Today I went to the Present to Succeed conference in Sofia, Bulgaria along with 850 other in-person attendees and a couple thousand live online attendees. I was excited because it’s not the kind of conference I usually attend – but I should, given that I do online training for a living. (I taught a session on doing good technical demos, too, which was fun.)
Before the conference, I really enjoyed meeting the other presenters, hearing what they do for a living, and hearing how they do it. I had no idea there were so many agencies devoted to helping companies build better presentations and speakers. It was also eye-opening to hear that HR departments booked large blocks of tickets for their employees and sent all kinds of staff – technical, managerial, and line level – to improve their communication skills.
Here were some of my favorite takeaways from each session.
Becoming a Top-Rated Speaker by Paula Januszkiewicz
Paula pointed out that conference speakers are constantly in demand. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in today, or what company you work for, there are always conferences for your industry. The ability to speak publicly helps you stand out amongst your peers.
Paula uses two-part session titles like “Lessons from the Field: A Hacker’s Guide to Infrastructure.” The first part explains the session’s method of delivery, and the second part explains what they’re going to learn.
She also likes to give away a PDF with top takeaways, as in, “You’re going to leave with a top 10 PDF of ways to secure your infrastructure.” That’s helpful because otherwise, she pointed out that attendees only retain around 60% of the session’s info after 3 hours, and 10% after 3 days.
I laughed out loud at her “Choose Your Fighter” slide about choosing your voice for a presentation: formal (Baraq), casual (Richard Branson), motivational (Oprah), inspirational (Steve Jobs), etc. That should honestly be the opening screen when you write a new slide deck, and should reappear whenever you open a file. It reminds you that you have multiple choices for your own voice, and you don’t have to use the same one every time. I need to remember that myself – I default to casual/Branson most of the time, and I need to mix things up. (Same thing with new blog posts too – the last motivational one I remember writing was Rock Stars, Normal People, and You, and that was over a decade ago!)
Claim Your Confidence by Margreet Jacobs
Phenomenal presentation with no slides. Margreet (aka Maja) started by stating, “You can’t get more confident by reading a book about confidence: you’ve gotta do something outside of your comfort zone.” Then, she pushed folks out of their comfort zone.
She had us do a few exercises, one of which involved turning your body to the person standing next to you, and staring in their eyes without speaking for 30 seconds straight. That completely creeped me out – which I found really amusing given that I have absolutely no problem standing in front of large groups of people for long periods of time. I have no problem with other people staring at ME for quite a bit of time, but I found it creepy to be 1′ away from someone one-on-one.
I had to laugh because if that exercise was designed to make people more comfortable with standing up in front of audiences, I wonder how many people it backfired on. It would have backfired on me! I would have walked away from that session going, “OMG, I never wanna stand up in front of people,” while in reality I have a great time with it. (Also, I’m probably a psychopath.)
Mastering Cross-Cultural Presentations by Bri Williams
Bri started by explaining that she was probably going to offend folks. If we want to avoid insensitive communication due to not knowing cultural differences, we’re going to need to discuss those cultural differences, and some folks are probably going to be offended by that.
Sure enough, one of the first concepts was low vs high context countries, and I can see why people might get offended by this. Low context countries prefer very straight, direct communication that has only one possible meaning. Low context country attendees will say things like, “Can you quickly get to the point?”
On the other hand, high context countries prefer very contextual communication that has many layers and subtlety. High context countries don’t say “no” – they’ll say “we’ll think about that” or possibly even “yes” when they mean no.
I laughed that us Yanks are on the very far left. I can’t count the number of times I’ve said “Can you get to the point” or “Just boil it down and specifically tell me what you need from me.” I can see how this would be very useful for high context country-based presenters when creating material for us low context folks.
As an American, I may not need to adapt my slides as much for high context countries, but I do need to adapt the feedback I provide. Low context countries prefer direct negative feedback, but high context countries prefer indirect negative feedback. (The continuums for low-vs-high context and the continuum for direct-vs-indirect negative feedback were different, but you get the idea.)
Bri pointed folks to the books The Culture Map and Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands to learn more about how different cultures expect to interact and do business. She also suggested asking ChatGPT, “How can a Bulgarian present to a US audience for a business meeting?” or “What communication style is preferred in India?” Very smart.
Storifying Data by Artur Ferreira
Artur explained that when you’re getting ready to use your data to tell a story, you’ve already had your Eureka moment with the data. You’ve had your insight, and to you, the data speaks for itself. However, that’s because you’ve already figured out the story you want to tell. It’s up to you to tell the story of the data, and that requires having empathy for the attendee.
Artur’s 3 main components for data storytelling are your data (aka the foundation of everything), your narrative, and your memorable visualization.
