I wanted to understand how many of you were suffering from endless PowerPoint presentations every day! As economies slowly open back up and we move into the new normal, of hybrid meetings and more remote presentations, what is the true toll of ‘death by PowerPoint’? It turns out that Microsoft cited a number, 30 million PowerPoint presentations per day, in 2003. This is before COVID and SARS, before Zoom, before VOIP and before everything we take for granted today. So, what is the true number today? How Many Online Meetings Per Day? I took an analytical approach to figuring this out as there is very little data on the Internet. We all know that the population of the United States is around 350 million people. But there are a lot of people who don’t work jobs where they are stuck in endless remote meetings. Then I decided to focus on just the information technology and tech sectors. There are roughly 12.5 million people working in this sector in 2021. These individuals do spend endless hours in remote meetings watching and presenting. My own research has shown that the average professional has at least five meetings a day. This results in over 60 million remote meetings using PowerPoint a day in the US alone. If you extrapolate this to the EU and Asia, assuming similar statistics and demographic profiles, we can argue that there are 200 – 400 million online and hybrid meetings today that use PowerPoint. How Effective Are These Meetings? Why are we all so disengaged? Is PowerPoint helping or are we using it as a crutch? I found some fantastic research that articulates the problem: 90% of people believe that a strong narrative in a presentation is critical for engagement 55% of people say a great story is primarily what holds their focus during a presentation 46% of presenters feel that the hardest part of creating a successful presentation is crafting a compelling story Storytelling is important in presentations—but it’s also difficult. Many presenters find it hard to come up with a narrative that works both for their data and for their audience. Most of us leverage the content that our marketing teams give us, and usually this is a linear PowerPoint presentation. A lot of people ask me how they can transform meetings and remote sales presentations using the tools that they have as we are not all born storytellers. Storytelling is Not Hard with The Right Tool The trick I discovered is to tell a story using your existing content, where nothing has to be changed. We, and our marketing teams, did invest a lot of time and effort in creating amazing visuals and PowerPoint slides. So, let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water, lets reimagine our presentations so we can take it to the next level without a lot of effort. According to research, effective presentations engage the audience using different elements: 38% of your audience engagement is driven by your voice and how confident and authoritative you are 55% of your audience engagement is driven by your body language, facial expressions, and other non-verbal communication cues Only 7% of your audience is interested and engaged by the content itself Your Presence in an Online Meeting is Key This is critical. You cannot be reduced to the size of a small postage stamp in the corner. You need to be as prominent and clear as your content. You need a decent camera, proper lighting and dynamically control the size and position of your image with the content during your remote presentation. macbook background You Must be Non-Linear Use PowerPoint for its intended function – as a visual aid. The slide deck does not have to contain every bit of information crammed into dozens of slides. It can be used as a generic roadmap for the conversation and as a trigger to pull up additional information as needed. Engage the audience and see what they would like to discuss, bring in dynamic content such as websites and videos when required, compare, and contrast different ideas based on the direction of the conversation. Have conversations! macbook background Discover how Reactiv SUITE can help make your meetings memorable with a free trial.
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