Really Great Presentations: How Does Yours Stack Up?

 

What was the last really great presentation you saw? How about the last really bad one? A great presentation makes an impression, and the presentation sharing Web site Slideshare has an annual contest to pick the world’s best. While these aren’t necessarily sales presentations, the techniques in these presentations may help you as you design your next presentation masterpiece.

According to a Business Week article about last Fall’s winners, the average PowerPoint slide has a title and bullet points, and has 40 words – that’s on one single slide. These ‘world’s best’ winners are much more visual, relying more heavily on photos and graphics and less on words.

While your sales presentation has information that has to be listed clearly – prices and circulation or viewership numbers for example – that doesn’t mean you can’t use visuals to help illustrate some of that data or to add visual interest.

Here’s the Business Week article that links to the 2009 World’s Best winners, and here’s a link to the 2008 winners. What do you think of these World’s Best? Do these give you any ideas for your own presentations? What do YOU think makes a really great presentation?