PowerPoint Sample Files Site

Introduction
I set up a site to hold sample I will be including in the blog.  It's a google site. I zip things. I will try to put explanations on each item so I do not freak anyone out. Yes, You should download at your own risk.. yadda yadda.  But I hope it makes things easier for all the readers to grab something they like of mine and just use it.


My Very First Posts
Michael was my first reader to post a comment about the blog. Hopefully, We can all look back some day and recognize him for being the first and only reader I had for two weeks.


Sample - A Jeopardy Board

Follow a Telework Discipline

Telework is in Our Future
The Governor of Virginia announced some impressive results associated with a statewide telework day.  The terms Telework, Home Office, and Telecommuting connote happy people, less driving, and cleaner air when you just skim the surface of the concept.  But most people lack the discipline to make Telework a productive and personally rewarding endeavor.  It has taken me years to develop a good working relationship with the old "cube in the guest bedroom". Consider the following tips to make your telework effective.



Set Your Telework Goals
My goals for teleworking are simple. I want channel the time I save from avoiding a commute to my family.  I book a reminder in my calendar to play an hour of soccer with my young kids and then plan my day around that end state accordingly.  My secondary goal is to be as productive and distraction free as I can be in the hours I have promised myself I will work.  Again, I plan out my day on my calendar work in my tasks "GTD style".  Lastly, I communicate that days success to myself and those around me.



Telework is a Varsity Mindset
Athletes often dress well on game day to let everyone know they are competing that afternoon.  The real reason coaches tell players to look good is psychological. Their dress code changes their mindset.  They mentally build up their desire to win throughout the day.  Wearing proper work attire in the home office is just as important.  It tells your kids you are in a mode (or to my kids playing a role) to stay focused.  It also sends a signal about interruptions.  But most important of all it tells YOU, the teleworker to work hard and win the day.


Make Telework Signs
I create a loose leaf ring binder with clear plastic inserts for my Telework signs.  I used power point to bang out some important signs for the.  Then I fold the ring binder back and sit it like a road sign outside my door. Sometimes I will even put it some place around the house I know my family will repeatedly see it.  Here are my favorite signs:

• Daddy has calls today.  Playing upstairs is a bad idea.
• Daddy would like visit form everyone at 12:30 after you eat lunch.
• Daddy says your BabySitter makes decisions. I will be listening.
• Daddy will be free at 5:30pm sharp in his boots to play soccer in the yard.

The signs are as much for me as they are for my little co-workers.

Create a Path in Your Yard for Phone Calls
Most home office phones let you walk all the way around your house with little interference.  I have a set path I like to walk while I talk with people. I am sales guy, so I try not to look at my laptop while engaging in a phone conversation.  I have little notebook that fits in my pocket. Sometimes I take notes on the backs of my business cards. The message here is that you rarely find a patio near your cube.  Take advantage of the sun and fresh air while you work.  I also voice over IP tied into my instant messaging client to get all my calls done using whatever phone I like.  I kill three phones in a telework work day. I use the upstairs phone until its battery dies and then switch to another somewhere in the house.  My cell phone is my last resort. Since everyone calls my central number, I can switch devices without anyone being the wiser.


Avoid Household Task Distractions
You cannot fold laundry and be effective on a conference call. Evaluate everything you do as if you were an hour away at the office. Stay focused and fold laundry at night after work hours. This point is important because we all convince ourselves we are productive but few of us evaluate what we actually do and how all this accomplishes our perfect telework day.


Summary
Telework is not a science. Telework is a discipline. Like anything else you should practice it thoughfully.  I invite everyone to add comments on how they "gear up" for a day of office work done at home.

Presentation Fail Whales - The Bad Diagram

Introduction
This is a cautionary tale with two lessons.  First,  Have some sense to ask people whether your slides are any good.  Specifically, Ask a range of people to review your slides and get their opinions and reactions before unleashing a poorly vetted deck on an audience you want to sway your way.  Second, Never give a presentation you do not know like the back of your hand.  Whether you have created it yourself or simply downloaded something from the corporate extranet, you are the person responsible for its content.  You own your presentation.  Showing slides you cannot speak to demoralizes your audience and makes you look foolish at best, a complete goof at worst.  Enjoy the story and poke around the blog for tips on how to avoid Izzy's fate.


Redacting a Name or Two
To protect the unfortunate victim in this story we will use the code name Izzy.  That's my own variation on the the first name of the captain from Moby Dick, a great story about epic fail whaling.

Izzy

We were all part of a team giving a day long presentation to the CIO and staff of a Fortune 500 manufacturing client.  One by one, each division of my company presented a one hour topic on a variety of software, services, and research offerings the CIO had requested.

