"There are people who get it, and people who don't"

The other day, one of my clients simply wanted to give up on explaining his concept to the typical 50% of people who "simply did not get it". 

In life there are many situations where you "give up" on certain people. Students who fail the entrance exam of a university, job applicants that did not make the cut, athletes who miss the qualifying threshold for the Olympics, contestants who did not make it to the next round of American Idol.

When presenting your company, you need to put the blame not on the audience, but on your presentation. Your targeted audience should understand your message. And that audience can differ: a presentation to a general audience, journalists, scientific experts can build on different levels of pre-existing knowledge and background.

Often, as a presenter you suffer from the curse of knowledge, you are so deep into your own story that you cannot possibly imagine how someone who is new to the subject cannot get it. Another reason for the disconnect is different types of reasoning/thinking of people. When people frown in disbelief, it might not be because that they did not understand what you are trying to say, they might have a valid different approach to evaluating your pitch that you have not yet covered in your presentation.

When you leave the room, your chosen audience of high school students or elite academics should understand your message. Whether they agree with it, that is a second challenge, but they understood where you are coming from.

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Cover image by Khara Woods on Unsplash

"Story telling" in a business context

The majority of business pitches do not have the entertainment value of a Harry Potter story. It is hard to transform that customer case example where you installed new servers that are 4x faster into a fast-paced, spell-binding campfire story. And no, few people will be interested in the 30 minute mini episode of a "day in the life of" your hypothetical customer in Amsterdam who had a scalability issue.

So what elements of "story telling" can we use in everyday business presentations? Some ideas.

• A sequence or flow that keeps the audience interested to hear the next point. This flow might be completely different from a text book business analysis.
• Some sort of framework, context that keeps the whole thing together. If you use a quantified case example, us the it throughout the presentation to explain different concepts. If you use analogies, keep them comparable.
• Show data points to which the audience can relate to. Per bottle, % of sales, hours saved. Abstract numbers don't talk
• Slow down in details that are interesting, relevant, have the courage to skip over content that is obvious and or repetitive
• Introduce unexpected transitions, "You think this is obvious, right? Well it isn't. Did you know that..."

Business presentations can use elements of story telling without having to open with "let me tell you a story..."

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When the problem is not the story

All my clients want that presentation that uses story telling and captivating images to hook its audience emotionally and gets them to sign an investment check right here, right now.

But sometimes that beautiful story is not the issue. Ideas can be pretty simple to describe, the market size easily understood, what is left is the concern that company can actually make it happen.

Business models, cost structures, go-to-market routes, hiring plans, product releases, all "boring stuff" that pretty much only can be captured in McKinsey-style tables. Ah, that annoying presentation designer who keeps on pointing out inconsistencies between the slides.

These cases also highlight why certain companies can do incredibly well in big audience pitch competitions, but fail to raise money from professional investors scrutinizing the details in small conference rooms.

Is it OK to be "negative"?

People say that in marketing, it is bad to be negative, trashing the competition's product and/or business. I can see how that makes sense in public advertising. Being the angry company who keeps on kicking others will not help build your brand in the long term.

In closed room sales and investor pitches, I think it is a bit different. You don't have much time, and the audience across the table might not know the market very well. Stressing your positives and hoping that they will fill in the comparison to the competition might not be enough.

The tone of a presentation does not have to be negative, the differentiation versus the competition should be made very clear. In most cases, there is a positive way to spin this story. Both models have a reason to exist: your product works great for this segment, the other product will work better in that segment.

Even in the consumer market, people are looking for the head on comparisons, even if they are absent in advertising. Product reviews by trusted sources, and online comments by honest consumers, trolls, and competitors impersonating as a reviewer will inform the buying decisions.

For corporate buyers or investors, this back channel to get the real story does not really exist, and/or they do not have the time to find it, so being a bit more explicit might not be that bad.

Why has this not been done before?

I ask this question often in client briefing meetings. "Your approach seems obvious, why did it take humanity as 2017 to come up with this, why is it so hard to do?" It is a useful question to take the position of the outsider. For the expert/insider the answer is so obvious that it does not even have to be included in the slides. For the outsider, it might be the most important piece of information.

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Favorite metaphors

People have different presentation styles, and their favorite stories. It is very hard to "force" a completely new visual story metaphor on a good presenter who does a great job selling to customers or investors.

For example, when the CEO "forces" her particular visual analogies in the sales decks that should be used the a 10 person sales force, the result is not always good. The slides will be put on the screen, but then the audio track usually deviates with "hmmm, another way to look at this is [FILL IN FAVORITE STORY].

I usually see how flexible people are with coming up with a completely new way to tell a story, especially with someone with strong presentation skills.

One idea at the time

In technology, a new product often involves a complete new approach to a problem that did not exist before. Benefits impact on multiple fronts: it makes things cheaper, faster, or all of a sudden you can combine things, do things differently. The story is far more complicated than "this car now runs at y liters gasoline per 100 km versus x".

The tendency of a company insider is to create a chart that explains everything. It is a bit like 5 people speaking at the same time, each expressing one nuance of the story.

