Recently, I was sent out to an organisation to discuss early-stage sales process in respect of telemarketing.  I became involved in a discussion about delivering effective presentations. One of the attendees was kind enough to point me in the direction of Cliff Atkinson’s excellent book Beyond Bullet Points (BBP).

A note of caution: please don’t let the presence of the Microsoft name on this book put you off.  Their involvement stems purely from the fact that Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 is Cliff Atkinson’s tool of choice, hence they published the book.

True, BBP is grounded in the classical elements of storytelling as originally defined by Aristotle and used in every film ever made.  But, if all this sounds a bit highbrow for you, trust me it isn’t.  It’s all about working out what each slide is designed to achieve from the perspective of your viewer and catching their attention at each stage.  

Cliff also provides some excellent resources, albeit for a low-cost subscription, on his website.  You can also read an extract from the book here.

Like you, I have to admit to being fairly sceptical. While I have great respect for the individual who recommended this, like many of you I’ve sat through what must be hundreds of hours of turgid, monotonous PowerPoint presentations, many from some of the World’s largest companies.  I’m not sure I believed there could be an alternative!    I was pleasantly surprised!

Essentially, what this book does is provide you with a process to create compelling presentations that combine classical storytelling techniques with the use of visual media, enabling you to separate yourself from the read-as-they-go brigade of verbatim PowerPoint presenters.  So what does that mean for you, the productive seller.

Well, before I tell you that, let me talk you through my encounter with Beyond Bullet Points.  I was called upon to deliver a tender presentation, proposing a complex learning solution, to a group of public sector managers.  The solution I was proposing was radical and high risk.  I needed a presentation that would not just create a vision but really inspire people to drive it.  Time to test drive Beyond Bullet Points.

I received my copy of the book with one week to go until I was due to deliver my presentation.  I was busy every day, so I had no choice but to prepare the presentation in the evenings.  This meant reading the book as I went.

Firstly the layout.  Aside from the introduction, which gives a brief overview and sets down the minimum requirements to run PowerPoint, the book opens with a story.  I won’t spoil it for you, let’s just say it makes engaging reading and does a fantastic job of illustrating the BBP approach.  The clarity of the layout and style allowed me to quickly get to grips with enough BBP methodology to build a credible presentation, even if I didn’t have time to study all of the book in detail.

The book goes on to explain the science and research behind BBP before drawing you into creating your first five slides (Act One in BBP parlance).  And the great thing about creating these?  You’re not going to use PowerPoint!

All your initial work is done using the BBP story template (a Word document), which comes on the enclosed disc along with a number of other resources.  This template guides you in the creation of a powerful, narrative-based presentation, using simple headlines and single, clear images that define your messages in an engaging way.

You are encouraged to think about your role and the role of your audience, before tying this into your desired outcome.  You generate a headline for each slide, relative to the desired effect (where am I, who am I, what challenge do I face).  You don’t think about images at all at this stage, and you definitely don’t create any bullet points!

There is a lot of information about creating tension (remember, this is a story after all) and focusing  the audience on a call to action (vital for us productive salespeople). All of this hangs off the BBP mantra of clean, effective, visual slides that combine a single headline with a simple, highly relevant image.

In Act One you prepare your audience by “orienting, interesting, engaging, motivating and focusing them”.  Act Two is all about the meat of your presentation.  Planning the rest of your slides (again using the story template), writing headlines, prioritising slides and sequencing them.  Act Three draws your story to a resolution by re-using some of your slides, including your call to action, albeit with some graphical changes.

One of my principle concerns was how valid a story-based approach would be for a serious sales presentation.  The reaction to my presentation blew this concern out of the water.  I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that I received many plaudits from a group of managers who sit through (often turgid) PowerPoint presentations on a daily basis. Words like “inspiring” and “powerful” were bandied about, with one manager even saying that it had motivated them to try and address the subject that very day!  Experience has shown that Cliff’s view of the importance of a story-based approach is accurate:

“One objection to using Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) is the misconception that a story structure is not appropriate for informational presentations.  The thought that people don’t need to be engaged or motivated when faced with new information is based on the mythology described in Chapter 3 that assumes that you can pour facts into the passive minds of your audience and the will automatically ‘get it’.  The research reality is that people need to actively engage new information, so offering them tools and techniques to do so will help them learn better.  Why pass up the opportunity to engage your audience, when doing so can increase focus, and involvement?” Cliff Atkinson, Beyond Bullet Points, Page 98.

