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Some sectors of the technology market are “hot”, everyone wants to buy the products, all investors want to get in.
But writing that sentence explicitly in your presentation might just give the impression that you are in a bubble that is about to pop. Get the sizzling temperature of your market across without saying it directly.
James Bond movies always start with an opening scene before the title roll. You get lifted out of our audience chair and thrown into the action. In presentation design, you have a similar option.
The conventional route is to put up a summary chart with the key messages you want to give. The James Bond option is to start with some interesting stories and case examples that are not completely tight together in some logical structure. After that short introduction you can put up the page that puts it all together.
Life is tough in the corporate world today. Endless (often useless) meetings, short-term requests that frustrate your attention to get the big job done, a relentless stream of emails. With all these distractions, it is hard to find the time to simply sit down and design/write/dream the story you want to tell. And on top of that, managers assume (correctly) that they know what they want to say, so there is no point wasting two hours to go over the obvious. Incorrect.
Managers suffer from the Curse of Knowledge. Yes, they do know the substance inside out, but cannot explain it to outsiders. Buzzwords and corporate speak have become a morse code, a short cut, that management understands perfectly, but that does not stick with outsiders.
Moreover, outsiders might have difficult questions that do not follow the business-school-like structure a manager would use to explain her business. Writing a story to lecture someone on a new topic is different from writing a story to address the concerns of a highly cynical audience.
And finally, writing a presentation without a proper story brainstorm takes out those personal anecdotes and jokes that can make your presentation so much more interesting.
In the end, many corporate presentations work out and are great. But very often this is the result of a reset in the middle of the design process. After the presentation is almost ready to go, people take a step back and start discussing the story, which often in a complete redesign of the deck.
Some presentations are a series of ideas, a number of products, a string of business unit updates. Most people try to force some sort of uniform framework to discuss all options: market potential, challenges, next steps, etc. But often you find that that one framework does not work for all the stories you want to tell. In those cases, feel free to drop the uniformity and pick the visualisation that fits best for that particular story.
As a startup you are used to sitting in the hot seat while the VC (venture capitalist) is grilling you on your business idea, and in the process gives you some advice on how to pitch it better. True, VCs probably know best how it is to pitch to them.
But VCs themselves can improve their pitches as well. I have designed many fund raising presentations for VCs and later-stage private equity (PE) funds pitching their next fund to institutional investors and high net worth individuals. Here are some of the common mistakes in version 1.0 that comes across my desk:
Investors in VC funds have heard the exact same story from all the other funds that are pitching for their money. VC/PE funds need to really think hard and articulate their story, and how it stands out from other funds.
Many clients insist on making sure that all the big points of a presentation are made by page 3. Why? Decades of boring PowerPoint has shown them that things past page 3 get lost in an endless stream of bullet points. Making sure your point gets made by page 3 means making sure that your point gets made in the first 20 minutes of a pitch.
The result: you are stuck in the middle. The story up to page 3 is too long to serve as a really crisp summary, and falls short on conveying the message with full impact (the real killer chart sits on page 37). A shame that people will switch off on page 4 and beyond.
Here is a better strategy: design a deck that takes 20 minutes to present with all the important points inside, telling your story once instead of saying what you will tell them (by page 3), saying it, saying what you just told them (slide 78).
Sometimes I come across slides that simply try too hard. A stunning image with a hard to understand analogy, or an infographic-style rebus that looks like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. OK, it is a visualisation, but a puzzle does not make it easier for your audience to understand what you try to say. Even worse, an overly simplistic symbol might play down the seriousness of the business you are trying to pitch. Instead of creating a puzzle, why not simply write down what you want to say. Image via WikiPedia
A recent client was wondering why I turned all images in his presentation to B&W.
The answer: because I matched the colours of the presentation to the colours of his brand; shades of grey plus a strong blue as accent color. These type of colour schemes are actually my favourite ones. They look elegant, are recognisable, and it is very easy to create a harmonious, consistent set of slides through the deck with out the distraction of clashing colours. Definitely not a presentation with a 1980s, pre-colour monitor, look and feel.
Here is diagram published on TechCrunch about the financial returns of angel investors. There are 2 ways to improve the diagram:
Then there are a few more things you can do to make it look less like Excel: tick marks out, big title at the top left, replace the Times Roman font from something sans serif, value axis title below the main title (i.e., no vertical text).
Following requests, I uploaded the slides I used for my talk in Barcelona about investor presentations. They are pretty minimal, so it will be hard for those who did not attend to grasp the full meaning, sorry. (I am working on documenting its content though, watch this space) Thank you Barcelona entrepreneurs for a great event!
