The real market is for sales presentations

I have been designing an enormous amount of startup venture capital pitches over the years. The stakes are high, the story is often not clear, the founders are open to new forms of communication and so they are willing to invest in a good pitch deck. I enjoy these projects immensely, there is nothing more fun than taking an idea from 0 to a beautiful visualization.

It is a relatively small presentation design market though. The big change will be in the 1,000s of boring sales presentations that are used every day. Corporates burn millions of dollars on advertising, billboards, fluffy white papers, and conference booths, while sending the salesforce on the road with a low budget PowerPoint deck that is embarrassing to use. It is time to re-allocate some of that marketing budget and stop killing these great stories with bullet points.

Get your hands dirty

The other day I was doing the first sales presentation design interview with a startup that soon will start selling storage systems for large data centers that will eclipse the performance of the big names in the industry. Two presentation options

1. Flaky chart: 2 columns, our performance, their performance.
2. Substance chart: a series of charts that explains how a totally new type of storage architecture can deliver these performance figures

The first approach does not stick, the second one does, even in the absence of a large number of customer examples.

The check list goes in last

How do you make up your mind? Think of this, consider that, go back, look at this. A slightly random process in which you jump from one aspect to the other. Once we are done with this process, we go through a more orderly check list to see we've covered everything.

Here are the implications for many of my presentations:

• Upfront, tease the audience something great is coming, but do not try to summarize or explain the whole pitch in a structured (=boring) way
• Tell the story using the structure a movie director would take, not the author of a business school text book
• Come back with an organized summary, the check list, to show the audience that we have covered all.

Microsoft Office 2011 Service Pack 1 (version 14.1)

Microsoft posted its first Office 2011 for Mac update yesterday, and as I can see now, it took care of the instability issues in PowerPoint 2011 that I have been complaining about (fingers crossed). Still, there is a long feature wish list for SP2 to bring it at par with the Windows version, of which custom font embedding sits at #1. See my earlier review of PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

My NYU presentations on SlideShare

Last week, I spoke at a SalesSchool event at NYU in New York. Here are the slides I used during the 2 evenings. Both presentations start off the same, but then diverge as they focus on VC pitches and sales meetings. SalesCrunch will post video fragments of the evenings later on their site.

SalesSchool - designing powerful VC pitches

View more presentations from Idea Transplant

SalesSchool - designing sales presentations that sell

View more presentations from Idea Transplant

At the end of the presentation, I touch briefly on the challenges of presenting without eye contact. For more suggestions about presenting remotely and in webinars, see this post by Olivia Mitchell.

Reduce the leading of large font sizes

Leading is the horizontal spacing between lines of text. For regular font sizes, PowerPoint adjusts the leading fine. When you start getting to huge font sizes though, things tend to go wrong, the distance between lines of text is too large.

To reduce the leading in PowerPoint, select the text, right-click, select paragraph, set spacing inside the spacing group to exactly, and lower the number that pops up.

Reading decks on the go

This guest post by Jakob Jochmann on Jon Thomas' blog triggered this observation: more and more, I start to email out intermediate versions of my presentations in PDF format because people can read them on mobile devices. This format is good enough for high-level comments on early drafts. The final round of edits needs a bigger screen.

What happened in Fukuchima in PowerPoint

This presentation is a good example of building up a complex systems diagram in multiple stages. Keep 99% of the diagram the same, and provide a text explanation of the 1% that changed.



Via Elan Dekel.

Back from New York

No major insights regarding presentation design today as I am getting myself organized after returning from a fantastic week in New York. I really enjoyed the 2 speaking events at NYU, and want to thank Sean Black from SalesCrunch for inviting me. Sean will publish the content of the 2 evenings in chunks on his site.

I also would like to thank venture capitalist Mark Suster (author of Both Sides of the Table and one of the "3 musketeers" of VC bloggers together with Fred Wilson and Brad Feld) for spontaneously agreeing to introduce the first event (on VC pitching) in person.

I enjoyed my week tremendously, met great people, and am really impressed by the buzzing startup scene around Union Square in New York. If you were in the audience and would like to connect and/or have additional questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

No red in financial data

Red is a great accent color to make text stand out from other elements on the slide. Do not use it for financial data though, people are associating red with negative performance and losses.

