Slideshows That Convert Your Audience Into Raving Fans With Brigette Callahan

by | Oct 28, 2021 | Podcasts

SWGR 586 | Slideshows That Convert

 

As entrepreneurs, we know how to innovate, execute leadership, and successfully run a business but we lack knowledge in delivering great presentations. In this episode, Elizabeth Bachman talks with Brigette Callahan on how we could win our pitches through our slideshows and deliver value. Brigette is on a mission to end the tyranny of boring PowerPoint presentations. She is passionate about helping speakers create presentations that engage and inspire their audience, and turns them into raving fans. We certainly can convert your audience into fans! Together, let’s learn how to create the perfect slideshows for our businesses. Tune in, increase our engagement with the audience and grow professionally!

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Slideshows That Convert Your Audience Into Raving Fans With Brigette Callahan

My guest is Brigette Callahan, who’s a Presentation Design Expert. Basically, she makes the world’s best slides. Before I go into the conversation with her, I’d like to invite you to find out how you’re doing with your presentation skills. You can go to our free assessment at www.SpeakForResultsQuiz.com. There, in four minutes, you can see how you’re doing with your presentation skills. We’re perhaps a little bit of support could help you get the results you need and the recognition that you deserve. This is an episode all about the visual aspect of presenting, especially with slides, which is incredibly important nowadays that we are mostly online.

My guest is Brigette Callahan, who is a Presentation Design Expert. She’s now my go-to person. She’s made my slides so much better. I always knew my slides were terrible. She’s helped make me look much better. Look at some of the episodes in this show to see. She’s talking to us about how we can make the visual aspect of our presentations much better.

This will apply if you’re doing this within your company but especially if you’ve got an important speech. You’re going to want to get someone who’s got the eye. When you’re engaging a graphic artist, you’re not necessarily getting someone with a camera or computer skills. You’re getting someone with the eye and the brain to see that, which is the thing that Brigette does so much better than I do.

SWGR 586 | Slideshows That Convert

Slideshows That Convert: Your title slide should match your branding. It’s easy and simple to see we have her face. You could see before just how hard it is to read that text.

 

Brigette Callahan is a slide presentation designer with many years of experience creating, engaging speeches, presentations and seminars. She’s worked with some of the biggest names in business, including Xerox, Acura, Samsung and PayPal. When most executives and entrepreneurs go to create a speech or presentation, they don’t know how to convey what they want to say in an engaging and compelling way. Visually is what she’s talking about.

After working with Brigette, her clients show up with PowerPoints that are easy for them to deliver. The audience ends up retaining the concepts the speaker wanted to get across and remembering the speaker as the true expert that they are. Brigette is on a mission to end the tyranny of boring PowerPoints. She’s passionate about helping speakers create presentations that engage and inspire their audience and turns your audience into raving fans. Now onto the interview with Brigette Callahan.

Brigette Callahan, I’m so delighted to have you here on the show.

Thank you. I’m so excited to talk with you. I always get excited in these interviews and stuff to share.

You’ve been working with speakers for a very long time. You and I met not long ago and you are now my go-to person for graphics. I’m so happy to have somebody who thinks in images instead of words since graphics are not my strong point. One of the reasons why I’m excited about this is this is publishing right at the beginning of the visible and valued training months for mostly aimed at executive women.

This is going to be part of the kickoff of where my show is going to talk about everything I teach. All being into squeeze into one month. Kicking it off with a chance to talk about how do you make your slides good is important. Before we get into all the many things I want to ask you though. Let me ask you about your dream interview. If you could interview someone who’s no longer with us, who would it be? What would you ask them? Who should be listening?

There could be many people that I’d like to interview that no longer exist like Pablo Picasso or Michelangelo, as far as artists go but when you ask me this question, the first name that popped up was Steve Jobs, a Founder of Apple computer. The question I would ask is how did you create your presentation style?

You have to know how to position your business as a brand that sets it apart from competitors. Click To Tweet

That’s interesting because Steve Jobs’ speeches, it’s the most-watched video on YouTube ever. He beats out everybody and so many people have modeled themselves on what Steve Jobs did. What do you think he did? How do you think he developed his presentation style?

