Fast. Easy. Beautiful.
Use these 2 ways of stretching objects in PowerPoint to your advantage. One will make objects closer together, the other maintains the spacing between them. I never paid much attention to this in the first 2 decades of presentation design, but after noticing it, it has proven very useful over the past weeks. Better late than never.
Tech product pitches are different for a enterprise IT purchase officer and an investor.
The purchasing department might be interested in the full list of user benefits, a detailed description of the features, all written in a language that sounds familiar and resembles the one that is used by the billion dollar tech giants, creating a sense of security that they are dealing with a stable product company that knows what it is doing.
The investor is probably too impatient to read through long tech marketing copy highlighting benefits such as productivity, efficiency, scalability, central dashboards. Yes, there is one box to tick whether the company is able to sell to corporate IT departments, but the bigger question is whether this technology fills a big enterprise need that should be very easy to explain. On the back of that, it should be logical to understand why existing players have not/could not have solved this.
Marketing pitch <> Investor pitch.
Image via WikiPedia
See fragments from it here:
Here's how something called "NetFlix"--like Kozmo for Blockbuster!--was pitched to me in 2001, after I apparently ignored a call about it. pic.twitter.com/B3ODp9Zcj1
— Harry McCracken 🇺🇸 (@harrymccracken) October 15, 2017
It is easy to say "haha" now that we are in 2017, and think of all those VCs in 2001 that missed this "great" opportunity. Remember, Netflix actually struggled for a long time, even after their IPO. And back in 2001, there were other companies that could pursue Netflix' business (Blockbuster itself, Amazon). Not an obvious investment decision then.
Leaving the content aside, you can still learn from this email pitch. It is incredibly personal, even informal and it does a good job in explaining the whole business in just a few sentences. A big bold slide deck full of stats about how people are switching from tape to DVD, would not have done a better job.
Image by Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar on Flickr
Financial projections of new business ideas are totally made up / not accurate, so being of by a few million here and there would not matter? We can make quick changes in our financials in the presentation slides, and then "forget" about updating our financials spreadsheet with the new information.
While the absolute numbers of your financial model might be totally pulled out of the hat, it is the thought process of how you got to them that is still valuable for investors. How does your business model work? What would I have to believe in order for your year-5-dream-scenario to come true?
And that model should be consistent across all your documents: presentations, spreadsheets, budgets, everything:
So, even if nobody can predict the future accurately. there is still value to create a consistent financial model the same way as you would for a business in which you know every single detail (next year's budget of an established company for example).
What can you do to incorporate the fact that numbers are highly uncertain?
Slightly more complex models might actually be simpler to understand.
I am on a short break at the moment do not maintain a blog post pipeline to pretend that I am working 365 days a year. I will start posting again soon when I am back at my desk. Sorry...
As a developer of an app, you are deep into its features. How do you stack up versus alternatives, we offer x, we offer y, we offer z. It can sometimes sound offensive when, as a presentation designer, you come back with a very simple visualisation of a competitive differentiation. This is not a simplistic dumbing down of the story, this the way users / buyers make decisions, and investors understand your story.
I had the opportunity to drive a BMW the other day with al all digital instrument display panel. Car manufacturers have something to learn about design. The display tried really hard to look like an analogue one, reflections, depth effects, glow edges, gradients. The whole thing feels very PowerPoint 2007 / Windows 7 / Nokia to me.
Also, a digital display opens up the possibility to re-arrange how the smaller data elements are displayed (kms, fuel tank, etc. etc.), but BMW did not (yet) do that.
Car instrument panels are up for a big shake up. I think the answer is not displays that mimic analog gear, plus eliminating buttons and replace them with touch screens and menu diving. Instead, I would opt for a beautiful, minimal display of essential information, and actually, very high quality, regular "analogue" buttons.
