Last year, I wanted to experiment with hosting my articles on beehiiv

—and while the platform is great, intuitive, easy to use, and all the things, I just felt a ton of friction when using it. That resistance was keeping me from writing as much as I could be.

The UI is great—no complaints there. It’s easy to customize newsletters to get them to look exactly the way you want them to. And it’s easy to publish, and make sure the right articles get to the right people. It’s got robust analytics you can dig into.

(To be absolutely fair, it’s also got a ton of features, especially around monetization and such, that I never really explored.)

I like to keep all of my writings organized in Notion.

Everything from workshops to proposals to articles to LinkedIn posts starts as a Notion document.

And importing documents from Notion into Beehiiv was kind of a nightmare.

Everything had to be reformatted.

And then if I wanted to publish that article on LinkedIn….

Everything had to be reformatted.

And then if I wanted to publish it on my website…

Everything had to be….you get the idea.

So, I started to avoid writing. Because, ugh.

I looked around for a way to sync a Notion doc with Wordpress (which my website is built on), and of course, somebody built that.¹

After installing the plugin, I spent about an hour creating my blog post format.

Now, I write articles in Notion,

and they automatically sync with Wordpress in that formatting. Colors, columns, featured image, categories, everything.

I don’t format anything. I don’t even have to type in the date. It’s glorious.

Anyway, Beehiiv will be shutting down soon. ²

You can find me here:
https://insightsaccelerator.com/takeaways/

The latest article is about how to overcome fear and anxiety.

Forward IV, by Vashte. Conte crayon on paper + digital art.

It’s something I struggle with myself. So who better to give you some insight on how to overcome it?

Talk soon.

/V

I even made this in Canva, which you can tell, because it looks like everything else made in Canva.

Before we can solve this problem, we need to accurately identify the problem.

When people reach out to Slidedesignr for help, universally, they think they have a design problem. “I’m not an artist, I’m not very creative, I’m not a designer, I can barely draw a stick figure”, that kind of stuff. You're not alone!

But I find over and over again that that’s not true—the problem is far deeper than that.

The basic idea is this: we have to present about something, and we sit down and we write. We write paragraphs, lists of bullets, and outlines. And then we go…great, how do I get from here...to impactful slides?

Or how do we take data from a lot of different sources, a lot of writing from a lot of different team members, analyze that, and synthesize it into a clearly visualized idea that connects back to business value?

That’s not an art problem! That’s an analytical problem.

It’s a mistake to reframe it as a design issue to be solved by either a designer or some design software.

Because, as an Insights Pro, I believe it’s up to you—and you have all the expertise you need to be able to solve this problem.

Why not just get a designer to do it for you?

Because being able to present your insights visually isn’t just a desirable skill—it's a necessity.

92% of business leaders¹  expect employees in non-design roles to have design skills and knowledge, according to Canva’s Visual Economy report.

There’s lots of ways you can visualize things—even with Generative AI.

You no longer need to be an expert digital artist to generate cool-looking images.

(Since GenAI is just a mashup of the work digital artists put online.)

But what about when you need to create a visual model to communicate a new insight? Every project is different, so most insights work is custom.

So it’s likely not going to fit into a template.

And GenAI can’t generate custom visual models, since, again, it's a mashup of existing content.

So, I’m not convinced AI will help you with that.

According to the same survey, 90%² of business leadership also thinks AI has improved the quality of visual communication.

"Quantity" I could believe, but, "quality"?

Out here in reality, it hasn’t, so it’s weird that they think that, but don’t be surprised if what follows is a real expectation that anyone can just use AI to quickly generate slides that do viscom better than a human could do on their own.³

Combined with the democratization of data collection, this could mean a lot of people trying to analyze data and crank out slides presenting "insights".

It could even mean teams shrinking.

This means you’ll have to work harder to visually differentiate yourself and demonstrate your business value as an insights veteran.

If there’s one thing you could do differently tomorrow to solve this problem, it’s this:

Learn the one thing that the best slide designers know how to do better than their competitors—optimize words and images for the human mind.

If you look at their decks, it isn’t obvious. Like good engineering, when it’s done correctly, no one notices it’s there.

Yet their slides are far more memorable, and people can understand them 60,000x faster⁴ .

That’s what separates the best slide designers from everyone else.

On August 1, 2024, I’m teaching a workshop that will boil this down, make it dead simple for you, and give you some free resources you can use on your next deck.

Click here to read all about it.

PS - if you have any questions about the workshop, hit reply and let me know so I can address them. I read every email.

🦶📝

Hi {{FirstName|there}},

I promised in the last edition to define what we mean by our y-axis Actionability, and make it actionable for your business, and for you personally. I hope this helps drive some interesting conversations in your business. So let's get into it.

What Happens After You Hit Send on the Deliverable?

Do you know how it performed?

Do you know how it performed relative to your other deliverables?

Do you know what happens to it? How it gets used?

Do you measure Client Satisfaction?

As an Industry, We Talk a Lot About Actionable Insights and Impactful Research, But:

Is it true?

In order for a claim to be true, it must be falsifiable—meaning, capable of being proven wrong through measurable evidence.

