SlideMagic Blog

Most sales presentations contain some logo page to show off your impressive client list. Make sure that the page looks impressive from a graphics point of view as well. An unstructured clutter of low-res logos makes an impression of an amateurish startup best to be avoided for serious business.

1. Check whether you got the latest logo of a client (visit the home page)
2. Use high resolution images
3. Where possible, use the logo that has a white background
4. Do not distort aspect ratios
5. Make sure the logos are more or less the same size
6. Distribute things evenly horizontally and vertically in a nice grid
7. Keep the page simple: just logos
8. If things look too busy, you can consider moving all the logos to black & white

I came across this image the other day, showing retention rates of students by delivery form. A lecture is the worst, teaching others is the best. I am not sure about the accuracy of the exact percentages, but there is something to the overall hierarchy presented here. And presentations are definitely somewhere high up there.

But we can learn from this pyramid to make our presentations better.

1. Audiovisual: This will not be a shocking new insight: use visual material in your presentation, avoid text
2. Demonstration: Keep things highly practical, use case examples that people can relate to
3. Discussion: Easy to do in a small setting, but harder for large audiences. In sales presentations for example, this would mean improvising your entire sales pitch on the client specific situation.

How could you get to teaching others in a presentation?

It is difficult for a startup to sell to a big company. Even if your solution is really innovative, large companies prefer to work with financially stable, large companies.

The look and feel of your sales presentation can add to that nervousness in the under belly of a big-corporate purchasing officer. Looks to avoid:

1. Amateurish layouts with childish colours and water cooler fonts such as Comic Sans.
2. Overly cute, touchy feely, retro look and feel, especially when selling in a male-dominated corporate culture (sorry).

Now we all know that the a slick visual deck full of stories and very little text will do great in these meetings (option 3), but, there is one surprising other option (4): the big corporate, lots of bullet points, serious, boring slide deck. Purely from a look and feel perspective, you will fit right in with all the other technology vendors, unlike option 1 or 2.

If you cannot pull off option 3, option 4 is still preferred over option 1 or 2.

The 16:9 format was invited for movies not for presentation slides. Over the past 500 years, there is hardly any print work in a wide 16:9 format. Text that spans a wide column is hard to read, and most diagrams, paintings, visual concepts are more square than rectangular.

If you want to design slides in a 16:9 format you could consider breaking some of the slide design conventions. Examples: putting a multi-line slide header at the top left or even bottom left of your slide, saving up valuable vertical slide real estate. Or maybe even simpler: leave a lot of calming white space on the left and right of your slide.

Doing the product spec slides of your sales presentation is relatively easy. The big picture, how you position yourself versus the competition is harder. It is tempting to start with the easy bits and worry about the difficult things later. Still, I suggest to take on the positioning first since all other slides will depend on it. Moreover, it is the overall product concept that you are selling, not the features of individual products.

Business school books and consulting reports have a clear hierarchical structure. This is great for reading a document: you can skip what you do not need, and go right into then detail when you do need it more explanation.

In short stories, hierarchy can be boring, you sound like you are given a university lecture. I often flatten that hierarchy, making the presentation more sequential. Out go the slides with the 3-5 setup bullet points, and instead I just let the story flow. If I have to, I bring back the structure at the end of the presentation to sum things up.

This works great for 20 minute presentations, for marathon presentation days we might have to revert back to the business school rigour though. But there is a reason why marathon presentation sessions are so stimulating for the brain…

Following frequent requests after my previous post, I have included a picture here that shows the concept of the narrow coloured bar replacing a fully coloured slide object.

Colours brighten up your slides and are a great way to group related items together: USA is green, Europe is blue, Asia is purple for example.

But applying bold colours to big text boxes makes your slides too busy and nervous. Instead, keep those text boxes light grey and add a very narrow colour box attached to it at the left side, almost like a fat line.

“Hey, that chart looks very messy?” “Yes, but that is what we want to show, right?” “True.”

The other day, a client needed a presentation meant for reading, something that would be sent out to the employees by email. So, we designed it for reading and used the fact that for an internal audience we could be a bit more radical with the format.

Here is the concept: a dark 16:9 background. Each chart has a big visual on the left side while the message of the chart is spelled out in full sentences in a relatively small font in a column on the right. Full sentences, because nobody will be around to explain what the abstract graph means. A narrow column in a small font because it is easier to read than a very wide sentence spanning an entire 16:9 screen.