I am not a big fan of parades.  I only attend real parades to see if the police will hold their marching formation no matter what terrain the horses they follow decide to leave in their path.  It's an odd hobby  but uniquely my own.  But I digress.  Slide parades are still very much a part of enterprise sales.  We do what we can to dress them up and make them effective. But everyone knows there are only two ways to really shine in day long events. You either present first and bring great hand outs or you bring in a hitter to bat cleanup and wow the customer right before they leave for the day. The rest of the time you are dealing with semi-distracted folks preying to their Blackberries under the desk.

I was batting clean-up that day. Few people like to follow me for obvious reasons so I was happy to have that magical attention span people muster at the end of the day.  Izzy was giving a presentation just before mine.  This is when the day went horribly wrong.

Izzy walked up to the podium while the last person was talking.  I never advise this as the podium is theirs until they say otherwise.  The customer asking the question at the time stopped and was startled enough to forget what he was asking.  The VP (Izzy was super career oriented.. wink) told the customer he could repeat the question and that Izzy would wait until the customer was satisfied he had the answer.  The customer was pointing to the org chart the VP displayed on the screen asking which of his executives could help with a problem he was having. Then the screen went blue. The VP's org chart disappeared.  Izzy had pulled the VP's cable out of his laptop so he could put up his deck. Izzy must have thought that the VP was finished presenting slides and the VP could answer the customer's question without a visual. The VP calmly answered the question and then graciously introduced Izzy.  Izzy was so wrapped up fiddling with his machine that he hardly acknowledged the gesture.

Izzy had many thing running on his machine.  I always advise people to make sure everything is shout down except the deck and maybe the demo you plan to show.  There are known keystroke combos while booting up a machine that prevent programs from starting up automatically.  The point here is that it is okay to get some work down while you are waiting to present, but you should be go-time ready a good fifteen minutes before you pitch something.  The customer asked Izzy about a window showing something that flashed red and green. It turns out this was a potential competitors offering Izzy was studying. Let's review. Izzy was not ready. Izzy interrupted another speaker. Izzy interrupted a customer question. Now Izzy gave free air time to a competitors product.

Izzy gave his presentation and demonstrated he was a competent subject matter expert.  I have to say his lack of energy while presenting gave me the feeling he hated either his job or these types of presentations.  The real trouble began at slide 21.  Slide 21 was a detailed architecture diagram.  Frankly, The chart reminded me of the wiring diagram to a 1973 Fiat Spider. Izzy looked at the slide and mumbled "There you go...uh, there it all is."  The CIO asked what it was that he was saying with this slide. Izzy replied, "I really do not even know what this slide means. But my manager told us we had to use all the slides unmodified."  We were all agog.  How could he show a slide know nothing about it?  How could he undermine his credibility on everything he had just shown us by making us think he had been reading a script?  Then Izzy asked if there were any questions. Not one customer even blinked.  He yanked out the cable from his laptop and walked straight out of the room leaving yours truly to pick up the pieces.  I did fine but I have to say Izzy sunk us all with his total lack of understanding about what good presentations entail.

Summary

I spoke at length with Izzy later and actually helped him improve his skills a bit.  But I know he never felt comfortable getting up in front of a customer again.  I heard the VP wrote his manager an unflattering email.  I feel bad for him. He did not realize what was at stake.  Hopefully, You will not let anyone on your team make the same mistakes that sunk Izzy.

Regards,

Chris

Using White Boards For Fun and Profit

Optimal Use of the White Board

I remember when I started to see white boards everywhere. The year was 1993 and every company was beginning to use them.  Of course, the technology was evolving and the first boards were a real mess.  People were using the wrong markers.  My competitor’s scribbling was burned into the board from the day before despite the desperate washing and scrubbing.  People were using ten colors to describe the simplest concept.  Those were fins times.  Since then, the white board has become the key tool for jointly working through concepts. Your white board skills demand some attention.

The All-Time Greatest Whiteboard

I remember the greatest white board session I ever attended like it was yesterday.  My manager at the time was the leading authority on our company’s email product and came to talk to the customer about an enterprise wide deployment.  Knowing his subject matter cold helped a great deal.  He was comfortable, confident, and calm. He sat down and put his notebook and pen in front of him.  For the sake of clarity I mean a paper notebook as at the time, the closest thing we had to portable was the size of a dorm room air conditioner.  He started his white board by clearly setting the stage for the meeting and then asking a whole bunch of questions.

We must have talked to the customer for 25 minutes about what they wanted, their user population, their customers, and their staff.  The customer did most of the talking which is exactly why my boss was so good with his presentations. He was consultative. He believed you could not advise without thoroughly vetting the customer’s needs.  This is the stuff of an entirely different post I will likely get to in the future. Note to self: save dying art of listening.