From watching him through the years, I remember early on when Apple came into being. When I was in fine art school and one of my thesis pieces was called Applectomy. It was photolithographic but Apple going through surgery. Taking out the little seeds and wrapping them up in gauze. My sister worked at a Children’s Hospital and so we had access to a great little photo studio to do this. I thought, “I want to send this to him.” I never did it. It was thought only but it was this relationship with the Apple.

The question of how he created his presentation style, it’s one of those questions, I don’t read a lot because I’m more visual. I like movies, looking at picture books. When someone’s speaking, I see it in visual. I start seeing all these things. It’s like, “It would have been great if I saw something like that when they said that.”

That’s an interesting question because I tend to think about how did that come to pass. I envisioned. I’m sure that Steve Jobs, at some point, worked with someone like me who was a speaker trainer who said, “Do it this way. Don’t do it that way.” It may have been when he was rising before he became CEO.

He couldn’t have gotten where he got without that help.

Presentation skills and being able to speak is so important to rise in business. I’m sure some mentors said, “Kid, let me give you some hints. Do this. Do that.” I also think one of the things that were very interesting about Apple computers has always been Apple computers is the way they positioned themselves as a brand. We are different. We’re not the same old thing. We’re not IBM. I’m old enough to remember when Apple first came out and IBM was ruling, with the white shirt, the suit, the tie and everything. God forbid, women ever did anything with computers and then Apple was bright and different.

Even the clothing he wore was different and how he presented, it was new and fresh and their commercials. Their Super Bowl commercial blew people away. I met the President of Chiat Day when they worked with Apple. It’s fascinating to know he’s retired now but knowing him when he worked with Apple and the behind-the-scenes stuff, it’s pretty cool.

Steve Jobs did not create those ads. They found somebody who was really good and creative, who understood what they were trying to do and the image they were trying to do. At some point, Steve Jobs was ready to walk out on stage in a suit and tie and so forth. He said, “I’m going to be different. I’m going to do it this way or I have to go speak in a suit and tie and I don’t have anything that’s clean. I’m going to put on the black turtleneck because it’s the only thing I have that’s clean.” That’s also possible. Everybody loved it so much, he kept on doing it.

He had his own version of garanimals.

You never know that thing. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about before we get into the slides is you work with a partner in your office who was very popular with your clients. Is your partner with you?

My partner flew the coop.

Your partner just left.

She should be. She sits right next to me at my desk. You can’t tame a cat.

I am one of your clients who says, “How nice. Show me the cat cam.” It’s lovely that you’re responding to customer demand by setting up a dedicated camera for the cats. That’s good. Brigette Callahan, the reason why I wanted to have you on here is that I had been looking for a long time for someone who could help me make my slide shows more interesting.

SWGR 586 | Slideshows That Convert

Slideshows That Convert: When you have too much color, the brain is trying hard to determine what they mean and thus creates confusion for the audience.

 

I knew my slide shows were boring. I never found anyone who had the understanding and imagination until I met you. You and I worked together on a project for a bunch of medical experts. We’ve talked a lot about how do you make data interesting or how do you make technical stuff interesting? You talked a little bit about the many uses you work with cardiologists and what we’re doing now with dentists.

I was this graphics operator, which is the technical term when you work live events and you operate the computers for their presentations. I did it for many years down in San Diego for a Cardiology conference. Most of the doctors, work on their own slides and they’re the same blue background with tons of text. Don’t take offense but they were boring and hard to look at and yet everyone did it.

They thought that’s how they do it and they’d take their laser pointer and point to a little number that no one could see. We’re talking about a ballroom with 800-plus seats. Even if you were up close, maybe you could read it but then you’re looking at this little number with all these other numbers around you, not sure what to look at. Even when he points with the laser pointer, it acts like this cat toy or something, your eyes flicker.

It doesn’t have the impact of conveying the statistic of what you’re saying because they feel compelled. “I got to show the whole chart. I have the data, the proof and everything.” It’s like, “I get that,” but they never consulted someone like me. Like, “How can we look at this a little bit differently?” However, there was one doctor who gave a presentation every year. I’m sorry, I don’t remember his name but I do remember his impact and everyone loved him. That room would be a standing room only when he came up to the stage and there was a hospital next to the conference hotel. The hospital would empty out and come over and watch him because he would talk about new technologies.

