SlideMagic Blog

Back in the 1990s, compact disks would show a so called SPARS code. A series of 3 letters that could either be “D” for digital, or “A” for analogue. “DDD” indicates digital recording, digital mixing, and digital mastering.

My late mother in law had a huge classical music CD collection and I would browse it to find a CD to play, when given a choice “DDD” would be my preference since it was clearly a recording of the highest quality.

My mother in law would answer that this was actually totally irrelevant. What matters is the conductor and/or solo artist that delivered the performance. A poor quality AAA recording from the 1950s might have been the best rendering of a particular piece of music ever.

There is an interesting parallel here with presentations: the actual performance and the supporting slides.

Image By Attosaur - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, source.

A live demo of your product is risky in a short standup presentation. Lots of stuff can go wrong (internet connections, etc.) and you might end up spending valuable time on banal things like logging in and out. For short pitches, I would suggest to use screenshots, with the exact messages you want to convey. Point at your lap top with a running demo as evidence that there is indeed a product.

A proper demo of a product can be done in a follow up call. People have understood the basic idea, are interested, and now is the time to dive into the product. And strangely enough, in the era of Zoom product demos are a bit easier since everyone sits very close to a monitor.

Like presentations, it is not recommended to “wing” a product demo. You might end up forgetting to show critical features, hitting bugs, and presenting a rambling user flow. You want to impersonate consistent demo accounts that perform a sequence of actions in a logical way, instead of clicking around randomly to show features.

In smaller, informal settings, pulling out your laptop to run through your slide deck can zap the energy of a meeting. For these meetings without slides, it does not mean that this is a meeting with a presentation. In the absence of slides, it can be hard to stay focussed on the story line. You might get lost in tangents, you might miss the important punch line as the waiter asks if you need sugar or milk.

The way you “present” in a slide-less meeting is different from when you are in front of a big audience. But still, you need to rehearse that story, maybe even more.

If the time window if your presentation gets cut you have 2 choices: fewer words, or more words per second. Pick fewer words.

When speaking at a conference and you get offered two possible speaking slots: early in the day and very short, and later in the day and a lot longer. Which one to take? Easy, the early/short one.

• Attendance at conferences drops during the day, your audience is a lot bigger in the morning
• When people see you speak (early) they are more likely to approach you later, (feedback about) your presentation is an ice breaker
• In conferences, a really short speech is likely better than a long one. You are not here to close the deal, just to start more conversations. Your short speaker slot is a blessing.

Lawyers love to negotiate (and bill hours) by changing words and lines in linear text. This works perfectly for deals that are standard and very well understood. The price of a product, the distribution commission, the number of shares.

When the business or the business model is a bit unusual, things go wrong. The 2 parties, and their lawyers (that’s 4 entities) can easily get confused. People think they understand, but they do not.

The solution: negotiate based on a sketch or a slide layout and use an imaginative case example with some made up, but realistic numbers. It is easy to refer to the year 3 sales redistribution commission as “those $42k”. Everyone knows what you are talking about.

After all this, the deal can be put in writing.

It can take months to get the results of your strategy project, or your business plan. And along with it, your pitch deck has evolved as well. You take it out for every meeting.

A refreshing approach: rewrite the pitch deck (not the business plan of course) from scratch for your next meeting. My guess is that it should only take you 3 hours, since you did all the work over the previous months. A fresh story line, and only charts to support your messages, rather than provide backup data. No risk, if it didn’t work you will always have your old one, but my predication is that that one will start to collect dust.

The protests against the attempt to weaken the Israeli democracy are continuing. Every weekend there is a 100,000+ demonstration in central Tel Aviv (14 weeks and counting). As a result, I have heard my fair share of speeches made by politicians and activists.

The bar for a good speech gets higher. A politician who tries a very long sequence of cliche sound bites (we will win, it unfair, we won’t let them), is unlikely to excite the audience anymore. What can work?

• Crowd managment, some people have the charisma, voice, and ability to time sentences to sweep up a crowd.
• Personal stories. Some speakers, even with weaker voices and/or a smaller stage presence, manage to connect to 100,000 people who listen quietly
• Original plots. Coming at things from a different angle, drawing possible future scenarios, rather than cliche sound bites / one liners
• Keeping it short. Most speakers fall in the trap of repeating themselves, and taking too much time. Shorter, even very short, speeches are way more memorable.

On many famous music recordings, an artist’s first take often made it on the final record:

• A stress-free, we will just try something, approach
• Some happy mistakes that turned out great
• A clear mind, free of tangents

In presentations, something similar often happens. After weeks of work, you sit down and say “OK, this is what it actually boils down to”, and out comes the perfect story.

This only works after, you invested in the hard work and really understand what you are talking about. It is a first take of telling your story, not a first take of doing the project.

Israel is going through a major political crisis now that has little to do with the traditional conflict here that usually makes headlines around the world. As a result, I have been attending a number of large rallies pretty much for the first time in my life, to try to prevent the current government from making the Supreme Court and legal system subordinate to the parliament with a simple 51% majority vote, effectively ending the separation of power that is crucial for a democracy to function properly.

Some lessons here when it comes to public speaking at these events with 100,000 attending:

• Your script is basically a list of sound bites, paragraphs of tension / release. Build up tension one way with a problem, then provide release with a punch line. There is very little room for sophisticated story lines.
• Don’t be afraid to put really, really long pauses in between, to get the crowd to calm down.
• Make sure your punch line is short and does not get washed out by the noise of the crowd.
• Balance your voice volume. If you are at the top of your voice all the time, you can no longer add extra drama to the punch line. (Yes, some people have a microphone voice with lots of lower frequencies, giving them an unfair advantage).
• Use the crowd creatively. “Raise your hand if you…” “Turn on the flashlight of your mobile phone if you…”

Most of the people in these rallies follow the speaker on giant screens. In between speakers, video clips are shown with a mix of regular footage and “slides”, usually big text messages that come in and out with animations.