SlideMagic Blog

Recently someone asked me: “How much time do you need for your presentation, 30 minutes, 45 minutes?”. While I can fill 2 hours with just talking about presentation design I chose to go for the 30 minutes. It focuses you to be to the point and interesting.

TEDTalks can discuss very complex subject matters in just 20 minutes. I have designed 6 minute presentations for startups participating in pitch competitions that managed to convey the entire company’s story. Often I find that a time constraint results in a better presentation.

Gary Vaynerchuk spoke live at an event organized by the Tel Aviv office of advertising agency McCann Erickson last night, and it was the first time that I got to see him on stage in person.

Gary became an Internet celebrity after he started using wine reviews in video format to transform his family liquor business from a mom and pop store to a major force in the US market. Since then, he he broadened his activities. He is a well-known author of books, runs a marketing consulting firm, and is a sought after speaker.

The one thing that got him were he is, is for sure his passion and energy that shines through in his presentation style. One of his opening statements was that every single brand that has been successful over the past 150 years has been one that managed to tell its story well.

Gary delivers a great performance in a unique style while breaking many of the rules of presentation delivery. And maybe that is what makes it interesting. He can pace back and forth, looking at the floor while speaking. His story line is an improvised sequence of stories. But these stories are memorable and delivered well.

Gary is good at building up tension in a talk. He is hinting at a crucial question he will ask you, or that he is about to reveal a major insight (what do I think that the Old Spice guy campaign was a failure), but he waits and waits with giving the answer.

Online presentation sharing services such as SlideShare allow you to upload an audio track alongside your slides. You need to make sure that the narrative is exactly in sync with the visuals.

I have seen (heard) examples where the audio presenter starts talking about data or concepts that are not present on the visual in front of you. As a result, the brain starts to wander off, looking for missing pieces of information on the slide.

When talking to a live audience in person, you can draw the attention from the visual back to you. An exact sync is less important, and it is easy to fit in a slide story. During a short web presentation with audio, your audience is using the narrative as an explanation of the slides. Make sure they are lined up.

Sometimes, when you are short in time, that might actually mean inserting a slide with some quick (very short) bullets (did I just write that?) or a short sentence to support your side story. Something like: “Case example: 22% cost savings”

Here is an interesting article about voice pacing on the BBC web site. Researches analyzed voice patterns of 1,400 attempts to get people to do a phone service. Here they are:

• Speak moderately fast
• Pause
• Don’t change the pitch of your voice too much

You could re-write these findings as follows:

• Be energetic and enthusiastic
• Don’t rattle off a pre-programmed script
• Act normal

In short, have a human conversation.

Ira Glass, an American radio personality, makes an excellent point in this video: (aspiring) designers have great taste, but it will take a long time to get to a quality of work that matches it.

This resonates with me personally, as I find it hard to believe that it was me who designed some of these presentations sitting on my hard drive a few years ago. And I know that I will have the same reaction when I look back at today’s work in a few years from now.

Ira says that most people do not make it past the dip, they quit. His message: hang in there and you will get there and good things will happen.

It is worth it to watch the entire 5 minute movie. Ira gives a case example where he shows how a rambling radio report he created 8 years ago (he was not even a beginner then) and how it can be replaced by one sentence that is natural, specific, and to the point. I am not a frequent radio listener, but I find that newspapers often apply this technique of an elaborate, dramatic article opening, taking forever to explain an issue in normal, human language.

Via Jason Kottke.

When I have not prepared a presentation well enough, and/or made last minute changes to the  deck, I find myself skipping a slide during a live presentation. Click-click, when you see a difficult slide coming up in presenter view (more about PowerPoint presenter view here).

Where do you need to practice most?

The opening of the presentation, and not only because here you are likely to be a bit nervous at this stage of your talk. It is here, where you usually talk about yourself as an introduction. You know the content of this section very well (hey, it is about you) and you do not bother rehearsing. So you are on stage, you go blah, blah, blah, and a feeling starts creeping in. This section takes a long time. Is all this detail about me really interesting to the audience. How should I have told the story about myself in such a way that it sets up the rest of the presentation correctly? It is hard to talk about yourself, better practice it…

Visual mental placeholders. These are slides that are great to talk around in a one-on-one meeting. You probably have used them a lot. You know them inside out, and hence do not bother to practice them. But when you are on stage, you realize that you do not have a good sequential story in your mind to talk a larger audience through this slide.

Bad slides. You will discover them when you practice. DELETE.

A lecture about designing sales and investor presentations

A series of videos of a lecture Jan Schultink gave at NYU in 2011. Venture capitalist Mark Suster (author of the blog Both sides of the table) introduced Jan’s talk. The event was hosted buy SalesCrunch (a startup that was renamed Crunched, and later acquired by Clearslide). The content of my talk closely follows the topics discussed in my book about presentation design.

Let’s start with Mark’s introduction.

Mark Suster has done live pitches in front of the camera. Here is my review of one them. His feedback to the pitching investors is interesting. But what is more interesting is observing his body language. Mark has created a great library of his blog posts about pitching to VCs

Below are the videos of my presentation design seminar that followed. There were 2 sessions, one on designing investor presentations, and one on designing sales presentations. About half of the content in the talk overlaps.

A story. I just finished designing a sales presentation for a client that is pitching in a major mobile-related services tender. I started off with minimalist slides for a standup presentation that would be perfect to support the facts that were all written down in the tender submission documents. Rather than focusing on the details of the system specification, I focused on the track record of the company, the many reference installations, the experience in preparing for a successful launch.

Then came the call: “Don’t bother to present, we will email your slides to everyone involved and just use the time to ask some questions.”

It is actually understandable. The tender issuer can read product documentation, read web sites, and is overloaded with (the same) facts about the industry from all the companies competing for the tender. It would be have been polite to let a tender candidate speak, but it is not the most efficient use of the time.

So, I u-turned on slide design, as I feared that many of the tender committee participants would not bother to read through the full documentation and would rather rely on a PowerPoint file as preparation for the pitch. I added more slides, and added explanatory text on the slides.

Lesson learned: with these multi-million dollar tenders, stay in close contact with the person organizing the pitch meetings to make sure that you carry the right type of presentation document with you.

I will be speaking in New York on 5 and 6 April (click the bullets for full details):

• April 5: How to design stunning sales presentations
• April 6: How to design powerful investor presentations

The events will take place from 18:30 to 20:30 at the NYU Stern School of Business. Tickets are $25, but readers of this blog can get a 40% discount by applying promotion code  “ideatransplant”.

I am honored to be invited by Sean Black, CEO of SalesCrunch, the organizer of these events. SalesCrunch is a social selling platform in which online presentations play a central role. The business has 3 elements (my seminars are part of #3):

1. CrunchConnect  makes it easy to share sales presentations with prospects. Moreover, it tracks to what extent they are viewed and how effective the presentations are. The service blends web conferencing, presentation sharing, social networking into one platform that salesforces can use to interact with prospective clients.
2. CrunchTrainer uses presentation sharing to create a powerful online salesforce training tool
3. SalesSchool is a community that organizes events about sales-related topics, my 2 seminars are an example of these.