The presentation is not always the bottleneck

The presentation needs to "transplant" your idea in the head of your investors or customers. They need to understand what the idea, and then be excited enough about it to buy or invest.

Paying a professional presentation designer to do your slide deck is not a guarantee to succeed. I see many presentations that might not be top notch, but which look professional enough and are clear enough to convey the idea. In those cases I am honest and say that the startup's funds might be better spent elsewhere.

Remember: investors might not like you, investors might not like the idea, investors might not like the market segment, investments might not believe that it will work, there are thousands of potential reasons for "no", and misunderstanding the story and/or the visual quality of the slides is just one of them.

Presenting the conclusions vs the recommendations

Most business presentations present conclusions. You did a ton of analysis, and now you take people through the data and their implications, often using the same slides the team used to get to those conclusions. "Look, here is what we did!"

Now, take it one step further, and tell what needs to happen next and why pretty much in the same way as you would talk to someone informally at the water cooler. What needs to happen, and why. Make slides that support exactly that, and attach the "look, here is what we did!" pack as appendix to that document.

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Generic investor pitch presentation flow

Here is a story flow that I end up using often for investor pitches of my clients:

• Good idea
  • Once, there was a situation
  • Something changes/changed
  • This creates an opportunity/problem
  • It's not easy to solve it
  • Enter [company]
  • It's clever
  • It's different from the competition and alternatives
• Good business
  • Market: lots of (potential) users
  • Market: lots of dollars
  • Profitable: Unit economics work, company economics work (when company reaches scale)
• Good startup business
  • Product/feature pipeline is doable
  • Sales & marketing strategy is doable
• Good company
  • Team knows what they are doing
  • Traction shows that things are gaining momentum
• Good deal (often not covered in a presentation)
  • Board configuration
  • Deal terms

Sounding convincing, versus actually convincing

Some people naturally sound convincing. They have charisma, they find it easy to tell their story, they are confident, they can wing the presentation, they say that they consider themselves good presenters. They sound convincing, but do they convince?

Many of the people who fall in this category are not very good at reading body language. Maybe the buyer or investor on the other side of the table is (slightly) introvert and does not push back that much. Maybe if the same type of question comes back for the third time (after 2x the same sort of answer), the answer was not very clear. Maybe there is a difference between a great meeting with great energy, and a decision to buy/invest.

As a presentation designer, I have built up another type of self confidence: not being ashamed to ask again if something is not clear, even if it is the fifth time. If I don't get it, the presentation I am going to design will also not get there. Investors and buyers won't be as patient as presentation designers

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A personal speech

We recently celebrated my daughter's Bat Mitzvah and here is the process I went through to produce my short speech:

• I did not make too big a deal out of the speech, it is not the State of the Union, I wanted to express my feelings to my daughter, and focus the attention of the entire crowd for a few minutes on her.
• I created a digital notebook accessible from all my devices weeks in advance. Here I jotted down ideas: stories, memories, jokes, anecdotes, as they came along. It is hard to come up with ideas 24 hours before
• About a week before the event, I wrote down a whole version, and put it away
• A few days later during a bike ride a crafted an entire new story in my head, shorter, simpler, and less dry. Immediately after dismounting from the bike I wrote that one down.
• I rehearsed a couple of time and created a short bullet point lay out of my talk that I could print in small font and hold in my hand. Important points are the key element of a paragraph (you can summarize those in 4 words if you have to), and lists ("what was that 3rd character trait again?")
• During the speech i made sure that I was really "into the story" feeling the meaning of the words while saying them (i.e, not pressing play from memory and just recite text without processing what it means).
• Instead of uttering "uhm", I tried to keep the composure and pause to form the next key idea in my mind before speaking it out.
• And yes, I did not use slides!

Backgrounds and introductions

You got 30 minutes with a senior executive to present your case in a highly politically charged issue. Many people bring a very long deck that starts slowly, industry trends, backgrounds, history, until finally at 25 minutes we get to the real issue.