1. Skill level one: write out the entire story in verbal bullet points
2. Skill level two: craft some sort of visual diagram that brings it all together

The diagram works for people who understand the story already, all the elements of the story are now in one concise page. Every element of the diagram is a visual reminder that unlocks a full story in the viewer's head. 

The fresh audience does not have this background. The only way to tell the story is isolate what is really important, and design charts specifically around that. Then, if you have to, you can construct a page that ties it all together, after the audience had a change to grasp the individual components.

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Story vs outline

When people write a presentation outline, they usually write questions: "why there is a market opportunity, why we are best to capture it, why it is great to invest in us".

The questions are mental shortcuts for the expert presenter, the answers is crystal clear in her head. The presentation looks incredibly logic on paper, yes, this is exactly what we should be talking about, answer these questions.

Missing though is the actual bridge between the questions and the answers in the head of the expert. Difficult for the audience to understand, or for the junior analyst to work on.

A better way to make a story line as actually write down in super short sentences the answer to these questions. You will bump into issues like repetition, order of arguments, where to go in detail, where not, where buzzwords pop up etc. etc.

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The stumble chart

I am in the business of designing presentations that I hardly ever need to deliver myself. Now and then I come up with this brilliant visualization/analogy that simply does not stick with the client.

First she asks what it means. I explain. "OK".  In the next call: "remind how that chart works again?". I follow up with a passionate explanation. During rehearsals: "So, here we have an [um] great example", and the energy in the pitch grinds to a halt.

Time to take the chart out.

Sizing IT markets

The Internet is full of IT market forecasts with highly precise predictions of product sales 5 years from now. Will citing a piece of research convince an investor? No. A $1b market forecast in 2021 does mean that the investor should open up the check book and invest in your startup with zero sales.

How to use these market forecasts? Here are some thoughts:

• Always approach market sizing from multiple angles. A top down market research estimate is one source. Trying combining it with a bottom up analysis, look at how the IT budget of one company could change and extrapolate that to the entire market.
• While forecasts by market research companies might be highly speculative, their quantification of today's market is probably reasonably accurate. Established firms have been around for many years, gathered input from many sources, including sanity checks such as adding up the turnover of all the suppliers in an industry. Your company is unlikely to be the size of IBM in 2 years.
• IT as a whole does not grow that fast anymore, single digit % growth every year. What fluctuates are sub segments inside the overall IT spend. When you are sizing your market, think about which IT spend category are you going to cannibalize?
• Market research is a useful source of "boxes" in which a VC can put you. "Where do you sit?" is probably a question you get often. While the numbers might not be 100% correct, market research gives a shared vocabulary about how to think about a market, and whether things are roughly big or small.
• Related to this, while VCs might not believe the point forecasts of market research reports, the junior analyst at the VC firms is likely going to use them as a starting point in due diligence. It is good to be prepared and go through the same process as she will.
• When selecting which market research firm to use as a source, think about not only whether they produce data that exactly matches the category you are in, but also look at the breadth of their overall coverage. A firm that covers a lot of ground will provide a nice broad, consistent definition of the world of IT.

Too many things in your head

When you are deep into your own story, your mind has hard-wired all aspects of it in one complex mesh network. Everything is related to everything, everything is connected. The upside: you are the expert and know what you are doing. The downside: it is extremely hard for you to explain your idea to someone who comes in cold, without the bits of information, and without the connections between them.

After I return to my office after a client briefing, I usually open a blank piece of paper, take a pencil, and jot down the big ideas I heard in the meeting, after I have given the brain to calm down in the 30 minute journey back. No worry about story lines, no worry about structure, no judgement about what is detail and what is a big message, and no going back to my meeting notes. 

These thoughts often become the core building blocks of the presentation. These are the points that I want others to remember when leaving a meeting.

Many people get to this point, they figure out the key messages of a presentation but make the mistake of communicating them in an overly simplistic, or minimalistic way. Just writing "the competition is not flexible" as a big, minimalist statement in a nice designer font is not going to make it stick. Many times, proven/showing these high level messages actually requires going into some depth.

So, a good presentation does not dumb down content. It unravels the wool ball in your head and creates a sequential line of ideas that can ultimately form the basis for a wool ball in the minds of your audience.

"Why should people invest in my company?"

Google is full of free investor presentation advice and presentation layouts. The problem with all of these is that they are generic and not specific to your situation. So blindly filling out a presentation template is unlikely going to give you the best pitch.

Here is another way to craft your pitch. Think of an investor you respect, and even better, an investor whose reasoning you sort of understand resulting from conversations and or blog posts. Now, jot down an imaginary conversation that could have taken place if you find yourself next to her in the check in line for a flight. The most important part of the exercise is to anticipate the likely questions are face expressions you are going to encounter: "Really, what is it about?" "Hmm, that is a sort of [x] for [y] right?" "But are any of your users actually sticking around?" "What do people pay today for this?" "But you have no machine learning expert on your team" "Yes, I know that online video consumes a lot of bandwidth, but what does it have to do with you"

 Now take you notes from this conversation and use it to craft the flow of your investor pitch. Then, go back to the standard investor presentation templates and use them as a check list to see whether you haven't forgotten anything important.