So:

1. What do “Insight”, “Actionable”, and “Impact” mean?

2. How do they relate to each other?

3. And then, how do we measure them?

What “Insight”, “Actionable”, and “Impact” mean, & How They Relate to Each Other

An Insight is a tool [noun] our clients can [verb] in the world to help them make decisions, take action, overcome obstacles, and achieve goals. Screwdrivers, a set of lock picks, a sword—these are all tools with which we can [do action] to solve a set of problems.

Insights as Tools are Actionable, meaning, verbable. They serve a clear purpose and are of value to the business. Our clients can use them in their minds, and in the world. And the actions they are empowered to take can make an Impact.

Make an Impact in Your Clients’ Business—AND Your Own.

Here's that matrix from last week again:

Slidedesignr Results Matrix

When we make an Impact, the force of that Impact should felt tangibly in our client’s business—and that energy should ripple back into our own business in a real, tangible way.

And this goes for both the vendor- and corporate-side.

So that's items #1 and #2 sorted. Now, for #3: How do we measure them?

So far, there hasn’t been any standardized definition of “Impact”, or any means of measuring Impact in a tangible way. We need to be able to answer at least three questions:

What, if anything was Impacted?

How much of an Impact have we made for our client?

How is that Impacting us?

By understanding what creates Impact, we should be able to set goals and objectives for our professional growth.

1. How do we know and prove that we're actually driving decisions for our C-suite partners and stakeholders in non-research functions such as design, product, retail, marketing, finance, and all the rest?

2. How can we understand what that’s influencing people to say about us when we’re not in the room?

3. How can we leverage all of this into building our authority (which reduces friction in the sales conversation with the next prospective client)?

Create Measurable Impact by Targeting 3 Things: Actionability, Achievement, and Authority.

Aim for:

1. Actionability. To recap, we create clear Insights that clients can use in the world as tools to create value in the business. Nail your product delivery. Get Actionability right. Consistently deliver for your clients. That is going to create...

2. Achievement. That we can put out there and leverage as proof and evidence of our...

3. Authority. Be known as the expert at what you do.

Qualitatively or quantitatively, these are KPIs we can (and must) track as Objectives & Key Results (OKRs). How we specifically formulate those OKRs and track them over time will look different for you depending on your mission, values, area of expertise, industries served, and other factors.

They should integrate with what you're already measuring, such as customer loyalty, referrals, lifetime value, churn, obviously revenue, and other metrics. Adapt these OKRs accordingly, and reach out if you’d like some help.

How to Measure Actionability.

Visual Clarity ⬆️

The more clearly and visually you present information, the more likely it is to be easily understandable, memorable, and useful, thus increasing presenter confidence and client satisfaction. This bleeds into everything you do; it goes far beyond PowerPoint.

Client Satisfaction ⬆️

This is an easy one. How satisfied are clients and stakeholder partners with what was delivered?

Presenter Confidence ⬆️

Even if they didn’t personally create the deliverable, how confident did the Principal/presenter feel when presenting and discussing these insights? Were they able to confidently deliver a clearly summarized elevator pitch for the entire deck, in 1-3 sentences? Were they prepared to answer any questions thrown at them during the presentation? If not, were they able to confidently tell the client that they knew where to find the answer, and would be able to get it to them in a timely manner? Did they feel prepared to drive and mediate the conversation?

Usefulness ⬆️

Did these Insights get used on business initiatives? What specific actions did they take as next steps? By which stakeholders, departments or business units? What specific decisions were they able to make, or what decisions did it help drive? Who did it help, and in what way?

Citations ⬆️

Does the deliverable, or parts of it, get referenced or cited often? Are people across the organization able to access it? Easily?

Get Those Right First; Then, Here's How to Measure Achievement.

Tangible Results ⬆️

Do we have tangible results from our clients that we can use in case studies and marketing efforts? If results are difficult to describe quantitatively, do we have good quotes and stories about the results stakeholders have experienced? If clients were able to improve or innovate or create XYZ Real Product or Service or Messaging That’s Out There, which one(s)?

Assets ⬆️

Can you visualize your unique approach that garnered tangible results as a visual model? Are you able to close the loop with your deliverables, and repurpose them as sanitized assets you can use as content in thought leadership pieces and sales materials? Can you use them to land speaking engagements? Can you write about them? Can you turn them into digital products that can further help more people at different price points (cf. the airplane metaphor)?

Which Then Drives Authority. To Measure Authority, Track...

Differentiation ⬆️

Do prospects and customers seek out our expertise? Are clients reaching out to us directly for non-competitive projects?

Reputation ⬆️

“This is the kind of work ____ does.” What are you an expert at? What do people say about you when you're not in the room? What are you known for? And, how’s your personal brand? Are you a trusted resource for XYZ? Have you become known for XYZ thing or area of expertise? Are members of your team rockstars at [something]?

Relationships ⬆️

When is the last time you spoke to XYZ Stakeholder about what they need to do their job better? What do you know about their needs, fears, and biggest questions?

Proactivity ⬆️

How much did we recommend and sell-in follow-up research, creative deliverables, upsells, or consulting engagements? Rather than reacting to their requests for projects, are we behaving as experts and proactively coming to our clients and stakeholders to create opportunities for uncovering Insights and impacting business value?

