SlideMagic Blog

It requires some skill to get a presentation to look professional. And when you are a boot strapping startup, I think most investors will forgive you if you did not have time or money to get your investor slides look completely perfect. You decided to put your effort elsewhere, rather than spending it on PowerPoint looks.

So, the bare PowerPoint template with a tiny logo on the bottom right looks, well, bare, but you could still say it is professional, sort of. Worse is when you put in a lot of effort and the results do not look good:

1. Clashing colours
2. Too childish, or too cute for predominantly machine/male investors
3. Tacky, cheesy stock images
4. Super complex gradients and other template graphics that take over 50% of the slide surface

No format works for an early stage startup investor pitch with a good idea, it will not work in a sales presentation though.

When you have done your sales pitch hundreds of times, sloppiness can sneak into your meeting preparation.

You forget your business cards, you forget to remove that food stain your small son made on your laptop, you forget to check out the prospect’s web site and LinkedIn profile, you forget that the person in front of you hears your story for the first time and you should deliver it as if you gave it for the first time.

Every meeting requires concentration, even sales pitch number 723.

Market positioning can be difficult for a product manager. Your product has so many features, you know the detailed spec comparisons versus all your competitors. Everything is not simple or black and white. But marketing is about making choices: who to target, with which benefits and turn that into a really simple story. And that means making decisions about what to cut out.

Designing a presentation is similar. Your story might have many angles, many background stories, an interesting history of how you got where you are, interesting perspectives on how your competitors are positioned in the market. A clear presentation has eliminated these distractions.

Remember, a marketing presentation is not a lecture about your industry, your company, or yourself but about solving your customer’s problem.

Reading this column about Story tellers have more fun led me to an old Seinfeld episode where he is pitching a new TV show to NBV about, well, nothing.

I discussed a presentation with a company the other day that was in the field of measuring and analysing human behaviour in companies. My main recommendation for their sales presentation: humanise your story and translate the pages and pages of cold statistics about people into case example and organisational behaviour situations that anyone can relate to. Because that is how people will use the tool in the end.

The other day I was asked to provide input on a pitch deck prepared by a respected consulting firm. The idea was the result of a consulting project, the results of which for document in a hefty, detailed, and structured document that everyone agrees was great for reading background material, but not really right for presenting/pitching. The team took the first step by cutting down the number slides (not changing them) in an executive summary presentation.

My advice for consultants who want to pitch: start from scratch and design a completely new presentation specifically aimed at selling, pitching, fundraising and leave the big data Bible as back up.

What goes usually wrong in executive summary decks that are created by chopping slides out of a master pack? Some examples.

• The team has probably been working for months on the project and as a result, they see the discussion of the problem as totally trivial and cut down a lot on the charts that adress the issue, most of them probably generated early on in the project, or even during the project definition phase. The consultants forget that to the outsider who hears about the issues for the first time, it is not that trivial. On the contrary, it is often easier to pitch the problem, than to pitch the solution.
• The problem section usually involves data, and consulting data charts are loaded with facts and figures and tables. Most consultants actually violate one of the cardinal rules of one message per slide. Go back to your drawing board and pick one statistic/trend that is really crucial to sell your problem and make a super clean/clear data chart that just shows that, nothing else
• As we get to the solution the consultant often forget to describe what it actually is. We show histories of how the initiative has been used in other parts of the world, who is involved, but hey: what is it that you actually want to do? To the consultant it is obvious, to the audience not.
• Describing the initiative or its impact can be done in dry text bullets with low emotional appeal. But why not use pictures? Show the project in action. Profile the people that benefited from it in big page filling images. Create human stories. People relate to this much better than dry data. Yes, I want to help this girl in the picture!
• Consultants are always shy, and hesitant to take a strong position. (Yes, you could take option B but it has these disadvantages and it depends on this scenario C panning out that way). As a result, it is actually unclear what is expected from the audience: contribute this amount of money to do X, Y, and Z. Get over your shyness, and spell it out the call of action bluntly.

The objective of a technology sales presentation is to convince your potential client of how great your product is, and how poor the competition.

Assumption: the above is actually true, which makes designing a presentation a lot easier.

One approach is to list all the benefits, and in a few more charts show that the competition does not have them (most of the times, without naming names explicitly). This story does not stick very well, a feature list that seem unrelated.

Better is to dive in a bit into the detail. Often technical products have one specific innovation, one characteristic of the architecture, one design approach that triggers all of the goodness mentioned above. Now that the customer understands this (and Einstein said that you can explain anything to everyone - even a 6 year old), it becomes a lot easier for her to understand the full picture.

Most sales presentations go on and on and on about an issue that the client might already be convinced of. Worse, if you present slide after slide in an amateurish format making the same point, your client might actually start to doubt what she believed when entering the meeting room.

That is time and slides wasted. More time efficient and effective ways to tackle this:

1. A couple of really professional and serious looking slides with the highlights, plus an invitation to visit your web page for all the details
2. Discussing the weakness of your competitors verbally and informally: it is hard to put this on paper. Suggest your client some tough questions to ask when they meet the competition. Note that this is actually a presentation design challenge, without creating the actual slides. You need to have this story prepared, maybe even with the help of a “spontaneous” flip chart sketch

Now spend the time you gained on the issues that really matter: are you expensive, is it hard to switch supplier, etc.? Preaching to the converted is never a good use of time.

Many of the spam email messages I receive start with a wobbly story about an ever changing world of social media confusion and making it very hard to understand what the spammer actually wants.

Good headhunters start their call well, with “I am a headhunter” which saves critical time that can be spent on pitching what they want.

In his latest book, Daniel Pink talks about 6 new ways to pitch an idea (video). One of the most interesting one is what he calls “The Pixar Pitch”, a story line that follows the typical plot of a Pixar animated movie:

Once upon a time [fill in blank] One day [fill in blank] Because of that [fill in blank] Until finally [fill in blank]