A new ergonomic chair

One of the easiest ways to become better at presentation design is to have a calm and relaxing work environment and an ergonomic chair and computer setup. I have not found the idea chair solution yet. Simple kneeling chairs put too much pressure on your knees after long use, complicated ergonomic chairs are so huge that they seem to come straight out of  a science fiction movie. Maybe this simple elegant solution, the Tip Ton by Vitra might be a good solution to put next to my regular office chair (nice commercial by the way), it will be launched later this month.

"Clients don't understand their success is reliant on standing out, not fitting in"

I came across this quote by the fictional character Don Draper (Mad Men) on the Advertising is good for you blog. It does apply to some of my presentation design projects, especially when there is some resistance to let go of the common bullet point approach.

Image via Wikipedia

How to present your team to investors

The founding team is a one of the most important inputs in a venture capitalist's mind when she decides to invest in your startup or not. For a large part, an investor will size you up during the pitch by judging how you present and how you answer questions, information that is not written down anywhere on a slide.

Still, the team slide is a crucial part of any VC presentation. It is difficult to put CV information in a slide. There is lots of information, and CV entries require lots of text (long university, company, and position names). So I usually end up designing 2 versions: one to go in the front and one with full details to go in the appendix (the latter is meant for reading, not presenting).

You should adopt the design of your high level team slide, depending on what you want to say:

• We have many of years of experience, a very long time line
• We have worked together before, multiple time lines circling the overlap in your careers
• We worked for big name companies: company logos
• We have complementary skills, some sort of (slightly cliche) puzzle that shows what skill set the individual team members bring to the table.

And if you can:

• Put in high-quality head shots of the team members
• Or even better: an energetic group picture.

Spring cleaning: de-personalizing your laptop

If you use your laptop to present slides in presentations, it is time to let go of all that personal screen real estate such as cute family pictures. Screen savers kicking in with images of you in the pool with your 2 year old son, instant message popups, wallpapers showing off your new motor bike are all very interesting to you, but not to your audience. Spring cleaning time.

A few tickets left for my NY seminars next week

I am very happy with the signup rate for my NY seminars next week. There are still a few seats left, you can sign up here using the "ideatransplant" promotion code. I am preparing for my flight and hope to get to see some of my New York readers in person next week.

Memory and stories

Joshua Foer, the author of Moonwalking with Einstein (affiliate link), shows an interesting technique to memorize a string of unrelated object: imagine them one by one positioned on a familiar path. Boiled egg on the driveway, duck at the front door, 17" MacBook pro at the bottom of the stairs, etc.

Speaking of ducks, the Hebrew word for duck is ברווז, or barvaz. Imagine that duck sitting in a cafe, having a coffee, while in the distance you can see that huge red vase sitting on top of the bar. Barvas.

It shows that our spatial memory is much stronger than our ability to remember a list of bullet points. It might have something to do with our ancestors whose key to survival was to remember the location of that apple tree, and even more importantly, the way back home.

Stories are a great framework to store and memorize facts and ideas. It comes naturally. This might also be an explanation of why you can remember an entire 2 hour discussion by just looking at a messy, incomprehensible white board full of scribbles.

Send me an executive summary

When an investor is running out of time, conversations often end with "why don't you email me an executive summary".

Upon hearing that, startups wil scramble to produce the well-known executive summary format, compressing the entire pitch deck in just a few paragraphs:

• Has to fit 2 pages, so no space for visuals, use a small font or narrow margins if required
• Stuff the text with buzzwords and big numbers
• Include all the features of your product
• Spend a lot of paragraphs on CV details of the founding team

Think of this from the investor perspective: this document is boring and so dense that it would take the same amount of time to read it start to finish than to page-down through a slide deck. Here is an alternative: "I am sending you a 5 minute pitch"

• A short and visual document, but it could be longer than 2 pages
• Explaining the investment opportunity in human language
• Focus more on the problem, less on financial,  product details, and team details (that can come later)
• The objective is not to get the investment (yet), but to get invited to the next stage in the investment process, possibly a full pitch meeting

My new Macbook Pro setup

So I replaced my computing infrastructure over the past week. Things are moving fast in the world of IT.