Artur said the data is like the stuff in your kitchen: fruits, vegetables, and other ingredients. They’re not very useful on their own, and they need to be processed for a better experience. I chuckled at that one because yes, people often “cook” their data, and that’s not a complimentary phrase. I wonder if that’s a culturally unique term, and I wonder if other cultures use that “cook” slang to indicate that the data’s been altered in an inappropriate way.
Debug Your Presentation by Damon Nofar
Damon started by asking for a show of hands based on our job duties. The majority of the audience was a mix of tech, sales, and marketing. Yesterday during rehearsals, we were laughing at the fact that one of the main things you should do when presenting is to know your audience, and yet… we really didn’t know who our attendees were going to be because a lot of the tickets were bought by HR teams for a mix of their employees.
Damon said that a good presentation makes a company money, and a bad presentation loses a company money. He gave a series of before-and-after slides explaining briefly how his agency debugged the slides and produced better versions.
Damon quoted a designer (whose name I missed): “Make people feel something so that they do something.” Therefore, when you design your slide deck, you want to think about the emotion you want your attendees to feel first. Design slides to evoke that emotion, and THEN design the slides to get them to do something – but they have to feel the emotions first.
Damon’s slides were totally gorgeous, and at the same time, they didn’t follow any kind of theme. Every slide was visually different. That made me stop and think – so often, conferences want their slides in a specific format, and yet, that doesn’t produce good results. Hell, I even think of my own templates in that way, wanting to get a look and feel down, but that’s not the right answer for every slide deck.
Damon had the best way of finishing a session that I’d ever seen, and I’m not spoiling it.
AI Innovations by Robin Dohmen
Robin asked for a show of hands for how many people use a tool like ChatGPT on a weekly, then a daily basis. Almost everyone’s hands went up, and he said that was a revolutionary change from just one year ago at this same conference.
Robin covered 5 things your AI prompts need to include: the audience, the purpose, the length, the format, and depth. He then briefly discussed what he uses ChatGPT, Midjourney, Cursos IDE, Github CoPilot, Grain.AI, Folk, Pitch.com, and the like for on a daily basis.
When it comes to your presentations, Robin explained that your presentation has 3 parts: your script (story), your design (slides), and your delivery up on stage. Today, he said AI only really helps with the first two, but he’s looking forward to the future when AI can help with rehearsal & delivery feedback as well.
He discussed a few tools that help build presentations with AI, and I’m only going to link to a few of ’em. For big companies, he recommended Beautiful.ai, which has a large template library, corporate security, and AI. For midsize teams that use Google Slides, he recommended SlidesAI.io. One of the coolest tools was PitchBob.io, which asks you ~35 questions, then creates pitch decks, business plans, and more. He shared coupon code THNKSRBN for 50% off, too, woohoo!
Creating Data Visualizations by Piotr Garlej
Piotr started by explaining that most visualization rules don’t work. He gave quick examples of why “Keep it simple” or “Don’t use pie charts” or “Don’t show more than 3 lines in line charts” don’t make sense, or can be broken in the right situations.
Piotr said his ultimate data visualization rule comes from Google: make your audience spend as little time on analyzing data as possible. To do that, avoid legends, remove information noise, focus on one item, and avoid cliches. He gave specific examples, simplifying a chart.
Piotr has a great YouTube channel on building presentations, and attendees who liked this session would also love Edward Tufte’s work.
PowerPoint Copilot by Alex Selig
Alex is the product lead for PowerPoint Copilot at Microsoft. Going in, my only experience with PowerPoint’s suggestions has been the incredibly stupid layout designer that keeps insisting on popping up every time I work with slides, and will not go the hell away. Granted, I use a Mac, and Office on the Mac has always been a limited subset of functionality available in the Windows version, but… most of the presenters here actually used Macs.
Today on Windows, Alex said Copilot will turn Word docs into presentations, write a summary of key points, add slides to an existing presentation, and more. Soon, Alex explained that Copilot will take a request for a presentation and build it for you live, and Alex showed a recorded demo of that. His example was creating a deck about a 4-day trip to San Francisco.
Someone asked, “Will Copilot work in Office 365 apps?” Alex explained that it was an additional licensing cost for your Microsoft subscriptions, and the whole audience grumbled, hahaha. Copilot pricing is $360/user/year, for the record. That’s ludicrous for PowerPoint Copilot’s limited capabilities today, but I can see it being totally reasonable for specific power users in a company who spend a lot of their time in Office.
Another question: “Will Copilot use my company branding?” Alex said yes, if you open a company-branded template and start using Copilot from there, it will.