And Authority Reduces Friction in the Next Sales Conversation, Circling Back into Opportunities to Create Actionable Engagements for Prospects.

Adapt, baseline, target, and measure these 11 OKRs in a way that makes sense for your unique business, to become known for Impactful Insights.

P.S.

Send your questions in—I'm always happy to answer them.

🙋 https://slidedesignr.com/ask-vashte/

Look out for a reply from me answering your question on the Slidedesignr YouTube channel, or right here in this newsletter.

Way back in the day, in 2008, I had to present findings to my Division Director at a Global Automotive Company.

I packed my slides with tons of good ideas, wrote to them in a smart, entertaining way, and guess what?

Even though my slides looked pretty cool (I thought), they flopped.

Flopped?

Crashed. Burned.

He was. not. happy.

Our C-Suite was not made up of English speakers.

And I presented my findings as wordy, witty, look-how-smart-I-am slides.

When I present slides now, they’re universally lauded as impactful, clear, professional, and some of the best insights slides my clients have ever seen.

What do I do differently now?

• I create insights as tools each stakeholder can use to be smarter at their jobs

• I do the upfront work to synthesize insights so they’re clear and easy to understand in seconds

• I translate words on the page into visual models that can stand alone and be universally understood, leaving nothing up to interpretation

Obviously something happened in 2008, right?

That something is called "Turning Words into Visuals". It's the understanding of how to turn your wordy outlines and report writing into visual models anyone can understand. And no matter whether you're using PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Canva, the concepts still apply.

And I didn’t have to become a better artist to get results.

Everyone seems to think the solution is better aesthetics, a new app, or better “storytelling”, but I disagree.

The solution is better logic.

You can get by with entertaining, cool-looking slides….for a little while. Like I did.

Sooner or later, someone is going to ask a question about how your insights relate to business value on a deeper level and, well…will you confidently, clearly, and succinctly be able to answer?

Cool graphic design doesn’t solve for that.

These results are achieved by leaning more into your analytical left brain, not less.

Really?

Yeah. And now you can learn what I figured out in 2008—how to turn your written words into visuals, too.

And you don't need to be better at design to get results.

I've been putting the finishing touches on the details of the How to Turn Words Into Visuals Workshop.

Availability is limited to 35 seats for this workshop. I’m teaching this live, and I want to make sure I can answer all of your questions. After that, there will be a waiting list.

I don't want you to miss out!

Click this link to read the details.

The ability to communicate your insights and ideas with visual impact is more crucial now than ever.

It can lead to elevating your work and your profile with clients and internal leadership.

These ideas changed my life.

I hope you see the value of these ideas as a way to potentially change your life, too.

P.S. If you have any questions about the workshop, hit reply and let me know so I can address them. I read every email.

Over the past decade+, I've helped hundreds of Insights Pros from one-person shops to the Fortune 500 create impact by delivering great products to their clients and stakeholders.

Across the board, I've observed two key things that differentiate those who make an impact, and those who don't.

First, is the Delivery Process (the x-axis).

How's your product delivery?

Are you figuring out ad hoc process steps for collecting, synthesizing, analyzing data, writing, articulating insights, visualizing them, designing the thing, and presenting “the story”, for every project?

Does everyone on the team kind of have their own way of doing things?

Is your process, or any part of it, decided or truncated by your client?

Or do you have a proven, repeatable, efficient, productive Insights Delivery System that reliably delivers optimal results again and again?

Next, Let's Look at Actionability (the y-axis).

How's the quality of your product?

When you deliver the final, how does your client audience respond?

Is the response lukewarm? Meh? Silence? Confusion? Requests for clarification or changes?

If they go "it was okay", does their voice go upwards in intonation?

Did you just go and collect a bunch of data? Do people know what to do with it? Does it end up on SharePoint, collecting dust?

Or did they get real business value for their research spend? Are they using your Insights to drive next steps and make decisions on real initiatives? Does it inspire referrals and business leaders coming back to you again and again?

Offering a Mix of The Top Two and the Bottom Right Quadrants Can Make for a Powerful Pricing and Bandwidth Management Strategy.

Per Ron Baker’s excellent metaphor, like an airline that offers Discount, Coach, and First Class seating, there’s a different value proposition for each section of the plane.

Depending on your client’s unique situation regarding timing and budget, their trust in and respect for you, and their desire to either take on or relinquish risk, some clients are going to be Automated Export clients, some will be down for an infographic or video, and others are willing to pay for your strategic point of view by way of Impactful Insights.

Diagnose the business need, have a consistent process in place that you can turn on for each scenario, deliver on the promise, and charge accordingly.

Honestly, Though...

I wouldn’t bother offering a Typical Report, because it’s the worst of all worlds.

These deliverables exemplify all the things people hate about PowerPoint.

They’re an inefficiently-created and poorly-executed attempt at creating Impactful Insights.

“You’re gonna get some bad slides” is not an expectation I’d recommend setting with clients on any part of the plane.

Photo by Aditya Wardhana on Unsplash

When you approach your client audience as human beings first, you show sympathy for, reassure, and disarm your audience. Literally! Arms uncross as your audience sits back and breathes a sigh of relief that this isn’t about to be another one of those presentations. This is going to be good.

