situations, too.

It's one of the most popular questions Matt and Alper get: "Help, an angry audience member is confronting me, what do I do?" Today Alper goes into what to say and do in situations like that, including what to do when the angry person just won't let it go.

Matt goes into how he, a self-admitted know-nothing when it comes to visual design, "cleans" a presentation, rails at what he calls the "Happy People Slide," and briefly touches on the need for trust when the "cleaning" process is so radical.

You know the agenda slide, the one that makes you say, "First I am going to talk about Topic #1, and then I am going to talk about Topic #2, and then I going to talk about Topic #3, and then..."? What if you could do a nonlinear presentation with the same slide deck? What if you could just walk into the conference room and tell your customers you can start with whatever they are most interested in...

Last week, we went into things 1, 2, and 3 that you should do when making your deck "pop." Today we go into things 4, 5, and 6, including importing information from Excel, and the opportunity presented by Data Values. Plus, there's the bonus Magical 2-Minute Tip. What if you don't have time for any of the six? What if you only have 2 minutes? This Magical 2-Minute Tip will send you into that confe...

Alper goes into the first things he does when someone sends him a deck that needs some love and care from a professional. To get a boring deck that looks like everyone else's, don't do these things. Warning: If you do decide to do these things, you might actually end up with less work to do. Imagine that, a nicer deck, AND more time to attend your kid's piano recital!

Matt, inspired by a podcast he listens to regularly, decides to map out a model he uses often in his professional life, including the four steps he would give to the hypothetical client Bruce, who wants to know how to use the model to overcome a presentation problem. The source of the inspiration: https://2bobs.com/podcast/models-everywhere

Alper wrote a book a few years back called Presentations That Make A Difference. Don't look for the book in English yet, it currently exists in Turkish and Spanish. Today Alper goes into the book a bit, discussing why he wrote it and who he wrote it for (spoiler alert: he wrote it for one person, but who that person is is still a mystery), and Matt marvels at the effectiveness of the some of the a...

There aren't a lot of kids who say, "Mommy, when I grow up I want to be a Presentation Designer," so most people in the presentation business come at it via seemingly random directions. Today Alper describes the winding road that got him into the business. Alper's story ranges from the highs of bringing Apple to a new country to the lows of crying in a car in a parking lot, and includes unexpected...