He had a very professional slide deck that was compelling. I knew it was professionally done by some agency or something but they probably saw, “This is cool.” What I loved about his stuff, he was talking about heart disease. He put up a map of the US and he had all these dots on the map. He says, “This is where all the McDonald’s are in the US,” and he showed the same map with different dots. He says, “This is where all the heart disease is and what your brain did was conjugate that those dots line very similar to where McDonald’s are.

It wasn’t batching McDonald’s, he was just saying that fast food is so pervasive in our society that it’s causing all this heart disease. You can see how it’s mapped out. That was years ago when I saw those two slides and I still remember the whole thing of what he was talking about and the meaning behind it. It was those images. All it said was McDonald’s at the top of the slide and heart disease at the top of the slide. Nothing else. It’s those visual impacts. We see it on television all the time. When you watch the news and they’re talking about something in the statistics and whatever. That’s like my juice. I watched that and look for inspiration.

You could see, they’ll put up a picture that demonstrates clearly a few things, simple and clear to show people what they’re doing. Indeed, people do process images before they process words. I’d also say a picture’s worth a thousand words. Certainly, as a presenter, it’s absolutely worth a thousand words.

Keep your presentations simple and stop complicating them. Click To Tweet

The benefit of that is you may have a time talk that you can only speak for maybe twenty minutes or whatever but if you can put up a few pictures that speak a thousand words you’re going to say so much more because our brain looks at an image ten times more synapses are fired by that image than it is by listening to words or reading words.

I know you’ve brought some slides to show us. Can you show us some of the slides that you’ve done and why they are more impactful than say the eye chart? I know you’ve talked to me about the eye chart.

This is only the title slide I have. I don’t have a deck in order so I’m going to a slide number. If you’re not sure how to do that if you have a deck of 200 slides and you wanted to show slide 42 when you’re in presentation mode, just hit the number 42 and enter. It goes to that slide. In my talk, I talk about keeping it simple and having no white backgrounds. This is the eye chart we see. We’re used to it.

For those of you who are only reading, the eye chart is not an actual eye chart. It’s a whole lot of text in black on a white background.

The conversation is in a dark room or when we look at projected light, our eyes go to the light. When the background is white and you’re conjugating these letters that are black, it’s so much more brainpower that we have to look at a letter. That’s an H then we look at the E, that’s an E and then we put the letters together, that’s HE’s. We get to go to the next one, A whole. I’m saying that slowly but our brain is doing that. Can you imagine seeing this for ten minutes, all these slides and trying to read it? You’d go brain dead. That’s where the death by PowerPoint comes from. In our industry, we call it the eye chart.

Here’s an example of a slide. I found this slide on the internet and they took this graphic. They probably stole from Google, slapped it on a slide. They didn’t even center it. I said, “How can I make this better? Let’s fill the whole screen with the graphic,” because it’s a great graphic. It’s very impactful, simple and it’s colorful. I took the color yellow and put the text in that color and put it on a dark background. Notice how much easier it is to read the decks. First of all, the text is bigger and there’s still quite a bit of text. I would normally not use as much text but some people need that text. I’m going to go back to remind you of what that white does. It’s so much more pleasing.

It’s easier on the eyes.

I go through some slides. I don’t use many white backgrounds but I do use some white backgrounds. It’s the limbic message, the visual, how do we affect that limbic brain? That’s our emotional brain that triggers those memories and arousal and that imprints on that memory what you’re talking about. That’s what I love about the limbic experience. Limbic messaging also talks to creativity.

This is an example of a slide for a client. They slapped a picture on there and says, “Let’s make the picture full frame.” When we look at a picture, we usually look, “Are there eyes, is there a face? If there’s not a face, are their hands? What are the hands doing?” We see, “They’re giving me a gift.” I want a gift. There’s the sample funnel. This was a client slide and I’m like, “That’s not a sample funnel.”