It affects not only the user/driver experience today, but also whether cars will eventually turn into a classic or not. To make the parallel with electronics, old gear from the 1960s / 1970s can still look/work beautiful, while designs from the 1980s and 1990s with low res/poor digital interfaces look cheap and ugly. Digital displays that look advanced today, will be totally obsolete in 5 years from now.
We will see what happens.
A VC fund who is raising money itself asked me the other day to give some example slides of other VC fund decks I have been working on. Showing slides is not possible because of confidentiality, but I could jot down the usual pieces of content after browsing through a dozen recent ones. Here we go in random order:
The list goes on! A good investor presentation does not simple tick the above boxes. Every fund story is different and the art of the presentation designer is to pick the right topics, and sequence them in the right way.
Many designers with excellent skills in web and/or print design somehow cannot deploy their talent very well in PowerPoint/business presentations. I have been thinking hard about why this could be.
The key challenge I think is the tight relationship with content and design. In print/web the design of a page does not really change that much if the content changes (it is still a block of text, an image, and an icon that fit in the same overall grid). In a business presentation, everything goes upside down when your competitor analysis needs to include 3 instead of 2 dimensions.
The second reason is - I think - that both people who write presentations and designers who polish them, stick to the conventional slide format: title across the top, list of bullets.
Now here is an interesting experiment for a 100% graphics designer who is not allowed or does not have the knowledge to touch any of the content (the classical print graphics designer situation). Assuming the presentation is a slideument (meant for reading rather than presenting).
Hand over the material in a word processor, as a long text file rather than a partly finished PowerPoint presentation. Now give the designer total freedom to present this material in any form she wants, even in any software she wants, using any page layout she wants.
Changes are you might get a pretty good lucking slideument by taking "PowerPoint" and its familiar layout out of the equation.
Image via WikiPedia
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.
Business presentations can use elements of story telling without having to open with "let me tell you a story..."
Image via WikiPedia
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.
We are celebrating the Jewish new year here in Tel Aviv, and I just returned form a short bike ride around the city, during which I got an interesting idea that could take SlideMagic into an entirely new direction. Something that was staring me in the face for a few years I think, but I did not spot it. Something that is probably not very hard to do technically, but requires my experience and weird combination of skills to get it right. Sorry to be a bit cryptic here!
There is a 3D cube shape in PowerPoint, here is how you can make it transparent. The secret: rotate a copy of itself and paste them over each other.
Image via WikiPedia
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.
Increasingly, presentation meetings are about discussing a proposal for investment or a product sale, rather than confronting an audience with an idea for the very first time. People have gotten the basic idea in material they saw beforehand.
So, there is a new role for busy slides, meant for pondering on a desktop screen.
A number of things can make slides busy:
The first two are a no-go, even for presentations that are meant for reading. The third option however, can be useful. In many cases, it is virtually impossible to visualize a complex timeline or network in a series of slides with pretty pictures and one word on them.
Some guidelines how to design these useful slides crammed with content:
Image via WikiPedia
I noticed that among successful investors you will find a lot of introverts. People that don't mind working in relatively small companies, like to mull things over, don't get career satisfaction with being the new sales director which can address the entire company at the next sales kick off meeting. Quietly, these investors did some good deals over the years, and as a result managed to raise subsequents funds. (No offense to extravert successful investors, I know many of them as well).
But be sure to take feedback from these type of investors seriously. She might mumble: "the differentiation versus competitor [X] is not clear", followed by silence. This is not feedback about redrawing the competitor slide, this is not feedback about reshuffling the order of the slides in the deck, this is not an invitation to repeat your 3 arguments one more time (this time a lot louder). This might be well-thought through fundamental objection against investing in your company, she understood your arguments perfectly well, she simply does not believe them.
Sweater featured in the picture seems to originate here.
Apple's product announcements are probably business presentations with the largest audiences ever and an example for all of us on slide design and stage delivery. Yesterday was no exception: a well-rehearsed performance and great looking slides in minimalist Apple style.