These type of presentations are not TED talks were we take the audience on an inspirational journey. Everyone in the room pretty much knows the background and history (if they did not, they could have read it the night before in your document), probably knows the arguments both sides are making.

Your 30 minutes is best spent showing why the combination of your arguments is the best one. You need to get the point early in your presentation, and have at least one slide that puts all the options, pros and cons on a page. Other slides in the presentation are backups for the points you are making.

Yes, that one slide can be busy, but it should not be unreadable. 

• Keep sentences short, think of every word you are adding to the slide whether it is worth it or not
• Group similar points into one overarching one
• Spend very little slide real estate at no brainers to which both sides agree
• Use colors, and layout to highlight the differences between the options
• Project the slide over a white board if you can, so people can scribble and write on it

Staring at a page and repeat

When you start at a blank or partially complete slide, it is tempting to put that key message in. You don't have the overview of the entire presentation, so the key point will appear - duplicated - on many pages.

The same thing I often see happening on corporate web sites: multiple people make edits on different pages independent from each other.

The slide and the page on its own make sense, the overall story looks garbled and duplicated. 

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Problems, problems, problems, solutions, solutions, solutions

Most product pitches go something like this:

• Existing solutions have this problem
• Existing solutions have this problem
• Existing solutions have this problem
• Existing solutions have this problem
• Existing solutions have this problem
• Our solution does not have this problem
• Our solution does not have this problem
• Our solution does not have this problem
• Our solution does not have this problem
• Our solution does not have this problem

The story gets repeated, which makes the whole things boring. A better option is to elaborate on the problems, but then keep the solution section relatively short. You can even show a grid of small screen shots of all your "problem" slides, with tick marks over each one of them.

One audience

Presentations have one audience. If you have 2 messages for 2 different audiences you need 2 presentations, or one presentation with 2 clearly marked sections. Using presentation A for audience B does not work, and diluting the content (a bit of A, a bit of B) results in nothing.

If you are lucky, you need to do some extra presentation design work. In the worst case, you might have to back to the fundamental positioning of your business, product, project, idea and cut one of the two options.

Full circle

Every pitch starts with an informal, but often very good, story/conversation. Then we start to complicate things with slides, templates, storylines, structures until we get to some slide deck. Then, it is often useful to step back to the very fundamental investor questions:

1. What is it they are trying to do? (Often not clear in a presentation)
2. Will anyone want to use it? (Rational logic, emotional gut feel)
3. Can you make money from it? (There are many good ideas that do not deliver a profit)
4. Can this team pull it of? (Probably most important question)
5. (Can I construct a good deal given valuation, cap tables, Board seats, etc.)

No patience for backgrounds and market trends

Some of my client work is for managers of business units in a large organisation who need to convince the corporate centre to make a politically charged decision. Some mistakes I encounter in the briefing document:

• Most decks start with backgrounds, market trends, history of the unit, all information that is not directly related to the issue on the table. Only in the back (or on the last page), buried in a bullet point comes the central point of the meeting.
• The overall pro/con arguments are not well laid out, you need to distill them from the pages, or sometimes it requires verbal explanation
• Critical arguments that could be backed up by facts are not.

In these type of meetings with a busy senior executive I like to get to the point early. Lay out the options, and summarise why you think your preferred one is the best. Then dive with charts to support the points, where ever you can backed up by facts.

Description versus story

They are different

• A description is an exhaustive, dry representation of a concept. It is what education uses. It is better to add too much information, rather than being incomplete. Description have a standard format, structure (inside, outside, etc.). Descriptions are wordy translations of what can be transferred using an image in one second.
• Stories get to the point. Anticipate the audience's obvious questions, take into account the audience context, build on what the audience already knows, use surprise and tensions, and a flexible structure that is not always the logical, standard one.

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The tricky point

The bar is rising in presentation design. More and more people know how to design decent slide, more and more people know how to explain a business concept visually.