But why the sigh of relief? What is it that they are relieved to see?

It’s that this presentation will be deeply relevant to them—and what’s more deeply relevant than staying alive?

Survival Shapes How Human Beings Understand & Remember Information

People can only see very few things at a time.

And what we see are the things that help us survive—everything else gets blanked out.

We are constantly scanning our environment (including deliverables!) for information that’s going to help us meet our primitive need to survive.

This means that when we present slide after slide about survey questions, or things we found interesting or present findings in chronological or discussion guide order, or even more strangely, in order of “what we heard the most”, our audience checks out. Why?

Because that information isn't helping them to…

Or more directly in our case, it isn’t helping them make money (put food on the table, keep shelter over their heads, find a mate, have children), do their jobs well (build a tribe, gain prestige, experience meaning), or give them strategies to beat competitors (stockpile weapons in case of barbarians).

They’re not seeing what they need to survive.

For many of our clients, one of their deepest desires is to be respected by their peers. No one wants to be voted off the island.

When looking at your slides, people are seeing what is useful for their own survival, and mentally discarding the rest.

You’re doing this right now in the room you’re in, too.

You aren’t paying attention to your humming refrigerator, the color of your rug, how many brushstrokes are on the painting on your wall (unless you dropped acid earlier today), the way your shoes feel on your feet (unless they hurt!), or that droning noise outside (unless it seems threatening). You’re looking at your screen (I hope!).

We have to aim our takeaways and recommendations at those things they believe have functional utility. In the context of our relationship with our audience as their Insights Professional, these are the things they care about most.

This means that we need to precisely position our deliverables as the tools we use to guide our client's actions towards the deeply important personal and business goals they're aiming at.

Based on your audience's role—whether they're a Director of Consumer Insights, a CEO, a Surgeon⁴ , a VP of Marketing—there will be more specific things they care about. But as human beings, as a baseline, the need to survive is what every human being in your audience has in common. Our task is to find out what specific survival mechanisms drive them, why, and how we can best align with them.

🦶📝

I facepalm thinking about it now. Years ago, when I'd create consumer insights reports, I'd start by trying to crank out as many PowerPoint slides as I could. It felt like I was being productive, but as it turns out, I was completely wasting what little time I had between the end of fielding and the panic-inducingly tight deadline.

Fast-forward to today, and I've developed a far more efficient process that removes the panic and cuts insights analysis time in half.  Rather than starting with an outline or messy slides, my clients start with a quick-and-dirty-freeform-yet-loosely-structured-totally-doesn't-have-to-be-perfect brain dump.

They tell me they really enjoy this part, especially because there's no designing, formatting, editing or outlining. Just focus on unloading everything you think, know, and understand about the research. Every finding, every connection you’ve made, the conversations you’ve had, your impressions, your gut reactions, emerging themes, the really smart quote that guy in your focus group said. No judging, no second-guessing, no editing, and no slides.

But what about the other things on your mind?

There’s a lot I’m sure.  Your other projects, random administrative issues, that thing going on with your car, that thing going on with your pet, an upcoming appointment, a date this weekend….it’s all stuff your mind is “working on” even if you’re consciously trying not to focus on it. You’re trying to focus on getting this deck out the door!

So what do we do? We push them aside. Try not to think about them. “I don’t have time for that right now—I’ll deal with it later.”

But that stuff matters too, and it seems like the more you try to shove them down, the more they keep forcing themselves back into your mind.

So here's what we're going to do.

Rather than dealing with your stuff later, we'll write about them first, before you start diving in to creating slides and all the rest of it.

It might seem counterintuitive to think about your check engine light before you think about your deck, but a Harvard study found that writing free-form about what’s on your mind (your “worries”) before completing a task can “offload” those thoughts and free up mental resources that you can then use to be even more productive on the task you want to complete.

So this exercise is about taking a few minutes to take good care of you first. It’s an exercise in relieving yourself of the burden of keeping too much information in your head.

It'll take about you 10-15 minutes, and will pay dividends in increased focus and productivity.

Grab it here, try it today, and let me know what you think.

If you’re always creating reports in a time crunch, and the quality of your deliverables still isn’t as good as you know they can be, giving away time as a concession to win the sale when you have an inefficient report creation process isn't serving you—or your clients.

The impact that’s having on the way your deliverables are turning out is massive.

“But Vash”, you say, “our competitors are promising reports faster than us. How can we win projects? If we don’t agree to the client’s request for a faster turnaround time, we'll lose.”

I hear your concern.

I don’t necessarily want you to tell clients that it’s going to take more time to deliver a high quality deliverable.

Not at the risk of losing the project. We gotta keep the lights on.

I do want you to have a strategy in place that enables you to reclaim and protect what time you do have.

Because, though it's in short supply, time is one of THE key ingredients of a high-quality, impactful deliverable.

It's certainly more important than graphic design concerns, such as color, and style, and all the rest.

A strategy like this helps you in two ways:

✅ you'll produce consistently higher-quality deliverables,

✅ and you and your team will produce them faster.

⬇️

Watch the full interview here.

V: "The reason why I developed the model is because there were...there were some problems I was seeing across the board. So after doing this and working with everybody from smaller shops to bigger insights companies to the client side, just, I was kind of seeing the same problems being repeated over and over and over. And one of them was sacrificing time.

