Having written a book called “How to Make Anyone Like You in 7s or Less”, I find it easy to believe that it takes 15 seconds for buyers to look at your presentation deck and decide to ‘bounce’, ie. ignore it. Here are some other eye-popping stats from a recent survey by storydoc.com of 100K presentations they did.

Attention Span Like a Goldfish

As Ted Lasso says to his losing team ‘be a goldfish’ and forget your defeat quickly. This doesn’t work for us in business when we’re presenting to a buyer who has an attention span of 15 seconds before he/she loses interest in the presentation deck that they’re looking at. That is two slides tops. My recommendation is to make those two slides about the buyer’s company, their pain, or something emotional like your personal story of the pain that relates to them in some way.

First Golden Slides

Statistically 80% of buyers who view the first 3 slides read the deck in full. Sadly, a Gallup report confirms that 60% of buyers rate themselves as indifferent and 11% are actively disengaged from the slide decks they are reading. So I repeat the advice above. Start with a bang and change those horrid disengagement stats.

Mobile Is King

You thought content was king and it is…but so is content read on mobile (cell phones or tablets). Over a third of decks are read on mobile and understandably, their reading time is about half a minute shorter than on desktop. Interestingly, the deeper down the prospect is in the sales funnel, the less interested they are in mobile info consumption. For example, the first outreach deck is read 47% on mobile, then the next sales info deck is 37% of the time read on mobile and lastly the final proposal is only 19% of the time read on mobile. That’s because the more serious the content, the less people want to miss details and read it on a smaller screen. So tailor your content accordingly.

Not Opened

When you see that your deck isn’t opened within 2 days, you can forget about it ever being read because there’s an 80% chance that it won’t ever be opened. The key to beating this stat is to do follow up and to send clever hooks and teasers to re-engage with the buyer.

Generic Decks Are Death

Decks with personal notes added have a whopping 68% higher number of buyers reading them in full vs. generic decks. Not only are more people reading them initially but personalized decks have a 41% higher average reading time and are shared 2.3 times more. When you consider that the average corporate buying group is now between 6-10 people, this should tell you that generic decks mean the death knell to your sale.

CTA or Go Home

A presentation without a clear one step action (call to action CTA as it’s known in the marketing world) has a 27% lower close rate. Clear action steps could be “Sign up here”, or “call for more details”, or “Talk to Us” etc. Something clear and concise is best.

Powerpoint decks should always be walked in, in my opinion. However, if you ever have to send them to your buyers, follow these golden nuggets of advice to make sure to get in the door with the buyer after they actually read it.

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