The White Rabbit

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...

Having broadcast for about 5 months, Matt and Alper decide it's time to tell the audience how they got into this business, so people don't think they're just random axe murderers who showed up to talk about presentations. Up today: Matt and how he got into this business.

Alper wraps up this mini-series with a deep dive into must-have principle #6 of the entrepreneurial pitch deck: Exit, and how it is so sorely needed, and yet is lacking in almost all pitch decks. A shout-out goes to Mathieu Carenzo, Alper's mentor in Barcelona. Mathieu is not a slide designer, but rather a business school professor, a seasoned entrepreneur and a dynamic business angel with current...

Alper goes further into must-have principle #5 of the entrepreneurial pitch deck: Scalability, and scalability of a particular type (hint: it's not scalability of revenue or headcount). A shout-out goes to Mathieu Carenzo, Alper's mentor in Barcelona. Mathieu is not a slide designer, but rather a business school professor, a seasoned entrepreneur and a dynamic business angel with current investmen...

Alper goes further into must-have principle #4 of the entrepreneurial pitch deck: Team, and what needs to go on that slide and what is just table stakes, even though entrepreneurs seem to love putting it on there. A shout-out goes to Mathieu Carenzo, Alper's mentor in Barcelona. Mathieu is not a slide designer, but rather a business school professor, a seasoned entrepreneur and a dynamic business...

Alper goes further into must-have principle #3 of the entrepreneurial pitch deck: Timing, and suggests some more imaginative ways to represent that element on a slide. A shout-out goes to Mathieu Carenzo, Alper's mentor in Barcelona. Mathieu is not a slide designer, but rather a business school professor, a seasoned entrepreneur and a dynamic business angel with current investments in scale-ups. T...

Alper goes into the first two of six must-have elements in an entrepreneur pitch deck: Market, and Value Proposition, and how to represent those in a slide deck. A shout-out goes to Mathieu Carenzo, Alper's mentor in Barcelona. Mathieu is not a slide designer, but rather a business school professor, a seasoned entrepreneur and a dynamic business angel with current investments in scale-ups. This ep...

Matt and Alper cover 6 of their presentation pet peeves, and try to do so quickly without droning on and on for 6 hours. Avoid these common mistakes and your audiences will appreciate it!

Alper asks Matt what he means by the phrase "vocabulary is a zip file," a phrase Matt uses a lot but that probably warrants some explanation, and Matt demonstrates how you can use vivid words in your presentations, even when you are speaking to an audience that might not know your fancy native-speaker terms.

Alper witnessed a presentation this week where the speaker missed out on using three particular tools he probably should have taken advantage of. They are very common, but even so, all too many presenters overlook them. Don't overlook these three tools, and your presentations are almost guaranteed to be better.

Matt uses this phrase all the time: "Talk to the dog." What does that even mean? Finally, an answer to the question.

Matt and Alper, both fans of Blair Enns, take one of his structures (a sales cycle structure) and see if they can map that structure to presentations, too. Warning: They are taking somebody else's one thing, and seeing if it can be repurposed for a different thing. Your results may vary.   Show notes: Blair Enns' website: http://www.winwithoutpitching.com/

Alper tells us about 3 favorite apps useful for presenters. The apps: Camo Studio: https://reincubate.com/camo/ Duet Display: https://www.duetdisplay.com PromptSmart: https://promptsmart.com

Matt makes an observation about how PowerPoint training and presentation training are often conflated, and offers a theory as to why.

Alper and Matt go deeper on the issue of audience resistance, and the unfortunate tendency of presentation training to try to overcome it, instead of elicit it and then leverage it. This was not an intended episode, but last week's discussion of resistance triggered it.