I have a love/hate thing with PowerPoint.

The vast majority of it sucks. Every time we’re forced to endure some shmo standing up to read a wall full of bullets, a faerie dies. Microsoft is partly to blame, given how easy they make it to produce crap, but the truth is the real culprits are the craftsmen, not the tool.

I shared a few thoughts on How To Present as one of my first posts on BostInno, which you can check out here. This post is less about that, and more about the important role PowerPoint is playing as we try to get better at marketing Actifio.

PowerPoint is a tool that can help you tell a story to a group. Like all great marketing, a great presentation starts with a clear sense of what your audience thinks, feels or does today; and an equally clear sense of what you want them to think, feel, or do when you’re done. It lets you create a structure for that journey – a logical progression – and a string of visual aids highlighting points in the journey from A to B.

Looked at this way, the app becomes useful not only in telling a story, but in crafting one.

In trying to get the Actifio story right, we’re starting with the PowerPoint. It’s the way our entire sales team tells the story, plus it can be changed quickly, then refined based on real world feedback. You can see the deck we started with here if you’re interested.

The first thing we did was sit in on a few sales presentations to listen for how people use the slides, how we tell the story. It was choppy and variable in places, but to be honest it wasn’t too bad (these guys have doubled sales for 7 quarters, so they must be doing something right.)

We asked a bunch of questions about who the deck was intended for, and which slides were the “money” slides that had the most impact. What became clear was that the people we were presenting too just wanted an easy answer to a simple question: What are you guys? We got around to answering that question eventually, sort of. It wasn’t actually written on a slide anywhere, and everyone gave an answer that was a little different from everyone else. This is a giant red flag.

If every person you’ve empowered to represent your company to the outside world – especially everyone on your executive team – can’t rattle off the same simple answer to a question about what your company does, your marketing is doomed to mediocrity. That has absolutely NOT been the case at Actifio, and it’s something we’re going to start to fix this week.

In the new rev of the deck, we put a simple answer to the question of what we do, in 28-point type on a clear field, on slide 1. Getting closure on this wasn’t easy, but everyone acknowledged the need for it, and with a little charm and a few implied threats of physical violence, we got to this:

Actifio is radically simple copy data management. Recover anything instantly for up to 90% less than you’re paying today.

From there we negotiated the story we wanted to tell… and put it on a single slide which became our last slide:

1. Enterprises are suffering under a copy data explosion
2. The root cause of that explosion is silo’d data backup & recovery apps
3. Actifio instead creates and maintains a single, golden copy of everything in your production environment
4. That lets you recover anything instantly, at a total cost of ownership up to 90% less
5. We’ve been embraced by investors, press, customers, and analysts
6. Let us show you what we can do for you.

After that we threw out any slide that didn’t support that plotline, and spent some time paring back, cutting text, and generally improving the slides that were left. The result is here, and while it’s sure to evolve from this based on feedback from the field, at least headquarters is on the same page about the story we’re trying to tell.

PowerPoint isn’t good, or evil… it just is. The key is to remember that you can’t tap it’s power if you’re fuzzy on your point. So if your deck sucks, start by fixing the story, and then tackle the slides.

That’s where we are. Now on to getting everyone into the boat…