"Hello, my name is Kirk Williams. In 2016 I was voted most likely to hug a goat, and 24 out of 476 people I made up think you should send work to me."
This is how we all begin our presentations.
It's what you should do, right? It's what everyone does so obviously it's the right thing to do.
The reason we take the oh-so-precious commodity of time from our already-too-short presentations is so we can get sales. That's the core of it, we want to make sure people know about our brand, company, agency, non-profit, etc so they can hire us and we can all sing happily together.
The bio slide is a sales tool. But what if we stop thinking of our biographies as the sales tool, and instead think of our presentations themselves as the sales tools.
What if we spend so much time working on our presentations, and making them out-of-this-world good (that's not me, BTW, I'm still working on leveling up my presenting skills!), that we don't have to start off our presentations repeating what the session moderator already said about us 30 seconds earlier?
I remember talking with a couple of Digital Marketing conference veterans about this awhile back. They challenged my thinking, and noted that they liked to add their bio into the middle of their presentations after an insightful story to get the hearer interested.I think that's a great idea, and I did that a few times with some success. But now I'm ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I'm done with biography slides in 2018. I have 15-45 minutes (depending on the session), to convince you why I am the PPC professional you should hire because of my knowledge, illustrations, and personality. If I can't sell you in 20 minutes with my entire presentation, I certainly can't do it in 2 minutes with one slide.
We'll see how it goes :)