Now comes my favorite part of the story. My boss leans back and stared at the board in silence for what seemed like an eternity.  Then he looked at the row of customers and said, “Ok, I think I have an idea of what you are asking me. May I step up to the white board and draw a few things out.”  The customer handed him the marker set and he began to draw out a few concepts with no more than a word or two underneath each picture.  “So this is what you told me you have in your environment today, right?”  The customer nodded and even contributed a few ideas which he happily added to the board leaving a big space in the middle for a description of our solution set.  The difference between amateur night and real professional customer facing people is the knack pros have for constantly confirming what they have heard from their audience.  My boss added that “right?” to the end of most sentences and actually waited for the customer to say yes before moving on. You might think that this slowed things down. But people appreciate when you check in with them.  Then he hit with the magic.

In the center of the board he drew concentric circles representing an IT staff at the center of a critical application (email).  He then added the challenges faced by various challenges faced by each constituency in the each successive ring.  The admin was at the center running the server. The help desk was handling calls from various parts of the company. The end users were trying to get their work done. The customers and alliance partners were in the outer most ring in need of some connection to the core business functions.  My boss had laid out a value chain putting the CIO in the very middle of the layered earth which was their email system.  “The problem is that we are acquiring several companies in the near future disrupting the layers on this chart”, said the CIO in a beleaguered grumble.  “I am going to erase all of this now and represent everything I just drew as a small circle.”  I could take a revisionist approach here and use the term “icon”, but that’s not how I remember it.  My boss drew five circles as if to lay out the points of a star and said, “Let me show you how our solution (he probably said the name of the product) could handle four simultaneous acquisitions.  He described how our product routed email to different servers and hubs and even went into some detail on how we exchanged (no pun meant) mail with systems from different companies.  He talked about centralized versus peer to peer networking and the implications of these choices.  He did all of this in under 30 minutes.  The customer was pleased and we moved forward with the sale quickly that quarter.  I know it was the greatest white board session because the customer told me so.  One year later that same white board was mounted above the data center control screens.  The CIO decided to unbolt the board from the conference room and put it up in his control center.

No one should expect to see their white board make YouTube these days. But there are some well worn paths along the road to a great white board session.  If you can leanr to white board you can certainly produce better presentations.

Shapes and Positioning

Learn to draw the basic white board shapes to convey your point.  You can only practice white board drawing on an actual white board.  I do not recommend learning to draw using a pen. Drawing comes from the elbow and if you practice using your hand writing style, you will soon find it does not translate well when your hand is above your head writing against a vertical surface.

Learn to draw quickly and move out of the way. The audience needs to be able to see what you are drawing and absorb the concepts unfettered by the back of your shirt.  I am a rather large person with a head the size of an overinflated rugby ball.  I have learned to use my reach and lean in the center rather than step entirely in front of the board.

Drawing Lessons while Entertaining Your Children

Children make great critics for improved drawing. Consider the chalk game I play with my children:  You need the thick sidewalk kind of chalk for this.

• Draw simple pictures in various locations spaced at sprinting distances.
• Draw a tree in one location. Draw a cloud in another location. Draw a house. Draw a happy face. Draw a Planet.
• Draw a star in the middle of the drive way and write start under it.
• Have the children stand on the star and then begin the game.
• Give a clue letting them figure out which pictures they should run to.
• Give clues that point to more than one picture; “This word begins with the letter H.”
• Add pictures the make the game interesting.

Flip Charts are Not White Boards

Flip charts make a poor white board.  Avoid using them when presenting value to a customer.  Flip charts are best used by trained facilitators who wish to gain collective input from the group.  White boarding is a sport for two people, you and your customer to discuss your topic visually, erasing, and marking up many versions as you go.  Simply put, the work moves too fast to keep ripping, taping up, and moving on to the next page.  I am a fan of good flip chart usage but have seen few instances where it was effective communicating value.

Summary

White boards are a great tool that forces the presenter to stop and listen.  They are not ideal for meetings with more than eight people.  This is a hard and fast rule.  If a meeting is one hour long and everyone contributes 5 minutes of input twice, you hardly have introduced yourself when you have to pack up. Choose the right tool for the right job.

Regards,

Chris

About Me

I am the Regional Sales Director and Brand Executive for Information Management in IBM Federal Software.  I manage the largest brand in the IBM Software Family.  My brand is home to the growing businesses of Cognos, Enterprise Content Management, Data Services (Think DB2, Informix, etc.), and Infosphere.  I absolutely love what I do and thank my lucky stars I get paid to have so much fun.  I wish I could say it was not always fun but I have to admit I have had the happiest career of anyone I know.