So folks don't leave enough time for deliverables. We come out of field, and then you say, hey, the report's due in two weeks. We've got two weeks to create this thing.

One of the key ingredients to a powerful deliverable is time, because you need time to think and form those connections that we talked about. And you kind of can't force yourself to do it."

Insights Require Deep Thinking...Which Requires Time.

V: "Like, I have some of my biggest aha moments at the gym. Taking a walk, in the shower. Like, making food. So it's just, you have to give yourself the time.

I've come up with solutions to a deck where I couldn't find the connection between three insights and find that framework. I found them in a dream before. And woke up and went, oh, that's it! So, and that's not, that's so esoteric. That's not a thing you can tell your client, 'sorry, I gotta dream about it for a week!' Like, you can't really do that.

And so you have to give yourself the space and the time to be a human being who needs to sit with this stuff and have a life and get enough sleep and eat right and be able to form these connections. So time is so important."

Multitasking—Which Impedes Deep Thinking—Makes Report Creation Slower, and Diminishes the Quality of Your Deliverables.

V: "The other thing that I was seeing was that folks were relying on design to do the heavy lifting of the Idea Hierarchy, so they weren't giving themselves again—time is that ingredient to dive deep and find those insights and create those frameworks—because they were trying to do that, and design slides at the same time.

So I just saw so much messiness in the process that it was taking the short amount of time that people, they already ain't got no time! You already have no time. And so you're staying up late and you're spending time on weekends, and you're still coming out with a product that looks amateurish. Unfortunately."

Clients Deserve Deliverables that are the Tangible Representation of Your Best and Deepest Thinking on the Subject.

V: "If your client spends the equivalent of a BMW on research with you, I feel like, because the deck is the thing that lives on, you know, after the, everybody's drank the wine and have had the snacks in the back room and have seen the focus groups, the deck is what lives on, and that's what everybody's going to remember. And if that doesn't capture the tools that we talked about, they didn't get their $70,000, $100,000 worth out of that research engagement. That, to me, is not a win. And so it's the most important thing. And it was left to the end.

And so I wanted to create a framework that would reclaim some of that time that would enable my clients to form those deep connections, because those deep connections are what drive the beautiful visuals that make it so our clients can see what we're saying.”

So, Make Space for Deep Thinking by Creating Strategic Parts of the Deliverable During Project Management and Fielding.

And so it starts as soon as you win a research engagement, you can start on a deliverable.

Don't wait until the last two weeks."

If you want to have your team create more valuable, more impactful deliverables, just reach out to book some time (zing!) where I’ll help you uncover a strategy to make your team better, faster, and more efficient at creating them using the resources you already have right now.

Send your questions in—I'm always happy to answer them.

🙋 https://slidedesignr.com/ask-vashte/

Look out for a reply from me answering your question on the Slidedesignr YouTube channel, or right here in this newsletter.

Gary Rudman, GTR Consulting

In a brief post-project conversation with Gary Rudman, the founder of GTR Consulting, we look back at our project in which we helped visualize his work exploring the challenges of conducting custom qualitative research with Gen Z, for an audience made up of researchers and marketers.

Having carved a niche in this domain over three decades, and with 23 years at the helm of GTR Consulting, Gary is dedicated to a pursuing a deep understanding of the preferences and behaviors of younger generations; his insights help a variety of businesses reach Gen Z in way that resonates with them authentically.

What led GTR Consulting to reach out to Slidedesignr?

G: “I have been writing these articles all about Gen Z and with a lot of positive feedback on LinkedIn and wherever else people were seeing them.

And one of the things I realized is how little people understood about Gen Z, and I think, how different they were. And I thought that it would be a great idea to create a presentation to sort of show the differences between Gen Z and Gen X or Millennials or even Gen Alpha and explain how, and certainly, Boomers, and explain to them how different this generation is. And then also give some marketing and research implications when you're talking with this generation, how to do it, or when you're trying to reach them how to do it.

And I wanted to reach out to you because I came up with basically the title, the report, the presentation that started the articles that I've written, and I wanted to use some of the material that I created for that.

And, but beyond that, I had a sort of a general idea of how I wanted it to go, and what I wanted to talk about. But I really needed to put that together in a way that, really clearly kind of told a story because that's really what the most important thing is in this.”

The 4 Keystrokes provide a logical, easy to understand framework for the Key Themes.

Slidedesignr Helped Streamline the Presentation…

G: “Your thought process really helped to sort of streamline and to sort of think about it in a certain way. I put together a very, very, like, ugly brutally ugly, brutally ugly slideshow on, you know, a presentation sort of rough thing to give to you.

And you helped to sort of, think about it and then also think about, like, what what's necessary and what's not and what works and what doesn't and what's an interruption to the story and what isn't. And I think that really helped a lot.”

How Did Slidedesignr Make You Feel?

V: “One of the first things I'll ask in starting a project like this is, what's the audience's goals for this? And it became pretty clear to me that this isn't, like you said, this isn't a leave behind. This isn't the kind of thing that someone is gonna read later with a cup of coffee or anything like that.

It's to support you as the star of the show, basically. To support you and your talk about your expertise. They should be focused on you.

