Portable Presentations: Walking Away with the Show
You've gathered that all-important data and incorporated it into a seamless, top-notch report. But when it comes to convincing a hard-nosed client, form is often as important as substance. John Tyler offers some hints on how to fine tune your laptop skills and give an effective portable presentation.by John Tyler
It used to be an embarrassed, mop-haired man in a bad-fitting suit, shuffling papers in front of an even more embarrassed crowd. It used to be a lecturer scrawling sentences -- or usually just major points -- on a green "blackboard," with intermittent, ear-wrenching screeches from her nails as the chalk broke. It used to be photocopied, hand-drawn graphs with typewritten titles in a duo-tang folder with a clear front cover. It used to be all of these, and more.
To paraphrase the ad: "We've come a long way, baby."
Selling our wares with a fine-tuned, graphically-pleasing computer presentation is the best way to demonstrate our in-tune-with-the-times approach to business. We convey that our company is cutting edge, that we are technologically literate, and that attentiveness to the customer is topmost in our minds.
But how often can we expect a customer to come over to our office for a presentation? These days, presentation means portable. If you have a laptop, you have a golden opportunity. Giving a well-planned presentation, in snappy 24-bit color, in the dimmed comfort of The Customer's own office -- that simple act will do far more than a week of cold calls, will impress far more than your expensively embossed meishi (name card), and will sell far more effectively than your well-thought-out pricing structure and payment plan.
Or not.
Taking a laptop computer on the road to pitch your product -- be it art and design, manufactured goods, or widgets -- presents golden opportunities for impressing customers with your company's state-of-the-art technology and potential disasters for showing them, in full technological splendor, the flaws in your planning (read: flaws in your product or corporate vision). I've done my share of presentations, and have experienced both successes and failures, and in the process I've learned some valuable lessons about how to prepare for a faultless portable presentation in Japan.
Sort out your RAM requirements
Everyone who travels with a laptop computer knows that the battery runs down faster, and the system runs slower, the more memory intensive applications and extensions you run on it. This is particularly true if you are running a Japanese system, which also requires approximately one megabyte more RAM than a comparable English system. If you haven't yet set up a minimum system to run while your machine is giving a presentation unplugged, now is the time to do it.A minimum system is one that doesn't load your Oscar the Grouch trashcan or the aooooga system beep. It doesn't load your modem inits and cascading menus. In other words, it doesn't burden your memory with these nonessential extras, thus freeing up the maximum amount of RAM for use in putting on your presentation.
If you don't have at least 8MB of RAM on your laptop, seriously consider adding more. Saving a few hundred dollars by scrimping on memory only to blow a several-thousand-dollar contract because of a botched presentation -- well, you can do the arithmetic for yourself.
Be sure to run through a presentation under the worst conditions, with every possible program open, to ensure that your system doesn't crash from too little memory. And if you haven't configured each application's memory requirements, do so now. If you'll be showing a Powerpoint presentation, for example, you'll want to go to Powerpoint's Get Info box (Command-I on a Mac) and set the preferred size to what you need. I keep the version on my desktop Mac set to a comfortable 8MB, but I allot the Powerbook copy much less, about 3MB.
Have sufficient storage space
The warning to make sure you have enough storage space may sound like something that only an idiot would neglect. Yet many laptop computer owners do much of their work on desktop machines, putting things on the laptop for use only when they need it. Too often, at the last minute you may find yourself in the situation where you have all the files ready to go, then realize you'll have to strip other files from the laptop just to get the essential files to fit. If your laptop hard disk is of reasonable size (at least 240MB in these days of bloated applications), this isn't a common problem among those who show spreadsheets or give simple slide shows, but it is a frequent concern for digital artists, designers, or anyone who has a folder of multi-megabyte images to show.One precaution against running out of space is partitioning the disk in the laptop you intend to use, in advance. Create a separate virtual disk with enough space to serve your most stringent needs. This method has the added advantage that you can store a bare system folder here for emergencies, or a Japanese system if you only occasionally come out of the English one.
Set up your font suitcases
If you're like me, you like a lot of fonts. I always find myself needing one for a special design the customer wants, and not having it. My font folder, at 40MB, is nearly twice as big as my system folder. When you're on the road, having a heap of suitcases open (using font utilities like MasterJuggler or Suitcase II) eats up a good portion of available RAM. Confirm which fonts are used in all of your presentations, and arrange your font utility to load only those. If you do this before you head out the office door, it will save you precious time when the customer is sitting across the conference table, waiting and losing interest.Don't find yourself in the situation where you suddenly decide you want to show the customer something else, and the proper fonts aren't loaded. You'll open your file, and it will look like the neighborhood crows got into it first. I don't remember which was more embarrassing the first time this happened to me: apologizing to the customer for the unsightly display, or making him wait three minutes while I rebooted and opened the necessary suitcase.
Japanese fonts are notoriously large, so having special suitcases for them is highly advisable. You will find that you don't often need more than one font (ryumin is smaller and just as pretty as chu-gothic); closing those you don't need will free up space elsewhere.
Do a periodic deep discharge
Keep your batteries in optimum condition. If you often run the machine on batteries, then you are continually topping the charge up, and probably not letting the level go all the way down and giving it a full boost. This initiates a battery phenomenon called "memory effect": while the battery doesn't lose capacity, the voltage output decreases. The battery begins to think the lower voltage is the correct level and adjusts itself accordingly, resulting in shorter battery life. Memory effect is more common with NiCad batteries than with NiMH, and the older lead-type batteries don't suffer at all -- in fact, fully discharging the older type batteries can cause permanent damage.Doing a deep discharge clears the battery's "memory" and allows it to again begin using its original full capacity. You can do a deep discharge by unplugging your machine, turning on all your extensions, turning up your screen brightness, and engaging in disk intensive work (perhaps putting a few Photoshop filters through their paces) until the machine runs itself down. You can also use some disk utilities to do the same thing. It is important, though, to let your machine fully recharge immediately afterwards. Having the battery in optimum condition won't cause you any embarrassing and costly stalls in the middle of your important presentation.
Do a dry run
This phrase "do a dry run" should be enshrined in a place of worship high on the wall -- preferably above the door you walk out of on the way to your presentation. Too often, we get so wrapped up in the minutia of our presentation -- making sure all the numbers jive, all the graphs are in proper sequence, all the notes are legible and intelligible --that we forget to test the works in a mock run.Set aside a hour (or however long you need) to test the entire presentation -- accompanying speech, asides, and drinks of water included. This will enhance the real presentation. You may suddenly find a page missing, a graph upside down, or an image in BMP format rather than PICT. You will see openings for questions, opportunities to plug other aspects of your product, and moments where a joke will lighten the darkened atmosphere. Also, you will be able to confirm the appropriateness of your language: if you intend to interject Japanese words into your speech (assuming you are not doing the entire thing in Japanese), now is the time to ask your test audience (a co-worker, a secretary) to finesse your accent and word choice. Nothing would be more mortifying (and bad for business) than using a phrase that belongs in a bar, not a boardroom.
Going on the road with your laptop not only gives you a sense of freedom and modern efficiency, it conveys the technological edge that customers today want to see. If you plan beforehand, your presentation will do more than just put on a show -- it will do your selling for you.ç