This would be a sales funnel where you would go from the customer journey.

This is different. Another redesign, this was his hot seats. Most coaches offer a hot seat for laser coaching and he says, “Ten minutes each.” I’m like, “I’m not inspired to want to sit in that hot seat. It’s boring,” so I said, “Here’s the hot seat.” At first, he says, “Put the words.” I said, “Look at this.” After I finished a slide deck, this became his favorite slide. It’s because when I explained this I look at that hot seat. It looks like one of those comfortable chairs you see in hotels that you want to melt in.

Look round it. You’ve got this impending storm and you’re in a desert area or something. There’s the tension and there’s the comfort. It’s the dichotomy of being in a hot seat. This is an example of a speaker coach. This was her title slide. She was going to speak on a virtual stage of over 5,000 people. I was like, “Are you kidding me? You can’t go with slides like that.”

I redesigned her slides. This is her title slide now. It matches her branding. It’s easy and simple to see. We have her face. You could see before how hard it is to read that text. You put the text over the white and that discolored pattern. Does the pattern mean anything? A problem a lot of people make is they put these designs into their slides thinking, “This will make it interesting.” Our brain is going, “What does that mean?” Take away all the extraneous shapes. If you notice in the back on it’s very subtle but I have there her E as a larger element but it’s ghosted back a little bit It gives a subtle emphasis. There’s some gradation in that purple background. It gives it a rich look but it’s a very simple slide.

Let me ask you. When you have the doctors, who come to you and we’ve been working with dentists and they too are mostly taught to have images and reports on a white background. What do you say to the ones who say, “That’s not so professional. I don’t want to be all colorful and flashy. I want to show up as an intellectual, as an expert?”

Put it on black then. I’m working on a talk that I’ll be delivering, called the Persuasive Power of Color and how do you leverage the use of color to make more sales. What most people don’t realize is that different colors evoke different emotions. Black, evokes power, authority, discipline. If that’s what you want to evoke, you’ll see some people that use black backgrounds and white texts. To me, it’s a little boring but it has that power and authority feel to it. Understanding the emotions of different colors and like, “What is your branding? Did you get thoughtful and creating your branding and the picking the colors you use?”

Can you show us that slide? That was interesting. We were talking about it earlier and you showed us the persuasive power of color.

Violet is imagination and spirituality. Yellow is enthusiasm and opportunity. Red is our excitement and energy. I’m doing some deeper studies on using color and slides. I found this from another presentation designer that most business slides put too much color in it. You’re thinking too much color. How can you have too much color? You’ve seen these bar charts with 8 or 9 bar charts, especially in Science. Each is a different color. What the brain is trying to do is, what are the colors mean? You see the little legend on the bottom and you can barely read it like, “That purple and the periwinkle are similar colors but that one’s for this client that one’s for this one.”

There’s so much brainpower trying to figure out what the slide means, we stopped listening. What is the message you’re trying to say? Do you need to show that everyone has a certain blip on this chart or are you pointing out to, “Look how high so-and-so went and look where we’re compared to them?” If you have eight different companies and you’re comparing your company with another company, make all of them gray and make yours and that other company two different colors. That way it’ll stick out better because you don’t want to necessarily bring attention to the other ones but they’re there in the background so that can reference it. I thought that was brilliant.

That’s an interesting thing because I found a lot of people who like the Scandinavian design look, for instance, which is a lot of white with small amounts of gray orange or something, which is fine if it’s furniture.

It’s nice if it’s in print but it’s not for slides. Not for television. I want you to do some homework. Everyone reading, go watch television and count how many backgrounds are full white and you’re seeing a little bit of texture, a little bit of count. In the percentage of time that you’re watching the television, how much is full white, shining bright like a flashlight in your eyes when a cop pulls you over?

Those of us who are not trained graphic artists like you, how can we start to think about our slides to be a little bit more interesting if we’re going to do something? The obvious thing is to hire you but the thousands of people that are reading this show, can’t all hire you. If we are stuck doing it ourselves, how could we start making ourselves think more creatively about what we’re trying to illustrate? We’re illustrating concepts.