Do you feel like do you feel like this helped you kind of achieve that? Did you feel like the star of the show as you're presenting these slides?”

G: “So, I think these slides really made me feel like the star of the show, because it's like standing in front of a beautiful backdrop while you're giving a speech. I mean, it sort of allows you to really shine.

You know, I think, it's like the the slide serves as a thought starter, as a great visual, as a, you know, an anecdote. Because I was so comfortable with the slides that you helped to create, that I just felt like I felt more I felt more at ease in giving the the the presentation.”

Slidedesignr helped Gary receive glowing feedback and secure future gigs speaking about his expertise on Gen Z.

V: “When it comes to any specific feedback you got, did you hear back from folks?

I know you presented it with MRX Pros, have other presentations coming up. But so far, have you gotten any sort of specific feedback about it from those who saw it?”

G: “Yes. I definitely did, I got a lot of positive feedback.

The one the big my biggest, fan was, Janet Standen who just, she loved it, and she was saying that she wished that she had known about you because she had used you. But you may even be hearing from her at some point.

I think what I heard was that it was just a fun, sort of reflection of what we were talking about, which is so important that, you know, you're showing a slideshow that is again, it's a referral piece. It's not all the content, but it's the idea. It's thought starters. I think people really appreciated that it was interesting. Visually, it was just it really helped the flow of the discussion and the conversation.

And I think what what it did for me is it really gave me the confidence. Like, okay. I can like, this is a great I can use this presentation places. And I actually have already I'm presenting to IIEX in Austin, Texas.

It'll be a truncated version because I only have twenty minutes. So it'll be the three things. So the three keystrokes instead of four.

But, yeah. So it gave me confidence and, I definitely plan on on using this again. And then I would actually, even shopped it around to some banking conferences, and I'm just gonna have to tweak it a bit and maybe reach out to you again to help with that. But, yeah. I've been really pleased with the response, and I'm pleased with the confidence it gave me to shop it around.”

V: “That's wonderful. That's really, really good news. Like, I'm really glad to hear that.”

Sketchnoting by Vashte.

Many researchers learn on the job to create slides that dutifully answer the questions in the Objectives, and in the guide or survey.

But is this what’s best for the client?

In my opinion, creating slides this way makes them feel like they were made by a vendor—not a strategic consultant.

Why?

1. Because you need to properly diagnose your client’s problem, going way deeper than their list of objectives, what they say in the RFP, or in a meeting.

2. Because the majority of deliverables are written from your point of view as a researcher —who thinks like a researcher, and doesn’t step outside themselves to think and write for their audience, who are mostly not researchers–they’re marketers, executives, creatives, product people, engineers, the C-Suite. Most report writers are writing from the researcher perspective, too.

A new template, cool colors, “prettier” slides, or “storytelling” can’t turn that unclear, wordy writing into an engaging, impactful, strategic deliverable.

There’s a reason for this—and my clients understand this—and it’s what I want to help you with, too.

It’s Just The Way Things Are Done

The convention that I see over and over again is to report answers instead of extracting Ideas. Reporting answers looks like “key findings”, “occasions”, “awareness”, “[product] appeal”, “reasons why [x] does [y]”, followed by a listing out of those things. There were X number of questions in the discussion guide, or in the survey. Here’s the answers, with all the punches in descending order, for totals and all the relevant subgroups, to every question you asked us to ask. Beep boop. 🤖

Problems with this:

1. The first problem with this way of reporting “key findings” is that you’re not addressing what the audience wants. And your audience, across all those roles I mentioned earlier, actually wants one thing. And it’s not “I hope they show me every single answer to all 50+ questions in the discussion guide”. What is the one thing all our clients actually want from our research deliverables? Yup: To feel smarter, and better equipped to do their jobs.

2. Which leads to the second problem—is you’re burying the lede. Is your audience interested enough in your series of “Key Findings ” slides to keep following your train of thought until you finally land on an Insight, Thought-Starter, or Recommendation? What if key people in your client audience don’t have any practical use for anything said on the first 10 slides? The first 15? Who is a deck like this serving?

Again, I understand that many of you learned on the job how to create research decks from a boss or mentor, and it’s just the way things are done, but… it doesn’t have to be.

A Missed Opportunity

3. The third problem with this, by listing out Key Findings slide after slide, you haven’t told the client how each Insight relates to each other. What’s the clear relationship between them? Do they follow each other in time, phases, or some other chronological order? Is one Idea foundational to the others? Is there an iterative or cyclical relationship? Can the whole deliverable follow the framework of a customer journey? I promise you, there is a logical relationship, and perhaps even a framework there that can be made visual.

This is what is meant by “storytelling”—but I don’t call it that, because “storytelling” makes people feel like they have to try to present the Hero’s Journey of Conjoint, or talk about a packaging concept test like it’s The Godfather. It’s incredibly goofy, and when that doesn’t work, researchers can feel like it’s because they just aren’t good storytellers. But all they needed to do was take their great Insights, and create slides and visuals that follow the structure that emerges between the Ideas uncovered in the research.

