Drawing pictures rather than reading slides for demo software

Theses days our slides in my own company are getting more and more overcrowded and seem not effective at all .When it comes to software presentation it is possible that bad and long slides presentations are worse than anything else because the audience is frustrated in 2 ways : They are frustrated first by the bad slides themselves and second they think we are wasting a precious time that could be used for the software product presentation INTO THE SYSTEM.

The situation has turned into so a bad point (bad power point) that our CEO Leo Apotheker decided to forbid the use of powerpoint slides for the next upcoming demos and so the software demonstration that some of my sales colleagues will perform tomorrow for SODEXO ( "Making every day a better day" what a nice company slogan !). It is a great idea indeed from Leo to perform a software demo without any slide : it helps us to focus on the most important thing that is our software and moreover it forces us to focus on the main customer's requirements meanwhile our creativity will be raised a thousand times by this constraint ( Creativity always improves when constraint happens, that is the thesis of the book "Creativity from constraints")

For instance we could use the whiteboard for drawing pictures and illustrating ideas and concepts in order to explain how our software will solve the customer's problems : this idea is very well explained and illustrated in the Dan Roam's book "The Back of the Napkin" (and i would recommend too his blog) In this book the author demonstrates (even though we have no artistic talent but all of us are quite good at visual thinking like any human being... ) how simple drawings communicate infinitely better than those complex slides presentations.

Consultant's Corner: The Back of The Napkin
As a matter of fact, this book could be very useful even though Powerpoint environment doesn't totally disappear... Basically it is not a slide problem but a bad bulleted-point slide problem that is going to bore everybody around the business.