SWGR 586 | Slideshows That Convert

Slideshows That Convert: Choose an image that is going to evoke what you’re trying to say is very essential.

 

Concepts are stories. You’re telling a story of how something works or how something inspires or whatever. I’m showing you examples of some of my clients, “This is a woman that helps you write your book.” We use several images where her slides look completely different than this one. When we redesigned them, we’re basing it around an image. This old book is ghosted in the background and she’s like, “Why do you want to write a book?” “Everyone says I got to write a book but why?” When you get to the why of the book then you get a little more inspired. It’s like, “How do I write my book?”

You want to discover your heart message. When you look at this image, this is a found image. It totally says, “Discover your heart methods.” It has got this woman drawing a heart with a flashlight and it’s a timed photo but you see the fire in the background and the beach. It’s warm and cool at the same time and highly emotionally impactful. We go into this listening to how she talked about discovering your heart message.

We’re seeing our own images of like, “I remember sunset on the beach when I was a teenager that was so much fun.” You pair those like micro memories with what they’re saying and that’s what helps you remember it, years later. Here’s a couple more, embrace your message. This is again for the book and frames your message so people hunger for it if you’re not sure that’s rice in the hands in the picture.

It’s a heart made out of rice.

There are a couple more here. This was for a former Executive Microsoft talking about how the finance department didn’t get along with anyone else, mainly sales. The conversation is, “What went wrong?” We took this full-color picture of like, you are this loan department out in the middle of the ocean and no one wants to work with you and you’re figuring out what went wrong? We changed up the color. We ghosted it back a little bit and put the text on top of it and so it’s like telling a story of the picture then the picture fades. You can have a couple of words on there. This is how I would say, “Make it simple.”

This is very simple but it’s like, “What image is going to evoke what you’re trying to say?” A lot of people aren’t grounded in looking for images. Some people are and so that’s where I come in. Our sweet spot is finding these amazing images that people haven’t seen. To go further, statistics. This is a typical slide where they have to show everything on the plate and I’m like, “No one can read it. You’re talking to it.”

They might have it in their hands but I have the slide. I said, “There are ways you could zoom in on the content and let it scroll through where are you talking about insurance, healthcare, miscellaneous. You also want to look at your savings, your food, your transportation and you’re looking at your monthly budget and seeing what your bucket is.”

That’s telling a story and having a simple animation. This is so simple but you have to know-how is the brain going to conceive this when you’re talking. Here’s another one where it’s, again, a nice infographic but, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Which number do I focus?” I said, “We’re talking about the 74% of all adults who have had a tooth extracted.” It’s in the middle right column it’s dental statistics but here’s the one I want you to focus on.

Some of that is also credibility because if you’re showing that you have the chart, you have the report, the peer-reviewed published report in the medical journal, in the legal journal or whatever, you can post that and post who the authors are but then pull out the key fact. What’s the nugget? What’s the main thing I want you to look at? Our brains will connect. It’s a thing I learned years ago as an actor is that if you have two conflicting things or emotions, you can show both. The audience will connect the two as long as you go back and forth between them. If you’ve established that the peer-reviewed article is there then you pull out the one key thing, that’s very important.

This is an example of a slide we designed for a client who was talking about living well in the wireless world. She’s talking about emitting rays, how they affect your body and how do you protect from it like the G5 stuff. We have two different images merged. The wireless world and the hands-on on the right and then this woman feeling free and healthy on the left and merging them.

Also, adding tones of color we have green, purples and oranges because those were the colors that she wanted the slides to take over. Here’s another slide where, this woman, this was her title slide but all she had was text. If you’re reading the text saying, “Turning behavior problems into no problem.” That would be good but notice how the image said.

Is this someone who’s a parenting coach?

Correct but notice how the image has so much more impact. It’s like, “My kid does that.”

That kid is screaming. You immediately react emotionally to that.

This became her logo for her event basically and this is one of the interior shots. I love this one because I see myself as this little kid. I remember embody when I would only be talking and my mom would say, “Kids should be seen and not heard.” I’m also been a parent. I’m not a parent but I’ve been in this experience where the kids are like, “Shush. I need to focus.” It’s these limbic messages images that tell your story and expound on it for them to remember. I call it the Hollywood effect, as far as putting slides together. It’s like you’re stringing stories together through images.