The challenge that remains is often a very specific point. In most cases, this is the answer to an "elephant in the room" question, a very specific answer to a question an ignorant but intelligent layman might have.

Most people burry these super important points inside a "standard" slide. "Oh, that is the point I make verbally when we present the competition slide."

I tend to make these points more in your face. Dedicate a specific slide to it. Even sometimes putting things straight in the headline ("No, we are not another Google").

These slides can be hard to design. The best approach is to listen really carefully when you explain it verbally to someone. "There are 3 groups of products, 1, 2, and 3, but none of them address y". "Gasoline engines can do x, but with electrical power we can do this.". "Up until now you could not see at nanometer level, but now it is possible". Look at the sentences and see what they do. Divide things in groups (boxes), contrasts between two options, "From to". Your language gives clues about what visual concepts to use. They don't have to be sophisticated, they just should be clear. 

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Overcompensating

Each pitch has a weak spot to overcome. How to deal with it in your presentation?

• You can ignore it, sweep it under the carpet. You will have had a very pleasant meeting, but you are unlikely to land the deal
• You can mention it, and support a very shallow case why it is not an issue. (Vague analyst quote)
• Overcompensating, give 15 different possible analysis that triangulate to the most likely market size number. This just might scare your audience. If 50% of you time/charts are about this issue, this must really be a big deal.

Better: admit the issue is there (you scored some realism points in the process). Give an honest defence, but don't burry the audience in analysis (yet). Wait with that for the 2nd meeting which might have that issue as its sole agenda point.

Make it personal

It can be hard to figure what to talk about when you are invited to speak at a professional event as an entrepreneur, an investor, a designer, a CEO.

One option is to prepare a business school-grade lecture about your profession. Organised, structured, all the key points laid out, with informative slides that will be photographed by hungry aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, designers, and CEOs. But in the world of Google and Amazon, there are probably hundreds of "how to's" for these professions available at the click of a mouse.

The other option is to make it more personal:

• Case examples
• Anecdotes
• Stories

Yes, you might not hit all the points of investing 101, but the audience will learn something they cannot learn anywhere else, will remember more, and have a better time.

Cutting the obvious out (or not)?

Doctors know what causes a certain disease. Investors know that hardware margins are small. Social media experts are aware of the huge install base of Pokemon Go. Cable operators know that an onsite visit to a customer costs a fortune. Even this presentation designer has argued many times not to preach to the converted, it is better to spend time and slides on issues that are less clear cut or controversial.

I still believe this is true, but I would not go as far as completely eliminating the obvious point from your presentation. This will break the flow of your story. Also you miss out on the opportunity of using the same visual concept for both presenting the (obvious) problem and your (not so obvious) solution.

A place holder slide with a simple image or statistic is enough to remind the audience of the obvious in 20 seconds. 

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Against all the other options

During a TED talk, most presenters have the luxury of bringing a totally new, surprising, inspiring story to an audience who cannot wait to hear it.

When you pitch a business initiative it is unlikely that it will come as a total shock or surprise to the audience, Investors have seen similar ideas before, potential customers have heard your competitor sales pitches, senior management heard you talk about this plan in last quarter's strategic planning presentation, market sizes look roughly the same as in yesterday's pitch, payback time is again around 6 months.

Why is your idea different than all the other ones out there?

The country update

I get many clients who are some kind of local distributor or agent in a country and are asked to present an update on their business to the global headquarters of the company. Most of these clients have some sort of standard presentation that they use in the local market:

• First up: the history of the company
• Then missions statements, organisation charts
• Then examples of advertising and campaigns for the product

But think about the corporate headquarters, they are likely to see 150+ country presentations that look more or less the same. They hear 150+ company histories that are similar. They have seen many ads for their product. They probably have a computer system in which they can call p the sales results by country and compare them against last and year, and, more importantly, against other countries.