I started my career at Lotus developing applications for Sales Force Automation and Reporting.  A legendary salesman saw me demo one of my applications and told me that sales was in my future.  I became a Sales Engineer working primarily with Insurance and Banking customers in Hartford and Boston.  The job was so much fun I never thought I would leave it.  Another legend, a sales director,  saw one of my customer presentations and knew that the woman who would become my wife was moving to New York city.  I moved from Boston to New York and saw more customers on a daily basis then I had in a week further north.  I had a great job. I got the girl. I was living in the greatest city on the planet.

IBM acquired Lotus and again my opportunities exploded.  Portals were taking off and I had made the first deals of said on Wall Street using the software to do just about everything from Disaster recovery to CRM.  I then landed some really cherry gigs on the Worldwide and Americas sales teams working with customers from all over the Americas.  Being translated is a real trip.

Writing and Speaking about software is a wildly rewarding life.  But I found quickly that I wanted to focus on making those that work for me work smarter... more productively. Again, It came back to my ongoing pursuit of scaling my efforts. The result of my choice is that there folks out better suited to doing all that great customer facing work.  The nature of management is that I have become a de facto enabler of others.

I started this blog because I would prefer to have those around me "pull" what they need rather than "push" what I think they need.  This is therapy for me as I see for too often behaviors that make me cringe.  I make mistakes daily myself and have gained a great deal of respect for sites that help me.  I yield benefits every day from my five favorite blogs.  Twitter not so much, that's too distracting.  I am writing this blog to channel my enthusiasm of Selling Software back into the void.. uh community.

Please feel free to provide me feedback in any of the standard ways. You can post comments in the blog. You can click the CALL ME link and leave a voice mail.  Both of which will make their way into my view.

Regards,

Chris

Three Rules for Writing Effective Emails

Rule 1 - State Your Business
Get to your point in both the subject line of the email and use a single terse line after the Dear Bob part.  I often use a single word to precede this critical sentence with a punch. Here are a few examples:

• Action: Need your list of customers you want invited to our important event sent to me by 12/12.
• FYI: The December event has not got enough customers and we may have to cancel it.
• Action: Please reach out to Bob Smithersjohnson at Widgetexon to confirm his support for our project by Friday of this week.

Rule 2 - Be Polite and Write Sentences
I have often thought a certain professional I know was writing his emails while wearing mittens while skydiving.  His emails were abrupt, chat text like, and often confusing to the point where I flagged his junk as spam.  There are no good reason I know of where you are taking the time to ask me for something but not taking the time to make it a concise and polite request.  There are several good crutches for those of you that need them.  Any current Blackberry has an auto text function that converts the letters LMK to "Let me know if you have any questions or concerns."  I have a bunch of entries that are thank you's.  Here are some examples:

• 4this - Thank you for the material you sent me.
• 4meet - Thank you taking the time to meet with me.
• 4ref - Thank you for the referral.  I owe you one.

Rule 3 - Follow-Up
Email is not contract between people to do anything. It is a very impersonal way of communicating.  As such, You must follow-up every email your write with a more personal form of communication.  I like this old school thing we call a phone. I know I am remarkably arcane and even antediluvian in my methods.  But I have to ask myself, "If I do not have the time to make a quick follow-up call, should I have wasted my time writing the email?"  The most important benefit of this method is to prevent me from using my email as a  trebuchet.  A trebuchet is an old very large catapult invented by the French to launch just about anything at their enemies. Think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and flying cows being launched at King Arthur.  I have seen to many times people simply forwarding their work into the void as an empty Inbox feels like success.  This is why we should all just delete what we are not going to act on.  It is much more honest.

Confessions of Key Stroke Guy - Using Launchy

My start menu regularly bloats up like a wood tick making it impossible to use. My desktop is a landfill of folders and half started project ideas.  The only place I have any real control is in my mail file where I have implemented a modified Getting Things Done approach with some well placed tweaks a la Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders and some software picks from Lifehacker. My favorite utility for giving my graphical user interface that much needed soviet era DOS key stroke feel is Launchy.

Launchy launches programs, files, and my macros without ever having to stop to move my mouse.  Sure you may say to me, “Chris, No one uses mice anymore. Just do a little finger yoga on your track pad.”  I refuse to use the track or the little red thing in the middle of my keyboard when I can just type.  It is second nature and I will challenge any one to a quick draw contest to prove my point.  But I digress.

I simply hit ALT + SPACEBAR and up come the dialog box for Launchy.  Then I type in “powerpoint” and up come a variety of likely choices including the program or the folders named as such.  Over time the program learns that “v” means fire up my Google voice.  Where Launchy is really helpful is in launching batch files and links to scripts.

Launchy also takes parameters by hitting the tab. So, ALT + SPACEBAR with the text chr (“meaning Chrome”) then tab and www.lifehacker.com sets up my chrome browser to go to the LifeHacker web site.  This is easy fast and frankly fun.

Check out Launchy and the discussion boars on automating your keystrokes.

Chris