Human beings remember stories more than they remember facts. Even if you’re talking to an audience of technicians, scientists or manufacturing of the clients and manufacturing. No matter how intellectual they are, they all grew up hearing stories from their parents. We are trained to learn through stories.

Back to the Microsoft talk. This is a different way of showing a statistic. They were talking about their business partner satisfaction was at 27% level. No one wanted to work with them. After he worked with the team, they grew it to 90%. This is a very 3D-looking graphic. Most people wouldn’t be able to create this but because this is what we do, we create compelling graphics beyond what the normal person is used to seeing.

Back to the book writer, she wanted this statistic, the bar chart. I said, “Let’s make a stack of books for the bar chart.” It’s thinking through how that would work. This is a series of animations I created for a woman who speaks about women leaders in the automotive industry and how do they ascend up there. They’re talking about women versus men in that match manufacturing process.

We’re showing different statistics in an animated way. They’re going a little quick because I’m only showing you the different examples of what that might look like but here’s a lot of texts but then highlight the text of the main parts they want to see. How was the eye moving across the slide when we go from one slide to the next? You don’t have to show all this data.

This is a series of slides but it’ll look like a movie to you. This is a coach talking about how you leverage your time. Leveraging your time means, what if I didn’t have to spend an hour talking to one potential client to make $8,000. What if I could talk to many people in one hour, of those many people in one hour and she has more words than I’m saying so the timing’s a little off. Let’s say five people want to buy my product. That’s one hour, five clients. I make $40,000. The question is, “What is a sales call worth to you?”

If you count that moves when you time it right, it is like a video or a Hollywood production but it’s simple to use. These are slides but when you present like this, you’re going to elevate yourself. People are going to be wowed. People are going to appreciate the time and the energy you expended for their eyeballs to feast on so to speak. It’s like a great meal and they’re going to remember you.

This is especially important because so much of what we do is online now. Many of our presentations are online. We want to have something important for people to look at. A lot of what I do is talk about how you get engagement and how you’re delivering your delivery style but what it looks like as well as what it sounds like is so important. Brigette, this is awesome. Do have something that you particularly want us to know? I can be watching your slides all day long but what I want to do is I want to send people to talk to you and have you fixed the slides for them.

A lot of people make these designs into their slides thinking that will make it interesting. It just gives a subtle emphasis. Click To Tweet

I talk about people who open PowerPoint and start their talk. Start creating their talk and I was like, “Stop. Don’t do that.” They don’t do that in Hollywood. They don’t put the camera on and put an actor in front of them and start their movie. They start with an idea. They write it down. They sell it to the studios then they write a script and go to storyboards.

You need a written outline of your talk. From there I say, “Create storyboards of your talk.” What that might look like is you write down the little pieces. Maybe you have five little subjects you’re going to deliver in your talk and maybe sketch if you like to sketch. If you don’t, just write down like I see a picture of a film canister. Over here, I see a picture of a book opening. Write that down so that you’ll know what images to look for when you start building your slides. What I love about Post-it notes is you can reorder them so that you could put your story in the right order like the puzzle pieces put together. This shows you an example of some slides I created.

Go back to the storyboard because this is a technique that I recommend to my clients all the time. If they’re trying to decide what their topic is going to be, they know they want to get out there and they’re talking. They’ve got so many ideas. One of the good ways to do it is to write your ideas on Post-it notes and put them up on a piece of paper. You have to do it off the computer. You have to get away from the computer to do this or you have a whiteboard and you write them up and use colored highlighters to color code where all the ideas are, how the ideas would fit together. You can put this one up here and that one together.

What I like to do is put it someplace that you will see as you’re walking through your house like you could stand there and brush your teeth and look at it because you have to let it marinate a little bit. As you’re looking at it then suddenly your brain will make a connection and go, “I need to add this piece and this piece then we have a topic.” I’m loving this. This is a great illustration of something I say in a lot of words but I don’t necessarily illustrate it as well. I’d be happy to have you but this might have to be another time to hire you, Brigette, to help me with that part.

