Powerpoint School

Going to a meeting with another customer tomorrow.  Proposal clarification on a key job we’re pursuing. Can’t share details as they are super-secret for now…

Since tomorrow’s meeting is a big deal to us, we had a pre-meeting today.  Need to be organized and be sure we can put our best foot forward, right?

Most interesting – read on and you’ll see why…

Our meeting tomorrow is with a mix of the customer’s commercial and technical people.  Intention is to review & clarify commercial details of our proposal so that there is no misunderstanding on either side. 

Come prepared, they say, but don’t go all technical on us.  [ Engineers have strong tendencies to fall back on technology, so we consider ourselves warned ]

The slide review was my first real involvement in such a thing here at PAS.  Wow!

It is no secret that PAS has been rather heavy on technology and pretty light on marketing for some years, but even so I was surprised. 

You see the school of Powerpoint that I went to says that each slide carries its own value statement and stands alone so that even those not paying attention (like managers playing with their Blackberries) can still get the idea. 

I talked about helping to bring out all the hidden gems from inside the company to market in an earlier post.  Well, after today’s meeting with my marketing hat on, it’s clear how I can add value to all the Super-Gee’s around here…

Next action… align our thinking on Powerpoint school – or I’ll end up re-writing more slides than I care to think…L

However, it seems like there are also other schools of Powerpoint design that say put as much as you can on a slide and obfuscate the real meaning of the bullet points as much as possible so that if a competitor ever gets a hold of it, they won’t be able to gain a single farthing of value from it.  I guess this assumes that customers don’t ever go back to read what you leave behind?!?  Hmmm…