Typically, this one is a time problem. By not taking (or allowing themselves) the time to think this through, they’re sacrificing what could a potentially powerful, impactful deck in favor of just cranking out surface-level slides that technically meet the deadline. I’ve reworked many a Frequencies deck for a client, and found a powerful framework within that had been left undiscovered.

Your PowerPoint Slides Don’t Have a Design Problem.

None of these points is addressed with a template, hiring a designer, or taking yet another course on how to make more “exciting” slides (that no one in your company will ever use).

And this is why thinking “my slides need to look prettier“ isn’t helping you at all.

The sooner you can identify and articulate…

1. The emotional and financial drivers of your client audience (rather than “Objectives”…)

2. The Ideas your client audience actually want and need (rather than frequencies or answers to questions…)

3. A logical, easy-to-understand, easy-to-visualize framework for those Ideas (rather than slide after slide of “Key Findings”….)

…the faster your deliverables are going to make your clients see you as their strategic consultant—not just a vendor.

Back over to you. Put this into action on your next deck.

If you need help, just reach out. We’ll discuss how you can transform your decks into consistently impactful PowerPoint deliverables that drive strategic consulting relationships with your clients.

What should a PowerPoint template do for you when it comes to presenting insights?

First, I’ll tell you what they can’t do.

What a great PowerPoint Template can do though, is cut the time you spend on slide by at least 25%.

They can help you get decks out the door faster, thus making a direct impact on your bottom line.

As you may have noticed, Typical Templates do the exact opposite that—they’re costing you time and money.

Because Typical PowerPoint Templates just weren’t made for people who do what we do.

Whether it’s your company’s or your client’s corporate template, that was created by a designer or agency, or it’s one you downloaded because it looks cool, they have 3 major flaws:

1. They have a bunch of stuff you don’t need, and very few of the things you do. They’re filled with visual fluff, swooshes, useless placeholders, and other Imagejunk² , and come with few—if any—slides that you can use to visualize qual and quant data without having to spend hours customizing and reformatting them.

2. Then, because they aren’t designed to best practices, meaning, that like a buggy piece of software, they are functionally broken, they do weird, random things when you try to format slides.

3. Then, because of all of that, it’s hard to keep consistent look and feel, leading to your slides looking amateurish and unimpressive to your client.

So instead of focusing on crafting insights and visualizing them in the best way possible, Typical Templates make you or your employees spend late nights and weekends, just to crank out something that may be working against the way your company is perceived. They’re a headwind working against you.

So how can a well-designed PowerPoint template be a tailwind that has a direct return on investment?

When it does these 9 things I’m going to tell you about in a minute, it should:

1. …make the time you spend in PowerPoint way more productive. Deadlines are short. A great template reduces the amount of time Insights Pros have to think about graphic design, and increases the amount of that time they spend on Insights while creating slides.

2. …save you hours by not being unpredictable, broken, buggy, and frustrating to use

3. ...help you produce consistently high quality decks for your clients

4. …and even help you be confident enough to make money by offering templates to your clients as a value-add.

A well-designed PowerPoint template should make creating impactful slides easier and faster, even if you’re not a designer or PowerPoint expert.

I call this the Ultimate Insights Template. It does 9 things that Typical Templates don’t…

…and it can happen with just a few small changes to your team’s deck creation workflow.

Pause. You can steal my exact roadmap on how to make an Ultimate Insights Template, step-by-step, from start to finish. If you want in your inbox, just click below. ⬇️ I Want This

Or, if you would rather partner with Vashte to create your PowerPoint Template for you, rather than learn to create it on your own, you can book a call here to discuss.

9. It minimizes branded graphics to maximize usable space for designing slides.

When it comes to templates for Insights decks, less is more. Way more! 2The fewer swooshes and swirlies and logos and stuff intruding onto the slide, the more impactful your slides will be.

It’s far more effective to create on a branded blank layout than it is to try forcing your insights into a template that has lots of graphics, and stuff.

1. Maintaining whitespace around the margins of your slide helps reduce eye fatigue and makes your content easier to take in and understand.

2. And this is major: Our content is so different from one research project to the next—sometimes we need to show charts, quotes, video, infographics, photos, and all the rest—imagine they’re like puzzle pieces. It’s all well and good if you’re just going to dump those puzzle pieces onto slides and write to some bullet points. You can do that in your typical template, and you’ll get typical results. But if you want to really provide value to our clients, you have to fit those puzzle pieces together into the Big Picture, so our clients can literally see what you’re saying. You have to look at the relationships between those individual puzzle pieces and synthesize a message from that relationship. Now you might say, I do that. That’s a Key Theme. And you’re correct.

But the next step is what’s critical, and just about no one does it.

You have to synthesize a visual framework that logically relates all of those relationships to each other. How do those 3, 4, 5 Key Themes relate to each other visually?

So the way we visualize that is obviously going to be unique from deck to deck, from project to project.

Therefore, content drives slide design. Not a template. Therefore, at Slidedesignr, we design from the content out, not the template in. Meaning, we never allow templates to limit how far we can push those ideas visually.

We’ll talk more about that, and how exactly to create those visual frameworks in an upcoming workshop, but I can tell you now that a few of the most powerful slides in my arsenal are this side tinted slide, and branded blank slide. For real. And I’ll be sharing them as bonuses if you sign up for the Template Workshop using the link below. For now, just remember—when you’re designing a template, less is more. way more.

