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There are three steps to making an IBM presentation:???

Plan It offers advice on organizing your message, sharpening your focus on what you want to say, and arranging it in a manner that audiences can follow.

Prepare It is a resource for constructing graphic support materials in Freelance Graphics (PowerPoint is also supported). You will find instructions on how to include elements such as text, charts and graphs in a style that will be consistent to all our audiences - an "IBM look," in much the same way that our advertising and marketing materials have a distinct appearance.

Present It offers tips on how to deliver what you've prepared effectively to an audience. Presentations are not about showing a series of slides; they are about you, communicating a message, with visual elements in a supporting role.

Where to begin

Here's what you do first: Stop. Take some time. As Thomas Watson Sr. used to advise, famously: Think. You are about to mount an argument. What do you need? Don't succumb to the temptation of

collecting every apparently relevant item

into a jumble and then trying to reshuffle

them into a coherent order. ("Jim has a nice

chart on this, and Lisa has some good market data, I'll get those.") That's the flawed

technique behind many of the more overblown,

leaden presentations you've ever dozed

through. That's working backwards. Instead,

start with nothing... and work forward.

Ask yourself this: What is my point? Every presentation is an attempt to communicate something. It may be a complex topic, with

lots of supporting data, but fundamentally there will always be something simple you want to say. It might be "IBM understands your business," or "This technology In her book Secrets of

Power Presentations , Micki Holliday suggests answering

the following questions as a

first start to organizing

your presentation:

? What does the audience need to know? ? What does the audience want

to know?

? What are the possible benefits of a successful meeting for this audience?

("What's in it for me?")

? What questions might the

audience have?

is the best for our requirements" or "We need more time to do this job right."

Figure out what you're trying to communicate, in its simplest, clearest, most concise form. Write it down, in one sentence. Does it make sense? Does it really cut to the heart of what you need to convey? If not, rewrite it.

If you only could deliver this one sentence to your audience, with no charts or any supporting information, would this be the one you'd choose?

Composing this basic sentence might take two minutes, or it might take an hour. It doesn't really matter which. Just get it right. Without a clear point of view, you are navigating without direction.

Get it wrong, and you'll struggle the rest of the way.

Get it right, and the pieces will begin falling naturally into place behind it.

Build your case

OK, you're clear about the point you need to convey. But it's safe to assume that your audience is not prepared to accept your message on faith. After all, if everyone in the room already knew what you wanted to tell them, and agreed with it, there would be no point whatever to your standing up and talking.

The purpose of your talk is to move your audience to your point of view. So you will have to build your case. You need to organize your argument.

Make a rough flow chart of the information you are going to present. Just sketch it out on paper - this isn't going to be a chart you'll show, and you'll probably have to revise it a few times anyway.

The organizing principle behind this is a pyramid: each statement you make will have one, or more likely several, supporting pieces of information under it. As you build your presentation in this outline form, a pyramid will form, with your basic statement at the top and everything else arrayed beneath it. Don't worry yet about the order in which you'll actually present each item. Just get them all down on paper to look at.

The Pyramid Principle book listed in our recommended reading list is devoted

to this method of organization, and it's a useful resource. But the basic idea is really common sense, merely a way of laying out your information so you can arrange and, later on, present it logically.

Let's take a look at a hypothetical presentation and how you might organize its various elements, using this technique.

From the top down

Let's assume your basic point is: IBM's solution is your best option, because its combination of products and services is integrated and flexible, and because we understand your business challenges.

Now, put yourself in your audience's position. They want to know why they should believe this. They expect proof.

You have, let's assume, four reasons. First, IBM products work together. Second, IBM offers the flexibility of open systems. Third, IBM services tie everything together. Fourth, IBM has experience in the customer's industry.

This is the heart and framework of your pitch. Lay it out graphically.

You now see that you're going to open by stating your main point, and you're going to proceed through your presentation by offering facts and data in these four areas. Don't worry yet about which will come first.

Take each of your supporting arguments and do the same again. Build another pyramid under each of the four. Under "products work together" you might have information about each of the elements in the solution: servers, middleware, storage. You might want to talk about inter-divisional efforts in IBM to integrate technologies across our product lines. It would look something like this:

Fallen Pyramids

Some people find it helpful to use a pyramid on its side, with the topic in the left-most box, and building the pyramid out to the right, instead of below it. If you use this method, you'll notice that the

For this example, we don't need to bother

creating all the pyramids that build downward, but you will want to do this for your entire presentation. Organize all the information that you might want to include. You will then have a pyramid that encompasses everything you need to convey. Now, play with it. Look at the big picture. See what's most important. Take out things that, while you might think they're

important, just won't resonate with or be

understood by your audience. Move things

around. Add or delete, but keep the organizing

structure intact.

