Presentation development and business illustration

The presentation or deck is the consultants primary tool for communicating ideas, making a case, presenting analysis, or defining recommendations. It is often the deliverable; the central manifestation of hundreds of project hours. On the sales side, the capabilities presentation (the statement of qualifications, the services framework, etc) is equally important as the primary tool to represent the consultancy's thinking, value proposition, and differentiation.

Despite its critical role, many consulting decks read and look awful. While all good consultants seem to be able to get nuggets of their brilliant thinking down on the page, most decks suffer from poor organization, difficult language, poor management of complexity, and too often are visually unmemorable or just pain ugly.

Corporate marketing and sales departments, for whatever reason, don't often put formal budget towards PowerPoint presentations. This is likely because 1) they view PowerPoint presentations as a hobbyist activity that anyone can tackle, or 2) because it often requires a lot specific subject matter expertise that they don't have. (in arguably a very self-serving opinion, marketing budgets for consulting firms should heavily emphasize the PowerPoint presentation over less-used tactics such as brochures or brand marketing).

Why you should fire your designer

Chances are you have a graphic designer (maybe an entire department of them) who attempts to do your presentation. If you're like most consultants, you choose not to use them. They're typically too slow and they don't understand consulting and business concepts in a way that helps the presentation. They mistake aesthetic design as being meaningful improvements to a presentation. We're kidding about firing them, but let them focus on brochures and websites, and only use them for PowerPoint when your content and storyline are already rock-solid.

High quality presentations are about communicating the business story in an effective way. They are about becoming landmarks and anchors within the minds of your consulting clients, where they associate key images with important concepts, and use the images to describe the concepts to their peers. Good presentations are a refection of the firm and their thought process. They gain legs - nay wings! - in the organization, speeding through meetings and e-mail as independent, permanent agents of the consultant's ideas, even when the consultant has long left the building. While good looking visual design is part of a professional impression, these other objectives are just so, so, so much more important.

SAM-Lab as your presentation ace

We are experts at crafting the sales and consulting story in PowerPoint. We tackle our projects coming from business and content expertise backgrounds, not graphic design. We are potent story analysts, able to construct an engaging and powerful narrative using all of the nuggets of brilliance in your source material. And, yes, we can create cool pictures too.

Here are some of the projects we do:

• Capabilities presentations / statement of qualifications (SOQs): We help craft the story as well as execute on design. Our clients often begin with "I don't know why, but this presentation doesn't work". We know how to make it work, from structure, to content, to slide development.
  
  
• Keynote style presentations: If you are presenting at a large function, we can convert your materials into engaging and telegraphic projection-ready images.
  
  
• Consulting deliverables: We can work on your project deliverables, and especially valuable at developing key frameworks and landmark slides that work to elevate the entire presentation.
  
  
• Small projects and one-off images: Need just one cool image? Send it over and we'll turn it around quick. We take credit cards. You can expense it, and its often cheaper than the plane ticket you bought for your BA and ten times more valuable.
  
  
• Methodologies, reference architectures, and other more technically-oriented materials: We're not afraid. Send us into the detailed depths of your most complex images and designs.
  
  
• Graphics clean-up: If your storyline and approach are already rock-solid, let us take a pass through to clean up your formatting, give the graphics a facelift, and finalize the professional appearance of your presentation. You could have your salaried graphics people do it, but think: you trust us and their hours might hit your client code anyways.

Read about our past assignments and subject matter expertise to get a sense of the topics and themes we've done well with.

Want to see samples? contact us and we will share some of our work after we've vetted your applicability as a client, feel assured you present no conflict of interest with our existing clients, and we both sign a confidentiality agreement. (Sounds painful, but our client relationships mean everything to us and we are careful to protect them).

Contact: E-mail me directly jtill @ sam-lab . com (remove spaces) or call at (857) 919-2734