SlideMagic Blog

Rattling through 25 points about why your idea is great on page 1 of your deck is not convincing.

• You do not give the audience the ability to warm up, and first of all understand what it is you do
• You dilute the power of the arguments by spending too little time on each: big need, no competition, great team, we all heard them before
• You remind us of weak pitches where the lack of quality of the story is made up for by quantity: products with 25 benefits usually have no benefits

Instead, resist the temptation for detail and explain roughly what you do on page 1, plus the most important differentiator. Then follow with a presentation that is short enough for the audience to focus on your key points.

Here are some posts that people have been reading a lot on my blog in 2012:

• Aligning bullet points in PowerPoint
• How to create a McKinsey-style waterfall chart
• Putting PowerPoint text in a circle
• Semi-transparent text fills
• Building a logo page in PowerPoint
• How to make a 3D translucent ball
• Presentations on tablets
• About logic in presentations
• Keynote versus PowerPoint
• Combining stacked and clustered column charts

For me it is interesting to see that almost none of these posts were written in 2012, and that pretty much all of them are about technical PowerPoint software skills (there is a correlation here, as my posts have evolved a bit over the years). Presumably this is the result of people Googling when they are stuck in PowerPoint.

Anyway, hopefully these posts are useful if you missed them the first time around.

When a company grows, a slide deck has to be used by more than one person. It is often hard for the pioneer presenter to let go of the old slides that she has been using for years. “What is wrong with this slide? When I put it up I tell this, this this, and this, these are really important points.”

Most of the above points do not appear on the slide though. The new presenters do not make them, the email recipients of the deck do not read them. The slide is merely a mental placeholder for the expert presenter to tell her story.

Time to let go.

If important numbers in your presentation are exactly the same (sales are $6.1m, cash flow is $6.1m and we will have 6.1m users in year 3), it is almost worth tweaking the assumptions in your Excel model a bit so that they are just slightly different. Usually, there is no material difference in the accuracy of your forecast, but it will be a lot easier to understand.

If you are a startup, you should consider getting yourself on the beta list of Videolean, a tool that promises to help you create promotion animation videos for $100 or less.

It is amazing to see what you can pack in just 60 seconds of video. Take Videolean’s on video for example: they pitch the problem, the solution, and present how the tool works.

A tool like this can replace a large number of slides in an investor presentation.

(P.S. all these videos seem to be using the voice over of the same guy, who probably costs more than $100, I wonder who he is).

I try to get rid of them, most of the time it is obvious that a column contains a company name, a date, or a comment. Sales, profits or acquisition value are a bit more tricky.

Every startup pitch has a hockey stick chart that shows its financial path to glory. As a result, investors will not believe it by simply looking at it. You need to explain what she has to believe in order for the end point to be true. What are the 7 numbers you need to multiply in order to reach that $50m in year 5? If she believes in 4 of the 7, and she buys into your methodology to calculate the potential, then you she might connect the year five dot with the 0 today.

I do not like the term “executive summary”. It suggests that if you are senior and executive enough, you are somehow rising above the masses who are swimming and drowning in detail. Most executive summaries are over-summarised with buzzwords and hollow phrases.

Clients often ask me to write an executive summary of a presentation, and I usually say they do not need one. A careful selection of the key slides of a presentation is much better suited for the purpose. Nobody likes to read 2 dense pages of prose, flicking through a number of visual slides is much more interesting. As a result, the message gets across better and faster.

Videos in your presentation can be powerful, but embedding them using a YouTube link that needs a working Internet connection is a risky strategy in a live presentation, technology always fails when you need it most.

The website keepvid allows you to download YouTube videos to your computer and embed the video file in your presentation. The program comes with a few health warnings though:

1. Watch out for copyright. Keepvid is legal as long as you use it legally for material for which you have permission to use it
2. Keepvid is covered with ads and buttons that say “Download”, these usually link to a sponsor site and do not download your actual video. Watch carefully on what link you click.
3. Technical issues. It takes some time before the Java applet downloads, be patient. There is something funny going on with Java and Google Chrome, so when I use Keepvid I switch to Safari which works fine.

Maybe stupid, but until recently I hardly ever used a slide template for a visual. My template used to be the white or black page, and everything on it was created from scratch. Data chart, insert followed by 15 actions to kill the standard PowerPoint formatting. Same for tables. Same for text boxes.

So, I am a late discoverer of the slide template. It requires some time though to set things up in a clever way. Maybe I gave you an idea as well.

Another big time saver: a custom toolbar, here is a very old post on the 19 buttons you need in a PowerPoint tool bar.