SlideMagic Blog

When you invite people over in your office and you run a pitch presentation on a 10 year old screen with a stretched aspect ratio, pixelated images, and burned in colours you are not leaving a very good impression.

LCD screens are not very expensive today, and the right cables plus a bit of tweaking with screen and laptop settings will give a razor sharp picture. Maybe it is time for a meeting room upgrade.

Other quick wins: removing used coffee cups, empty cookie boxes, de-greasing the screen remote, eliminating chewed-on pens and used stationary, open the windows.

First impressions count.

When you have done your sales pitch hundreds of times, sloppiness can sneak into your meeting preparation.

You forget your business cards, you forget to remove that food stain your small son made on your laptop, you forget to check out the prospect’s web site and LinkedIn profile, you forget that the person in front of you hears your story for the first time and you should deliver it as if you gave it for the first time.

Every meeting requires concentration, even sales pitch number 723.

When you are rehearsing your presentation it is tempting to speak softly, sit down rather than stand, and re-start parts of your talk that did not come out well. The best practice however is to simulate the real thing as much as you can: in one go, standing up, looking at the audience, while speaking at the same volume you would do on the stage.

The first ever guest post on my blog! The contribution below is by Roger Kethcart,  a writer for Cable.tv who “fell in love with public speaking watching courtroom dramas as a boy”.

Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking: Tips from TV

Public speaking is perhaps one of the scariest, most frightening things that one can experience in their lifetime. Sweaty palms, shaking hands, stuttering, queasiness- all unfortunate symptoms that public speaking can have on you.

Whether you are a seasoned public speaker who still gets the occasional jitters, or an amateur seeking a way to stay calm through the storm, taking cues from beloved shows may be just the tranquilizer you need.

Go Slow

One of the reasons people suffer from public speaking is the feeling that they need to speak quickly to get the speech over with. In reality, however, the faster you speak, the more likely you are to mess up, stumble over your words, or skip parts of your speech. By simply slowing down, breathing and relaxing, as best you can, you will greatly enhance your speech. The King’s Speech was a great example of what slowing down can do for one’s public speaking. He’s a clip of the original speech by King George VI, where you can see his pauses when a stutter would have incurred.

Tip: If using note cards for reference, write “BREATHE” and “SLOW DOWN” at places where you find yourself speeding up. The written note will help you relax and focus on what you are saying and your speed.

A post by VC Brad Feld about pitch fatigue: when people have told a story too many times, they get bored and lose the passion to present it with all they have got. Your audience hears the story for the first time though, and they probably evaluate you 50% based on content, and 50% on the emotional delivery of the story (your body language). A bored presenter will not convince. What can you do?

• Do not run off a standard script like a tape recorder, but as you get more experienced with your story, deviate from predictable patterns
• Make the story a dialogue rather than a monologue. Try to make it very specific to the audience. Use case examples, analogies that are tailor-made to that client, or that potential investor.
• Now that you know the story in and out, you can rely less on slides and visuals. Make more eye contact, and tell your story verbally
• Fire yourself up before the pitch, and think about the outcome you want to achieve, getting that investment or signing up that customer. The objective your meeting is not to deliver the pitch, it is to reach your objective. That should bring that spark of adrenaline back into your system
• Make sure you are not physically tired (eat a snack 30 minutes before, have a coffee)
• Do a make over of your deck, after 999 run throughs you have probably some pretty good ideas how to delivery the story better, but you somehow never have time to sit down and implement them. Create the time, and make more minimalist, bolder slides and create a piece of true art that makes you excited to deliver your pitch.

Yesterday evening I attended a dinner in honor of a famous scientist who received a honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv university. The setting was a beautiful coast-side villa of a successful businessmen, the audience: scientists and healthcare technology investors (corporate and venture capital). On the menu: some good food and 6 presentations. Here are some suggestions for scientists who get put “on the menu” for these types of events.

Investors. You have 6 minutes, you have 2 audiences: scientists and investors. This is probably not the right time to get insightful feedback from your science colleagues, however, you might hook the attention from a potential investor in your research you would not have met otherwise. So take the investor as your target audience and shape your content for her. Out with the detailed methodology, the detailed statistics, the history of your research, but in with the need (why is this such a horrible disease and how many people suffer from it), why is what you did so clever (other technologies fail, yours takes a fundamentally different approach), and why the early trial data shows that it works. And oh, if you are raising money for your project, say so.

Only charts when you need them. Six minutes: no bullet points, just pictures you need (statistical data, pictures of team members). Put black slides if you do not need the projector. A huge white screen in a dark garden completely overpowers the presenter.

Simplified statistics. Putting up the full scientifically responsible data chart over dinner is not effective. Laymen do not know how to read it. First explain what benchmark matters (survival rate for example). Then, make an incredibly simple char that compares the 2 benchmarks without the footnotes, n values, p values, standard deviation. All that can be discussed over coffee, not a glass of wine.

Chris Anderson is the curator of TED and has written an article with some excellent suggestion on how to give a presentation of TED-like quality. Some of the points discussed in the article:

• Plan your story: beginning, middle, end
• No jargon, keep things conversational, cut back on the ego, show that you are vulnerable
• People do not relate to descriptions of organisations/institutions
• Do not try to cover too much ground, you need to go into some level of detail to keep things interesting
• Let the audience draw conclusions themselves, not everything has to be spoon-fed
• Really, really, memorize your talk in order to be spontaneous. Sort-of memorising is the worst, you are not your improvising self, but the words do not flow either with frequent memory pauses giving away that you are playing off a script
• When rehearsing, think what feedback you need to take in, and what not. Usually, experienced speakers give the most useful feedback
• Stay relatively stationary on stage, emphasise with arm gestures, keep eye contact with a few people in the audience
• Use slides only if you have to make a point that needs visual backup
• When using video: keep it short, and think twice before including a sound track
• Final advice: be yourself

I am starting to work with the CEO of a very large company to design a presentation for 1-on-1 meetings with institutional investors. I am thinking of a presentation designed for iPad, or even a loose stack of slide print outs that can be randomly selected as the need comes up in the meeting.

The big story of the company can probably be explained verbally in a conversation, these slides that are typically included in a presentation for a big audience can be left out. But then, equity analysts are likely to have detailed questions that require factual backup slides that are denser in design than the ones you would typically use for a large audience investor update.

An interesting project.

Often, I see that the slide deck is just a confidence booster for the presenter of a new story. Having those beautifully designed slides behind you makes sure you will not s**w up. Over time, you become more and more confident in delivering the story, your slides get bolder and more minimalist, until finally, you do not need them anymore.

But, without that slide deck on day 1, you would not have gotten to that level of story telling…

Screens on computers and mobile devices are getting better in 12 month cycles. I design presentations on 2 giant 27" displays that show a lot of detail and reveal the most subtle color shade differences.

Then you put your presentation on a conference room overhead projector that has been sitting there since 2002… The screen resolution is so small that it takes you 5 minutes to find your application windows, and when you finally get to show the slides in presentation mode you will notice that white and light grey is the same color, and that almost black grey is actually bright grey, and that orange means pink.

Test run your designs for the crappy conference room projector.