SlideMagic Blog

Flickr is an unbelievable source of images. I came across this photo by Alex Kess. The texture and colors are amazing (the original on Flickr is much clearer than the image below).

UPDATE: To readers arriving here via Google: this is a post from February 2011. However, as I write this in January 2015, Microsoft PowerPoint 2011 for Mac again is crashing frequently. I recommend saving your work often. I corresponded via Twitter with the Microsoft support team and they pointed me to their general cleanup suggestions here (basically removing all your preferences).

Want to try out an alternative to PowerPoint? Request a beta invite for the new presentation design software SlideMagic here!

Here is the original post from 2011:

OK, more searching solved the issue, which can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975723 My toolbar folders were corrupt.

Everything is working again without toolbar customization. But when I start modifying the toolbars again (I need a set of 20 buttons or so to be really fast an efficient in PowerPoint), the whole saga starts again. I will keep you posted about my experience with Microsoft PowerPoint 2011.

I have been battling with PowerPoint 2011 for the Mac for the past hour and it seems seriously flawed. When entering slideshow mode, it just crashes. Searching online for a solution reveals dozens of forum discussions about the same issue that are unresolved. Do not upgrade from Office 2008. Repeat, do not buy it, it is not stable yet! Usually I am an early adopter of software and can live with a few bugs here and there. Not being able to go into slideshow mode kills the purpose of PowerPoint, this is a serious flaw.

Sasha Dichter is the Director of Business Development (fund raising) for Acumen Fund,a global non-profit venture fund that invests in enterprises that fight poverty in the developing world. (Example: investing in a mosquito net manufacturer creates employment/income for a local community and fights malaria at the same time.)

He is building support for a great initiative: turn Valentine’s Day into Generosity Day. The idea is that you say “yes” to anyone who asks for help for 24 hours. He himself went through an initiative like this, but kept going for a month, see a video below explaining what he learned form that.

If you are interested in the work that Acumen does, join the community of supporters all around the world. I know that this blog is read by many presentation designers, and doing presentation design work as a gift for a worthy cause is a great way to make a difference. A much better way actually than sending a check (see an earlier post about pro-bono presentation design).

(Disclosure: I help Acumen now and then with their fund raising presentations).

Can I use humor in an investor presentation? (Well, the question applies to all serious presentations). I would be careful. Humor is a great ice breaker when it comes naturally, even in serious presentations such as a pitch to investors. However, making it come naturally is hard to plan. That rehearsal in front of your friends in the living room sofa is a different environment from the corporate conference room.

If you used a joke spontaneously in a previous presentation, you could try to use it again (i.e., program it), in another one if you feel that mood and energy in the room is right. But only then. And never put jokes in writing on slides or in images, you lose the option to pull them out at the last minute. Also, you do not control the digital after-life of the presentation file after the live presentation.

Client: “Hey, investor presentations don’t look like this! I have seen many before. This one has too many slides, too many images, we need to fix this.”

Me: “That’s exactly the point”

Recently, I received a review copy of  L’art des présentations Powerpoint, by Bernard Lebelle, a frequent commenter here on the blog. A very interesting book (obviously for those who can read French).

My first impressions:

• Besides the big presentation and speaking insights (often covered in many other books on the subject), this book is a treasure of smaller insights, many of them illustrated with a little diagram or a quick scribble. Almost like reading a constant flow of interesting blog posts. My French is probably not good enough to read this book from page 1 to 386, but the layout with the bite-size illustrated tips and tricks enables me to digest much of the content.
• It covers a broad range of subjects, all the way from speaking suggestions down to the basics of typography and detailed suggestions on how to use the PowerPoint software
• Bernard integrates concepts and ideas from many sources (books, web sites) with clear references to them for further reading.

Congratulations Bernard.

The shape combine function in PowerPoint 2010 is great. Here is an example of how you can create text that seems to be flying through a circle. The key is the create 2 half circles and send one of them to the back. In earlier version of PowerPoint, this was very hard to do. (See a review of PowerPoint 2010 here).

Sales presentations have a specific setting. Often, the audience is relatively small. Most of the time you would have time to discuss and prepare the meeting in phone calls before hand. Where as in a VC pitch presentation the audience is probably constantly testing for reasons not to invest in you, someone sitting through a sales presentation would actually really want to buy something from you. Here are some observations (in no particular order) to help you design better sales presentations.

A good sales presentation does not always equal a slide deckSome sales meetings can be conducted without PowerPoint at all. An alternative is a meeting sketched out live on a white board. For example, you could run your client live through a calculation of the financial benefits of your product. It will be clear that although there are no PowerPoint slides involved, these type of presentations might actually require more preparation than regular slide shows.

**Talk about the customer issue rather than yourself.**Pages and pages about the history of your company, how many employees you have, where your offices are located, are all about your, and not about the issue your customer is struggling with. If you are a startup and you need to establish that you are a financially stable company, do so, but in (most) other cases do not bore your audience with talking about yourself.

**Listen, listen, listen.**Each customer has specific issues, and customers are very keen to explain them to you. Listen carefully in the phone calls leading up to the meeting. Listen in the meeting. Focus your sales presentation exactly on the customer. Look the audience in the eye and see whether you maintain the attention, there is still eye contact. Rigorously sticking to your script even when the customer signals (questions, interruptions, eye movement) she wants to take the discussion in a different direction is a sure recipe for a turn down.

Everyone knows that it is important to think about the story and flow of your presentation before opening PowerPoint and start designing slides. Paper sketches are great, sticky notes are great. But there is one common approach that usually does not work: writing the story out long-hand in Word.

Long-hand text looks final. When you want to discuss it with a team of people, they start paying attention to wording, fine tuning messages. This is wasted energy at this stage in the process.

But more importantly, text is not visual. “Here we need an image of a man standing in the street holding his phone up in the air in despair”. It is much more powerful to discuss the draft or first ideas of a visual presentation with - well - visuals!

As a result I often end up scribbling the first version of a presentation in PowerPoint. But in this case PowerPoint is not the slide design tool, rather a simple note pad to organize ideas.

A startup pitching to a giant:

• This will save you millions of cost!
• Your users are asking for it!
• We enable you to break into new markets!
• Your competitors already have something like this!

25 minutes later with 5 minutes left: “convinced?”

“Yeah sure, but we have a policy not to work with startups that might go bankrupt tomorrow…”

It is important to find out the major concern of the giant before pitching. When someone mumbles in a phone call that they have a policy not to work with startups, it is most likely not a side comment. Focus your pitch on this issue. Not explicitly, but in between the lines.

• Show your blue chip investor base
• Show the partnerships you have with very established players
• Show your positive cash flow
• Show your customer list
• Show them anything that might support the point

The real battle is here. Maybe it is a hard one to win, but at least you should try.