Another question: “When Copilot built the slide deck, where did the photos come from? How are they licensed?” He said that Microsoft has a stock photo library, but if you’ve got a corporate stock photo library, you can also integrate that with Copilot, and Copilot will even prefer that if you want. You can also choose to use Dall-E image generation, and soon, you’ll be able to see image attribution in the deck.
Another question: “If I want to create slides from confidential company information, can Copilot do that?” Alex said Copilot doesn’t send your data up to the LLM, and your data stays with you.
Effective Body Language by Ida Holten Worsoe
Ida started her session 4 different ways, coming onstage with different body language each time. It was immediately clear to the audience how your pose and tone makes all the difference in the world, right from the get-go. However, she also immediately elaborated that there’s not just one right way to do this, and there’s not a blueprint for it – there are many ways to use body language onstage based on what’s authentic for you.
She explained body language using acting terms. For example, high status poses are calm, direct, claiming space, and daring to use pauses. On the other hand, low status poses look uneasy, hunched over, small, and avoid gazes.
Ida said that you can claim your space and have a direct, high status pose – while your material is still low, humble, and curious. You can say, “I don’t have the answer to that question, but I’ll write that down and find out” – while still claiming your space as a presenter.
She also talked about your voice: you want to claim space with your voice, she said, speaking as if you don’t have a microphone. Don’t yell – but just speak as if you would in a discussion.
Top 10 Things for Presenters by Luca Bruschi
Bonus points to anyone who begins a session by referring to a Suzanne Vega lyric. (I adore her deeply.)
Luca told the story of how he and his wife wanted to move to Australia, but he was faced a tough question: “Why would someone from Australia want to hire you, from another country, that they’ve never met? How have you made yourself visible to them?” That prompted him to begin public speaking.
He gave a list of 10 things that are important for building presentations. I loved thing #2: you need one central idea. When you volunteer to share things, you want to share everything, but each presentation needs a central idea that you need to convey. Scope creep is a real thing: once you start writing, it’s easy to keep adding on more and more that you want folks to learn. (My advice: every time you wanna add one more thing that isn’t necessary to understand the central idea, add a link to the best existing resource on it to a “More Learning” resource slide that goes to the end of your slide deck.)
Demos That Go Viral by, uh, Me
I covered the table stakes – multiple rehearsals, screenshots, zooming in, etc – and then explained why that’s still not enough for today’s audiences. I discussed several different approaches to keeping audiences intrigued and interactive.
I knew going in that my slides would be terrible compared to the other presenters because some of them actually run their own slide design agencies, hahaha, and indeed they were. During rehearsals, I froze when the other presenters made fun of bullets, as in, you shouldn’t have any. Uh oh. I had several slides with bullet points, hahaha. Ah, well, if you don’t look back on your work later, ashamed of what you used to produce, then you’re not growing. Gotta keep growing, and that’s why I’m here.
If you watch me work regularly, you’ll know that my sessions on YouTube and my training classes involve a lot of demos. However, I didn’t do a single live demo during this session! I only had a 35-minute slot, and I wanted to cover so many topics that I couldn’t do live demos, and I explained why during the session.
(Because I know y’all, dear reader, I know you’re going to ask to see my session, and it’ll be available as part of the session recording sales.)
Overall conference thoughts
Just a few days before the session, the organizers explained that we’d be using a 21:9 aspect ratio projector. You see those really wide slides in all the photos above? Yeah. I redid all my slides to work better for that aspect ratio, and I was curious to see how everyone else’s slides would turn out. They did not disappoint! Each presenter’s slides were gorgeous in its own way.
Because the presenters were all professional presenters, and the conference only had one track, it was important that the agenda be curated and go in a proper order. It did! The first session was motivational, and then different sessions from that point on went into different things to think about as you’re crafting your presentation. This wasn’t a 100-level conference: it’s better suited for folks who have given at least one presentation to their peers before, and now want better skills to level up and get onto national and international stages.
Also, if you were considering hiring a presentation agency, the conference would be useful to vet different companies. Most of the presenters were professional storytellers who do that kind of assistance. Across the span of the day, I saw different presentation and slide styles, and that was thought-provoking. It made me think about the kinds of things I’d look for in a speaking mentor. I usually think of TV shows and online educators that I’d want to emulate, like Alton Brown, Mythbusters, or Giada de Laurntiis, but when I try to emulate their stuff, I’m basically cargo culting. It would behoove me to hire someone who examines presenting more closely, like a scientist, to distill different methods and understands what makes them work for different people.
I would love to see short TED-style talks done specifically by presentation mentors & agencies. The exact topic of each session doesn’t really matter – I want to see how the presenters craft a story and use supporting material. I’ll have to go looking for that to see if there’s something lik that out there.