• Laptop. A few years ago having decent graphical power still restricted you to using desktops. No longer. I have gone mobile. (Maybe motion graphics will make me regret it later). No I can use those little downtimes in between meetings to do actual useful work, rather than catching up on email or Twitter.
• 17", I compared screen sizes and concluded that as a visual designer there is no avoiding the extra weight and size to get a decent size screen
• Apple. Strangely enough it is actually the physical interfaces that convinced me. A nice machine to touch, nice keyboard, nice track pad. Something you spend the majority of your day on. Interestingly, a hardware decision, not a software one.
• Cloud. It was surprisingly simple to move to a new environment when all your critical data resides in the cloud: email on gmail, files in dropbox (affiliate link), clients and invoices in Freshbooks (affiliate link), contacts in Batchbook. Everything is in sync on my new machine, and the legacy infrastructure that I continue to use as backup. 1Password synced via Dropbox to keep track of all the accounts
• Virtual Windows/OSX blur. None of my clients use Keynote, and PowerPoint on Mac is simply not good enough (see a comparison between PowerPoint 2010 for Windows and PowerPoint 2011 for Mac). So in comes Windows, but I totally do not notice it. I use Parallels to create a virtual machine, and my Windows applications run in a Window as if I am working on a Mac. All data is shared and file management happens via OSX. It requires beefing up the hardware though. I put in 8GB of memory, of which I allocate 5GB to the Windows machine. The big customer segment for Parallels is actually hardcore gamers who want to port their favorite graphics-intensive games to the Mac. As a result, performance of a Windows virtual machine is actually very good. There is only a slight delay when you switch over.
• Adobe alternatives. Adobe software is incredibly complicated and bloated. I need basic photo editing capabilities to resize images for the web and take out backgrounds out of images. Pixelmator is a beautiful Mac app that can do all these things (and much more) in a beautiful user interface. The same with Illustrator, I need it to edit stock vector diagrams nothing more. I could not find an alternative for Mac yet and as a result kept my old Windows CS3 installed (I see no need to upgrade). It is interesting to see that I started to look at user interfaces to decide my software, not so much the features anymore (same story as in hardware).
• Legacy software. Some of my clients (mostly the large ones) are still running PowerPoint 2003. Hence I actually installed it in parallel to my production software PowerPoint 2010. (It took some time to dig up those old CDs).

Financial forecasting in VC presentations

The financial forecast in a VC pitch presentation combines two different pieces of financial information in one chart. Still, you can treat them differently.

1. The short term burn rate. This is information should highly precise and accurate. An investor is 100% sure she will "lose" this money. If you cannot be accurate, you probably do not have a clue what investment is required to build the company
   
2. The long-term dream. There is no point specifying that you will have $50,342,784.12m sales in year 5. You just don't know and claiming that you do will lose you realism points. Explain to an investor why you think it will be ~$50m 

Reuters issues a 1-page online annual report

Slowly, large publicly traded companies are starting to experiment with Internet and social media as alternatives to the dry and boring annual report. Reuters just issued a 1-page version (see it here), with a promise that over the next few days, this will be followed up with more detailed blog posts about the company and its financial results.

Early online annual reports were a pain. They basically were print documents put online and you had to keep on clicking on "next" links to get to the following page. Rendering of tables and data in basic HTML also did not provide good results. Combine that with slow page loads and you get a pretty useless experience.

New display protocols (and certainly HTML5) will give PowerPoint-like fast navigation controls to online documents. I think a hybrid of a traditional slide presentation, advanced (and fast) web navigation, video and other multi-media, plus social aspects will give a powerful distribution platform for financial data. You get the best of both worlds: PowerPoint-style visualization of data and key strategic messes, and nicely-formated text for those who want more details. Certainly for public investor presentations such as this one, but also for confidential documents. You can distribute login details to (potential) investors you want to share your data with and exclude them from the online data room as soon as the deal process has stopped.

There are also great opportunities in sales. I rarely use a PowerPoint presentation anymore to introduce my own services for example. Rather, I just take people through a few sections of my web site, either in person or via a remote presentation tool. SalesCrunch, the company that is organizing my upcoming New York presentations, is trying to create a platform for these remote sales presentations.

Back to the Reuters annual report. I learned something from the way the graphics of the financials are done. I like the dividend history chart, a bit unusual, but it shows both the trend and the detail of the numbers. The big column charts might not be the right format though. Large stable companies do not grow that fast and the columns show hardly any change. Also, the big difference in absolute size between the revenue and profit column does not look optimal. It would have been better to put the $ values as text, but rather make a graph of the % increase.

I am looking forward to the additional blog posts that will come out over the next week.

Thank you Dominic Jones for leading me to this report.