Probably I’m going to slip this slide in one of your decks. Is that what you want?

I’m going to steal this slide from you. You had one other thing you were going to show us then we’ll find out more about how we can learn more from you.

This is a typical slide. It’s got two bullet points. They’re not even lined up and they got this interesting picture. I said, “Let’s make this picture full frame. It’s a great picture. We don’t need the bullet points.” Put the title. Put it at the bottom away from their eyes. When we look at a picture, the face, the eyes if they’re looking at us, great. If they’re not looking at us, what are they looking at? We go from left to right and she’s talking about, “As you age, you might age quicker if you’re not taking care of yourself or being helpful.” Here’s another bulleted slide again for my former Microsoft client.

Where did you find the PowerPoint images?

I created it. I’m an artist.

No wonder I couldn’t find them. I have to get them from you.

The point behind this is different. It has the brain trigger differently and listen differently then we would pull up the image for the subject you’re talking about and put the Post-it notes in the corner. You don’t have to have that typical text, that boring text but you could do something a little bit differently. What’s funny, I love him dearly but when I gave him the deck finally, he’s like, “How do I present this?” I’m thinking, “He’s Microsoft. He’s looking for the bullets.”

There’s another one, again, a typical. It’s like, “I’m not inspired to stay in faith with this slide but this is a little different. I get it.” Again, for this client, it was her favorite slide. It was all done in PowerPoint. These animations can be done simply. You have to know a little bit about animation as far as how the brain sees it. Most people go in and go, “Look at all the transitions you could do,” and it’s overkill. When you look at my slides, it’s very minimal and tasteful. It’s going for that Hollywood effect of how are we sending them through the story?

SWGR 586 | Slideshows That Convert

Slideshows That Convert: If you have two conflicting things or two conflicting emotions, you can show both the audience will connect the two, as long as you go back and forth between them. So if you’ve established that, then you pull out the one key thing that’s very important.

 

Brigette Callahan, this has been awesome. I’m going to ask you to stop sharing here so I can talk to you again because what I want to know is where could somebody start if they’re interested? I know you’ve got a YouTube channel. You’ve been all tips and so forth. How could somebody start learning more about how to work with you or how to do their slides better?

My business website is PresentationDesignExperts.com and my email for that is Wow@PresentationDesignExpert.com. Send me an email if you want to reach out directly. My other website is a membership site but there are ways to get in there for free. You don’t have to pay for anything. You still get some training and it’s CreateSlidesThatConvert.com. We’ve got a cool hour-long training. It’s five videos that walk you through the different ways that I created these graphics that I’ve shown you on screen and how you can do it yourself. There’s so much more content than we’re pouring into that in the paid membership. That will pre-launch and we’re going to launch live.

Brigette Callahan, thank you so much. I’m glad I found you and you have helped me. You’ve helped my clients immensely. I’m happy to have found such a brilliant resource. Thank you for having been on Speakers Who Get Results.

Thank you.

This has been Speakers Who Get Results. Let me remind you that if you’re curious whether your presentation skills are helping you or not, you could take our free formatted assessment at www.SpeakForResultsQuiz.com. There, in four minutes, you can see where you’re strong with your presentation skills and where perhaps a little bit of support could help you get better results than the recognition that you deserve. Don’t forget to tell your friends about us. Subscribe and check out our YouTube channel. Check out Brigette’s YouTube channel. I’ll see you at the next one.

 

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About Brigette Callahan

Brigette Callahan is a slide-presentation designer with 30+ years’ experience creating engaging speeches, presentations, and seminars. She has worked with some of the biggest names in business — including Xerox, Acura, Samsung, and PayPal.

When most executives and entrepreneurs go to create a speech or presentation, they really don’t know how to convey what they want to say in an engaging and compelling way.
But after working with Brigette, her clients show up with PowerPoints that are easy for them to deliver. And the audience ends up retaining the concepts the speaker wanted to get across … and remembering the speaker as the true expert they are.
Brigette is on a mission to end the tyranny of boring PowerPoints. She is passionate about helping speakers create presentations that engage and inspire their audience, and turns them into raving fans.