In about 5% of the slides, Apple slipped into the feature list trap though. Whenever it was time to wrap up the presentation of a product, a slide with a beautiful photo appeared, with a list of bullet points appeared, summarizing the features. Phill Schiller was rushing through the list, mentioning certain bullets, skipping others, repeatedly looking down at the stage monitor to keep on script.
Bullet points can happen to the best of us.
"Oh, I just want to pick your brain", is what clients on a low budget often say. Two things they do not realize: 1) it is hard to add any serious value in 10 minutes, 2) 10 minute conversations never last 10 minutes, especially when in person, 3) taking a creative person out of the workflow for 10 minutes comes at a cost of around 60 minutes.
Here are 4 levels of improvement in a presentation:
Don't expect the output of level 4 with a level 1 investment.
As a professional presentation designer I deal with highly confidential information in almost every presentation I work on. Let's look at NDAs (non disclosure agreements) from different perspectives.
As a founder, inventor, entrepreneur, you have every incentive to get people to sign an NDA before sharing confidential information. You have this fragile idea that anyone could just steal and replicate. Also, NDAs are important when applying for patents. If someone can prove that your idea was "out in the open" without NDA protection, you could lose your claim as its inventor.
Investors see thousands and thousands of deals in a year. Signing an NDA for each single one of them creates some practical problems. You would have to thoroughly check 4 pages of dense legal text for each one of them, you need to keep track of all the agreements over time in order not to forget the thousands of legal obligations you entered into over the course of 20 years. That is the reason most investors won't sign an NDA.
Since investors hold the check book, they are in a pretty strong negotiation position versus the inventor. What to do? In most cases it is possible to explain an idea without signing an NDA. Simply leave the very specific bits out of the pitch. When the due diligence process advances, you might have a chance to get the investor to sign later on, as the probability of making an investment increases.
Even if the investor had bad intentions, it is pretty hard to copy a startup idea after glancing through an investor deck. You need to have the required technical know-how, the team, etc. etc. to make it happen. And even if you have all that, you need to put in the sweat to make it actually happen.
The only investors I would watch out for are those who invested in a complete, direct competitor of your product. Although most investors probably have the ethics to try to keep things separate, it is hard to "unsee" a strategy slide in a deck of a competitor when you are about to make big decisions in the Board meeting of your portfolio company. (There is a broader issue here though, whether this investor is actually a good investor for you in general).
What about designers? Like investors, I tend not to sign NDAs in the early phases of a project discussion. There are so many draft decks coming in, that it is not worth entering a legal agreement just to scope a project. I ask the potential client to send me materials that can be shared without an NDA to make a project quote.
If we end up working with each other, I do sign NDAs (unlike investors), but usually with 2 conditions: they should be capped in time, so that whatever I sign, I know that the obligation will go away at some stage in time and I won't be burdened with legal obligations that I will have forgotten about in 10 years from now. Watch out with the legal language in these contracts. One clause can say that the agreement runs for let's say 3 years, but then another one later on can state that the obligations of the contract last forever (I have seen ones where my children would have been legally bound as well). The second condition is not to include non-competes. They are very hard to define, easy to forget.
Having said that, many of my clients trust me enough that they email me the most sensitive data without any NDA (for example detailed portfolio return data of VC funds). This is usually the case when we have a lot connections in common, and/or, the other party understand that the key asset of an independent designer is reputation, I will go out of business and suffer a major personal blow the second after I spill confidential information, and that might be the best insurance of your confidential data.
There are endless ways to show financial ratios and benchmarks. Each industry has their own specific ones.
Beer brewers think of the manufacturing cost of beer in terms of cost per hecto liter (not liter, not kilo), but when they think about distribution cost, they think per 6 pack case (not liter, not kilo, not bottle). The cost of sending a letter is usually in weight, the cost of sending a package is usually expressed in terms of volume. Retailers think in terms of sales per square meter. Technology startups think often in terms of per user per month.
Find out what the norm is in your industry and adjust your financials.