Quite simply, Beyond Bullet Points means that your sales presentations are going to be powerful, engaging and hence more productive.  Not only are they going to win you more business, you are going to revolutionise your use of PowerPoint as a tool to influence, inspire and motivate people. That has to be a good thing.

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What can we in sales learn from a junior Senator who has all but talked his way into the most powerful job in the world?

In her excellent article ‘The new Cicero’, published in the Guardian, Charlotte Higgins expounds the classical origins of Obama’s power.

Wait, wait, wait I hear you shout (that’s Anaphora by the way!) I don’t care about the Greeks and the Romans, I just want to sell!

Steady there Brutus; down Gladius for a moment and let’s see what’s in it for us productive sellers.

We are all about inspiring, right? And not just in managing our team, or dealing with colleagues; we inspire customers to buy our solutions.  Sure, we engage with the prospect in  a lot of ways, probing, uncovering pains and developing relationships, but at some point we have to present our product or service to the prospect’s decision-making unit:  this may be a low-key affair, or it may be a full on, stand-up presentation with PowerPoint and a projector.

This is where our sales rhetoric comes into play.  It’s not something we think about, not really.  We may have been on presentation skills’ courses and learned about body language and not reading from our slides, but very few of us have bothered to look into the true art of rhetoric.

Here are a few classical pointers to get you started:

1. Know your prospect organisation: its structure, its objectives, its pains and what it requires from your solution.  As Charlotte reminds us “In his book ‘On The Orator’, [Cicero] argues that real eloquence can be acquired only if the speaker has attained the highest state of knowledge – “otherwise what he says is just an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage”.”

• Does someone else in your organisation have experience of your prospect’s sector? Leverage their knowledge.  Test your presentation on them.  You might even want to take them to the presentation with you.

2. Know your solution: An extension of point 1. It sounds obvious, but I have encountered so many (unproductive) sellers who have a poor knowledge of their product and/or sector.

• If you can’t talk around the subject take someone with you who can: an engineer, a consultant, anyone professional in outlook and appearance, who can lend the weight of knowledge to your assault.

3. Remember, prospects are human too and humans have emotions. Aristotle taught us how to appeal to the prospect using pathos, logos and ethos.  What this means for you, the productive seller, is that you need to:

demonstrate to the prospect that both you and your company are qualified to speak on the subject (Ethos) (see points 1 and 2).

call upon the prospect’s pains, which you should have uncovered earlier in the sales cycle, to tap into their emotional responses and then link to this emotional response to the value of your solution (Pathos).  If you struggle to find pains, check out a leading sales methodology like Keith Eades excellent The New Solution Selling.

have a strong Return on Investment case ready for your solution, supported by substantive facts and figures, all of which are to hand during your presentation. This switch to logic (Logos) serves the double function of both adding to your credibility as a speaker and underpinning your emotional argument with substance.

4. Add power to your openings and endings with Tricolons.  Caesar did it with “Veni, vidi, vici.” (I came, I saw, I conquered); Obama with “I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.”

5. Add even more power to openings and endings with Anaphora and Epiphora.  This is the use of repetition at the start (Anaphora) or end (Epiphora) of a sentence in order to empahise a point.  In the video (above) you can see a famous Obama example.

e.g. “When they heard what we were planning, they said the market wasn’t ready, they said the technology wasn’t stable, they said we were crazy.  They were wrong.  Ladies and gentlemen…”

6. Use Praeteritio, “mentioning by not mentioning” when you have to refer to a negative.  Obama does it with: “Tonight we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the heights of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy…” He distances himself from imperialist sentiments while making the audience feel empowered by the very thing he is claiming to reject!

• e.g. I think what is important is not to focus on the difficulties that your existing system is causing, or the cost to date, but rather the short term financial and business gains that we can work together to achieve through…” (that’s a Tricolon too!).

This is just a short introduction to what is a complex, ancient and very powerful subject that definitely has relevance for productive sales.  But like anything, if you take the time to learn about it and assimilate it into your style, you and your selling will only be richer and more productive for it.

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