Once you have a pyramid that seems to represent your theme and the various points you need to get across, you're ready to start creating the materials you will actually show people: bullet points, charts, graphs. Instead of organizing on-the-fly, you've organized first. Congratulations: you now have a clear picture - literally - of what information is relevant to your presentation, what points it supports, and where it should go. Unfortunately, many people pyramid more closely resembles a classic outline structure. Unlike an outline, however, the relative

equality of the boxes make it much easier to restructure and re-order your presentation

and establish new

relationships to item without

altering the entire

organization, as often occurs when creating an outline.

don't bother to begin with this formal, structured approach.

Although you haven't even created your first slide, the most critical (and often botched) work in creating your presentation is complete.

If this all seems too plodding, too restrictive and structured, don't worry: it isn't. By the time you have a presentation ready to show, the underlying organization will fade from view, leaving behind merely a framework that helps your audience focus more easily on your message, and enhances your own mastery of the material, since you understand thoroughly how it all fits together.

Now, let's take your graphical, pyramid outline and prepare a presentation.

Where to begin

Visual elements such as

graphs, charts, and text can

enhance your ability to

communicate, helping your

audience follow your message and quickly understand various types of information.

Used thoughtfully, they can be valuable tools.

Used indiscriminately, or constructed poorly, however, they can actually detract from your message. They can clutter your presentation and confuse your audience.

This template will facilitate the preparation of your presentation and will help to continue establishing you as one of the best expressions of the IBM brand.

It reflects IBM's corporate design style, which also influences our advertising and marketing materials. It is straightforward, clean, and simple.

It's flexible enough to accommodate a variety of uses. Some may use it with little or no graphic elements, while others might need to convey far more complicated data.

It's simple to use. Although communications specialists and graphic designers have worked to create this template, anyone in IBM should be able to use it without any special skills or software beyond what is

already available.

Don't automatically assume you need to use presentation software to make your presentation!

Some of the most effective sales jobs are done just by speaking directly, sincerely and informatively about the subject, without hiding behind charts. In Say It With Presentations, noted presentation designer Gene Zelazny gives three basic types of media you should consider if you need visuals to help convey your message:

Lap visuals, so called because each member of the audience receives his or her own copy of the materials at the start of the meeting, if not before. Best for small groups, their use can open up discussion and help everyone participate as equal partners. The downside is that they may read ahead and start asking questions you would prefer to deal with later in the discussion. And you can also miss opportunities for eye contact if everyone is looking down reading. Easels or white boards. Great for increasing interactivity among 15 or fewer people, since you're recording the audience's ideas as they come up. Downsides: Avoid spending all your time with your back to the audience; perhaps deputize a member of the meeting to help write down points so you can concentrate on their comments and reactions to you and each other.

On-screen presentations. While less personable than the other two methods, this is by far the most polished and suitable for large audiences. Since this is also the medium with the greatest pitfalls, this is the type of presentation

we'll be working on in this section.

Title screen

By using a standard title chart and following the style consistently, we will add a professional touch not only to our individual presentations but collectively to all of IBM's face-to-face communications.

The title slide is a straightforward element, and generally requires only that you include your name, IBM organization, and speaking topic in the places provided. However, the template allows for other elements that might be required, and it's important to follow the guidelines if you will be using these.

More text (if you must)

The template also provides a format for longer blocks of text. You should use blocks of text very sparingly. Yes, once in a while there might be a longer passage that is relevant, and valuable. For instance, you might have a quote from an analyst or customer that is particularly striking:

If you are going to make

your audience read

something, make sure it's

worth their time and

effort. More important,

make sure it's worth your

time, since you don't have much available and you've just turned some of it into a small reading assignment.

Don't overdo it

Before you begin, keep in mind some key points:

Visuals are not your presentation. You are the presentation. Your

audience has not gathered for the purpose of reading your Freelance (or PowerPoint) pages; they have come to hear you communicate. Use visuals to support your message.

Less is more.A graph that shows (for example) levels of customer spending on certain technologies can reveal at a glance trends in the market, but it remains your task to explain that data's relevance to your audience.

