Bob London says slides distract from listening in customer discovery conversations, pulling focus away from what customers actually need. Build them after you've listened, not before. They should support insights you've already gathered, not replace genuine conversation.
Chapters
Really, everyone hates slides. I mean, truthfully, no one likes creating slides and preparing them and editing them and coming up with statistics. And certainly on the receiving end, people don't love sitting through, being dragged through slide presentations. And so what I realized was that slides have kind of become like a third entity in the room. Like, hi, I'm Bob. Thank you, customer, for meeting with me. I'd like to introduce Pete the PowerPoint. You know, he's just going to be there and he's going to change his face every few seconds and look at him, but listen to me at the same time. It gets in the way of an authentic conversation. It's a little bit of a distraction. Distraction. It's a little bit of a barrier for this type of customer discovery conversation. I'm not saying slides should never be used. I'm not saying they're never important. They can be an effective way to communicate, but they should never be a crutch and they should never become a barrier or this third entity in the conversation that is just serving to really distract. I can't have a conversation with someone to understand them while I'm showing them a slide. You know, I'll never learn anything while my lips are moving. I have to be quiet. I have to be focused on what they're saying. And if I'm presenting a slide, that'll never happen. So any slides we do have, once we've done an effective job of listening to understand the customer and we incorporate those learnings into the next slide presentation that we have to do, that's when slides become valuable, is when they're relevant.