Why is the business school, standard, investor presentation structure not always the right one?

• Investors might already know a lot about a market, a technical vertical segment, so there is no need to do the 101
• Investors might actually know nothing about a particular market, and you will have educate them before getting to the actual pitch
• There are "elephant in the room" questions screaming to be answered first, even if they allow show up on page 25 of your template
• Visual or verbal analogies might require a story sequencing that clashes completely with a standard investor pitch template
• If you have 500 pages and/or 3 hours of material there is no alternative but to structure things orderly. ("Hey, where were we again?")  In 10 to 20 minutes, you have a bit more creative freedom to shuffle things around
• Standard presentation structures might not work in a conversational pitch style, if you start rattling down your Harvard-approved pitch the investor already gets worried: "Huh oh, we are going to get this one for the next 10 minutes" and you are likely to be interrupted with a question that invites a dialogue.

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Art: Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of creation

Over-summarizing

You had that magical slide sequence a few years ago that you used to pitch your product. But as you got more confident with your story, and more importantly, as you got bored with hearing yourself say the same thing over, and over again, you start cutting things down to your current page that collapses the whole thing in just 1 slide with 3 words that can be presented in 5 seconds.

But your audience is likely to still be at the level you were 3 years ago... What would happen if Disney strips the magic out of their stories and just presents you the generic dry plot line?

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What questions do you usually get?

They are an indication of what is missing in your presentation. They come in 2 types:

• Easy ones. You think something is so blatantly obvious that you saved some slides by taking it out. Apparently your audience disagrees. 

• Hard ones. If everyone brings up this question, and you know it is one of the weaker point of your story, you might as well address things, since even if you had a meeting where the question was not asked for a change, it is highly likely that the audience did still have it.

Read your audience carefully. Does the same person ask the same sort of question again after she said that she understood a previous answer you gave? Does the person say she understands, but her eyes tell a different story

Elephants in the room

Client "I don't want to talk about this, because it reminds people of [X] which failed. Let's call that differently because there was that research project 10 years ago that did not work. Hmmm, let's not put that on page 3".

Me "But your technology solves all these problems from the past right?"

Client "Yes"

Me "And in meetings, where do you end up talking about all the time"

Client "People confusing me with technologies from the past"

Sometimes it is just better to take things head on and stop avoiding the big elephant that is sitting in the room but nobody wants to bring up in a conversation.

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Branching out

Most business or scientific concepts come in a lot of flavors and variations. The objectively correct way to explain the concept to someone is to sketch the overall framework of possible permutations, then start filling them out one by one. This is what academic literature does, or a manual with a comprehensive index section.

To a cold audience with no understanding what so ever on the subject, starting with a layout of all the options is either frightening or confusing (probably both). Instead pick one model/option (don't let the audience choose), and take here through the whole thing. Then - and only if necessary - add more variations and options.

In most cases, the audience is not interested in a comprehensive representation of whatever field you are working in, she is pondering whether to buy your product or invest in your company. University-style lectures will not get you there.

One level deeper

In order to design a good presentation, you need to understand things one level deeper than what you are actually going to share in your slides. If you are the inventor of the product, or the university teacher of the subject, that is no issue. When you are a junior executive, management consultant or a professional presentation designer, it is not obvious.

The most obvious issue of knowing your slides but nothing more are questions. They will be difficult to answer. In management consulting firms, knowledge documents are shared internally and used freely across the entire firm. Modified versions of slides end up in all kinds of decks and are often presented outside of their original context. A few questions from the audience can undermine the credibility of the entire deck.

As a presentation designer, going one level deeper allows you to think about the story you want to tell from scratch. Often the expert has left out bits of the story that are obvious to her, but crucial for a cold audience to understand the full picture. Or, the expert goes on and on about facts and details which are not important. If your knowledge is not broader than the 20 minutes of content covered in your deck, you cannot choose what to include or not.

Clients are often surprised that I insist on trying the product demo, understanding the mechanism of action of a new drug, or dig into the financial model line by line. It is also the reason that I think presentation designers cannot charge by the slide, since there is a big fixed cost component to understanding a new story, independent of the slide count of your presentation.

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"They are not interested in this"

Or maybe: "they understood it". When you don't get questions about a certain issue in your presentation does not mean that you should pull that part of the story. It is most likely that the audience understands your point and is ready to move on.

If it works, then there is no reason to spend a lot of time/slides on something. But leaving that part of the story out, creates a deck with only your contentious issues left without the glue that stitches everything together.

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Usually one thing is special

Back in the 1990s at McKinsey, a very senior Director told me that while the Firm does high quality work across the board, in ever project there is usually one insight, one piece of analysis, one original idea, just one, that stands out and makes all the difference. And that one insight is enough to break a deadlock where the client or other consulting firms could not solve the problem.

In sales and investor pitches that is pretty much the same. Yes, smart phone use is growing, yes the team consists of a bunch of very smart people, yes security is a major concern of enterprises. People have seen it before. But that one unusual combination of technologies, or that completely new approach to a problem that is interesting.

Show why it is so tricky to solve. Show the solution. Show why it is so clever.

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