A single, well-constructed graphic, supported by your thoughtful

explanation, is more effective than a series of charts that the audience must decipher.

Projected visuals have severe limits. They are constrained by the

resolution of a computer screen, which is far lower than the printed page.

They are limited further by being projected onto a screen that people must read from a distance. For this reason, we want to keep visuals simple and bold. More complex graphics are better suited for inclusion in printed materials.

Let's take a look at the main elements of the IBM Presentation Template that you might need to include. More possibilities and variations are available in the presentation templates themselves. But understanding which you need, and when, is the first step.

Bullet-point text

Your audience is ready to listen and to look, but they don't want to read long passages of text on a screen. And you don't want them too, either — reading takes their attention away from what you are saying.

The most effective way to use text is with short phrases that can be read at a glance. Presented this way, text can remind people of your key points, or help them follow the progress of your presentation. Here's an example of text poorly used:

That isn't a bad-looking page, and it isn't too difficult to read. But it can be improved. This would be even better:

The first example tries to present your message. The second example merely provides cues to the messages you are discussing. It engages the audience's time only for a moment, and demands that they listen to what you're saying as you explain the points.

Of course, even when you reduce your message to a bullet-point phrase, you can still defeat yourself by cramming too many onto a single page. That's why you should limit any page of text to no more than five items (and even five is pushing it). You'll see that the template reflects this limit.

This limit of five is not a matter of how much text will fit onto a page while remaining both legible and visually pleasing, although these are important considerations. Rather, it's a question of how much information someone can easily retain at one time, especially while listening to you speak.

But what if you have more than three or even five points to make about IBM servers? Perhaps you want to talk about the technologies that give our servers their price-performance edge, and cite some benchmark studies as evidence. You have more to say about management capabilities, too. It simply won't fit into five lines.

No problem. If you examine your information, you are likely to find that it will arrange itself into groups of details that support more general points. (If you'd prepared your information carefully, according to the pyramid structure described in the 'Plan It' module, this should already be clear.) The solution is to create another page which focuses in greater detail on one of your topics. In our current example, you might progress to this:

Here again, you are giving your audience a limited, manageable amount of information at any one time. If you have benchmark data (in this example) that simply demands a graphic treatment, don't cram it onto this page unless it's a very simple graphic. Make another page, devoted to that.

When you've finished with your information about price-performance, return to your list and the second point. Your next page might list the key points about IBM servers' advanced management capabilities, followed by one with more detail on Linux and open standards.

If those other topics don't have as much supporting detail, you might simply show your first page about IBM servers again, perhaps with your next point highlighted:

You would then proceed to discuss the advanced management features. Your audience has a clear and quick visual cue that you're moving on to the second point, along with a reminder that a third one will follow.

It's perfectly okay to repeat pages in this manner. Repeating pages can help your audience follow the presentation, without requiring a lot of their attention to do so. While it's true that "less is more" on any single page (and even for visuals in general) so long as your pages are brief and direct, repeating pages in order to highlight the progress of your presentation is an effective use of supporting visuals. In this instance, more can be more. Just don't get carried away: you don't need a line on the screen to summarize every single thing you're going to say.

(If you are preparing a printed version of your pitch to distribute to your audience, you will probably include a page only once, and remove any highlighted and repeated pages.)

Charts & graphs

Chartware

If your presentations require

greater use of a wider variety

of charts, you can find a more

detailed exploration of the

Charts and graphs can be very effective tools. They can also be annoyingly clumsy, obscuring the very information they're intended to communicate. Like other tools, they must be used when the task requires them, and with care. Our template calls for charts stripped clean of extraneous clutter, free from such visual gimmickry as three-dimensional effects, and

restrained in their use of color. If your information is relevant to your audience, it shouldn't be obscured by this sort of distraction. If your information isn't relevant, it shouldn't be on the screen at all.

This introduction to the simplest, most common and effective types of charts used in presentations should help you develop the basic skills you need to decide when to use a graph, how to select the type most appropriate to your data, and how to create it using the software you already have available, in a style that will blend harmoniously into the IBM template.

Before you even begin creating charts, there are a few points to keep in mind.

topic in Say it With Charts , by Gene Zelazny, one of the books in our recommended reading list. For an even deeper

examination of visual

communication, Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte is

excellent, though not as

directly relevant to business presentations.