Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales Through Visuals

Chapter 1

The Role of Presentation Slides in Today's Sales Culture

The best way to paralyze an opposition army is to ship it PowerPoint and thereby contaminate its decision making.

—Robert Gaskins, co-creator of PowerPoint

The term “death by PowerPoint” is so prevalent that it is now firmly entrenched in corporate culture. In fact, as of this writing, if you Google this term and look at the Google Images search results, you will see 50,000 images (many of them great comic relief) related to the term. The phrase was actually first coined by Angela Garber in 2001.¹ It was a good article. But like thousands of other articles and books on how to continue to use PowerPoint while avoiding its pitfalls, Garber's piece was just that—suggestions on how to put lipstick on a pig. We ask, “Why not just fry up some bacon?”

So we know that slides are the predominant way organizations communicate internally and between buyers and sellers. But there is now data that shows there are significant, quantifiable costs associated with their use. Right around the twentieth anniversary of PowerPoint, a study cited in the Wall Street Journal conservatively estimated $252 million in lost productivity per day due to bad slide presentations.² The calculation is based on Microsoft's 2001 estimate of 30,000,000 slide presentations in existence. That's in 2001, during PowerPoint's infancy or, at best, its adolescence. ...