Here is another approach:

• Keep the obvious stuff very short, here are our brands, here are the results.
• Think in what way your country might be different than other markets (population concentration, market preference, local competitors) and discuss how you solved these specific challenges.
• Use lots of photos that give a good visual impression of how your product is positioned in the local market.

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Cold emails

Now that I am a CEO of an Internet startup (www.slidemagic.com) my email address is slowly spreading in the databases of app developers, PR people, recruiters, marketing consultants, SEO firms etc. Although not in the same quantities, I start getting the type of pitch emails that venture capitalists, journalists, bloggers must be getting.

Most of these emails actually get through spam and other gmail filters. In some way or another, the recipient will look at them. Especially now that mobile devices enable you to kill dead time with gracing through your email field.

The majority of these emails get totally ignored. First of all because of basic hygiene that has been discussed in thousands of blog posts before: generic subject line, generic "hello there" greetings, spelling mistakes in names, etc.

But there is a bigger thing that turns me of: the way they are written.

• Too generic. The sender has not bothered to check out what my app does, what stage my company is in, what sort of services I might need. Instead, it could have been highly personal and relevant (what features my app lacks, which LinkedIn contacts we have in common, etc.)
• Too complete. The email tries to do a full pitch of the company and its services. As a results things sound bland. You will never land a contract with a cold email. Better is to write something very short, but intriguing. Something that does not cover everything you want to offer me, but makes me hit reply to find out more.
• Specific links to specific information are missing. A portfolio to look at, apps that you designed, not just the root of your web site.

A pitch to me good be. Hey Jan, we had a look at your app SlideMagic.com and you have set yourself quite a challenge by taking on PowerPoint. Your app requires a lot of client-side Java script, and that is our specialty. Have a look at [app], [app], and [app], examples of client work we did. We have a few ideas on how to improve your app, do you want to discuss?

When pitching investors you can do something similar. Hello VC. I read your blog post of last week in which you expressed interest in drones. We are the first company that has a solution for that issue. We can explain later in more detail, but the crux of the idea is that we combine [z] and [u] to do [d]. As you know, nobody has made that happen. Do you want to find out more?

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Art: Hendrick Avercamp, on the ice, 1610

10 slides in, and we have not made the big point yet

Impatient audiences of senior management or investors often complain (rightfully so) that they have been listening for 10 minutes, 10 slides, and still the main point of the presentation has not been made. 

The common reaction to this feedback:

• Shuffle slides around, and drop slides from the back of the presentation all the way upfront. The result: a broken story flow. The sequence of slides in the front does not make sense anymore, and the left over slides in the back don't connect together.
• Cram a lot of content on the first 3 slides and call them "summary". The result: your audience never gets to see you beautiful, highly visual slides in the back, as you are fighting your way through the bullet points in the front.

What causes the delay?

• Think about why it takes you so long to get to the point. Does the audience needs all that background? The company mission? The company history?
• Think about what the audience means when they say "getting to the point"? Do they really want the full detail of your solution on the first page, or would simply telling your audience what you are about quickly be enough to calm them down and stop them from guessing?
• Think about whether your existing summary is stuck in the middle: too long to serve as a real teaser for what is about to come, and too short to give the full detail of the pitch.
• Are you taking too much time to present your slides? Uuuh, uuums. Side tangents. Details, exceptions, apologies for rounding errors, footnotes.
• Are you going off script: you put up a slide, but take the story in a different direction ("let me give you some context first")
• Do you spend too much time on the obvious: explanation of buzzwords ("let me explain what the sharing economy is", "look at this data about the stellar growth of mobile phone penetration").
• Are you reading out all the elements of a slide one by one, but because someone else designed the slide for you, they don't really fit the way you want to tell the story. So after you are done reading, you tell the message the way you wanted it, effectively presenting each slide twice.

Keep your summary super short, it is more a teaser of what is about to come. Then tell the story at a pace you would use when explaining your idea to a friend, without slides at all. 

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