8. It makes it easy for users to stay consistently on brand.

An Ultimate Insights Template can help reduce the amount of design decisions you have to make while creating slides. Wasting time wondering what color or fonts to use, what styles to use, not only does this result in randomness from deck to deck, it’s time people should be spending on visualizing insights, rather than spending hours checking Google Images for design inspiration.

The correct versions of all the stuff you need to brand slides should be packaged inside the template, not scattered about in random folders on your computer or the shared drive.

Even if your company doesn’t have a brand identity per se, this is still important. Even as a stopgap, come up with some consistent standard that captures the look and feel you want clients to experience.3

Your decks are your hard work and deep thinking made tangible. When you send them out into the world, they represent you (even if you’re using your client’s branding).

7. Its fonts look the same everywhere.

If you create a template with a font that someone then using the template doesn’t have, PowerPoint will substitute the font you chose with a font they do have, causing text to shift and resize. That’s why sometimes a template might look fine on Windows, but look funky on a Mac. Or vice versa.

There’s a lot to this, but, because, for the most part, we’re creating templates for teams with many possible combinations of operating system, versions of PowerPoint, and frankly, willingness to install or manage fonts, a great template uses licensed fonts that are common to both Mac and PC. And there are a lot more of them out there now than just Arial and Calibri. Here’s a great comprehensive list you can download now.

6. It has the layouts you team needs most—and none of the ones you don’t.

This is a big one. Some templates have like 200-300 layouts built in to it. While that might seem comprehensive, what that’s actually doing is just resulting in a file size so large, that people find it difficult to use and share. Most of those layouts will go unused. For the most part, people will choose a simpler layout over a more complex one.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to cover all your bases, it just means to get strategic about it.

Conduct a Slide Audit to see what kinds of slides are really needed.

Here’s how. ⬇️

When I’m making this list of slides, I like to sketch out thumbnails for the slide types and layouts that come up. And as I’m creating those layouts, I can use this cheat sheet to be sure I’ve covered everything, and none of the team’s requests are falling through the cracks.

You can Download the Thumbnail Slide Sketch Sheet here.

➡️ Thumbnail Slide Sketch Sheet

5. It has placeholders, such as footers, slide numbers, and titles show up predictably, without random formatting issues.

An Ultimate Insights Template will never have you fighting with formatting issues, such as adjusting slide numbers, on every slide. Period.

Those formatting issues crop up because there are some quirks baked into the way PowerPoint works. And most people who design templates don’t understand PowerPoint deeply enough to know the best practices that would help them avoid those quirks.

The good news is, you can learn those best practices without becoming a PowerPoint expert if you’re willing to design templates in a methodical, step-by-step way, attention-to-details sorta way, which is something researchers are uniquely good at.

4. It helps make reusing slides from other decks easier, not harder.

And those best practices do something else for you. You know when you try to paste in a slide from another template, and everything goes crazy?

When you copy in a slide from a different template, PowerPoint looks for placeholders to map that slide’s content into. If they aren’t there, or if there’s an extra placeholder, that content may might end up in some random place, turn random colors, you name it. A nightmare that you have to manually fix, slide by slide.

AND, when you paste in a slide from another template, PowerPoint also pastes in that slide’s template. I’ve seen decks with 3, 4, 5 templates inside of it at once, and no one knew which was the right one to use.

An Ultimate Insights Template doesn’t have time for that. For the kinds of work we do, reusing slides from other decks should be as easy and fast as possible.

3. It’s managed so you can tell at a glance that you’re using and sharing the latest version.

You should be able to tell in seconds if you’re using and sharing the latest version, especially if you’re collaborating with others on slides.

People waste hours searching folders for the final final final version of the template.

After creating a template to best practices, only one person or a small team should have access to the .pptx file, which they should use to rollout new global changes to the .potx version of the template for the wider group to use. A .potx file is a PowerPoint template file no one can overwrite.

That .potx should be shared in a folder that’s easily accessible by team members who need it

And once they’re inside, the Slide Master should be clearly named with the brand and version date.

2. It has clear instructions on how it should be used so that anyone on the team can hit the ground running with it.

Did you know that you can put instructions right inside the template, so anyone using it sees them before they design a slide? You can add instructions on how to format text, charts, photos, just about anything.

People who join the team, or are using the template for the first time can hit the ground running without lengthy training, and make fewer mistakes leading to costly revisions.

1. It’s easy to include layouts for qual, quant, Capabilities, Proposals, and everything else you do, all in one template.

Because of the other 8 things an Ultimate Insights Template does, it lets you do this.

In a few short steps, you can reskin all the functionality built into your Ultimate Insights Template with the other kinds of documents you need to create. Your template can truly become a library containing the slides your company presents over and over again, saving you loads of time and potentially thousands of dollars in productivity.

And that’s how an Ultimate Insights Template can legit change your life.

Back over to you.

Pause. You can steal my exact roadmap on how to make an Ultimate Insights Template, step-by-step, from start to finish. If you want in your inbox, just click below. ⬇️ I Want This

And if you would rather partner with Vashte to create your PowerPoint Template for you, rather than learn to create it on your own, you can book a call here to discuss.