Failures From Pictures Not Showing The Issues

Twenty years back I enjoyed working with a client selling solutions for 'corporate building maintenance'. In my salesforce knowledge management capacity, I witnessed poor big ticket training company sessions, utterly misguided global Sales consultants programs, and internal resource fruitless struggles to shift the salesteam approach in a significant and required manner.

I was reminded of those days when seeing a session for a major firm offering Risk Assessments. In a place where they first must pitch to conduct such.

Alarms rang as soon as I saw the deck used. Standard Powerpoint fare. Each Title Placeholder in a horizontal wavy box at the top in corporate colour. Text-only bulleted sentences beneath, black-on-white.

Take the title of this post above. The very slide header of one typical example.

I thought 'here we go'. A few juicy visuals to help show the traps.

But no. Just a discussion on what commonplace pitfalls have got noted.

I couldn't help myself.

If ever a message cried out for photo'd imagery, here it was.

If nothing else, imagine how a prospect would view such.

The thing is, you need not be a slideware whizz to score here.

The pic alone all you require.

You can even ram the point home by having a kind of before-and-after treatment. The same scene twice. Where one mightn't really show much, yet the other nails the glaring, urgent issue.

It's also a decent discipline to know what you ought be on the lookout for. And be aware of how to highlight it. Whether pictorially or not, that's at the heart of what we do anyway.