SlideMagic Blog

Cities are recycling their presentations to lure Amazon to put a new HQ there to pitches other candidates.

I see this many times, a company that needs to pull out all the stops to present at a major conference or pitch competition. Ideas and energy of that pitch are re-used numerous times in other presentations. It is often that wake up call to get your act together, take more creative risk to present your idea with “nothing to lose”.

There is a cost element to it as well. How can you get more return on that expensive video work? You need to try to find the balance between a personal and relevant pitch (rule #1 of sales presentations), and re-usable content. For videos, I usually request to have a clean version of the file without specific text banners or voice overs that cannot be separated. In that way you can re-use the assets for other projects.

Btw, these city pitches are very interesting. Here are 3 very different pitches. I think Detroit is the most inspiring. What do you think?

Cover image by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

Looking back at recent client work, the V1.0 briefing decks I saw, here are some of the mistakes I encountered. Not a complete list, not in the right order, just some examples that came across my desk the past few weeks.

• Without even reading a single slide, some presentations have an incredibly dated look & feel: standard PowerPoint colors, old, low res, cliche images, even clip art. Look at a presentation you think look good, and simply copy the style elements with the colors of your logo and your presentation will dramatically improve, without changing one bit of its content. And by copying, I mean copying. Look at the positioning of titles and boxes, the amount of white space that is used. With an example design in front of you, your page should be able to look exactly the same, no excuses!
• You have gotten used to the strategy review slides that have been in all the decks since you started out a couple of months ago. The audience sees them for the first time. Charts you used to evaluate your strategy, and not charts that can be used to pitch investors or customers. These presentations look highly professional, are loaded with content, say all the rights things, but do not change heart and minds.
• Some presentations look too cute, minimalist infographics, icons, and cartoon characters. It is maybe nice and funny for a 1 minute product video, but people need to feel that there is a proper business behind this. If it fits your brand, it is fine to use the “cute” story as a sales presentation inside your investor deck, but the other slides should provide a bit more gravitas.
• There are presentations which take too long to get to the point. Endless series of charts with market backgrounds, often providing statistics for trends everybody pretty much agrees with. Cut to the chase earlier, and if required, put a quick placeholder slide to remind the audience of the market context you are working in
• Most of the time, I am not to strict with structure in a presentation (yes, I am an engineer who used to work for McKinsey). In 20 minutes, a story that flows nicely is more interesting that a highly structured presentation full of tracker pages and sections. Having said that, some companies actually need it. If you are a biotech with a significant portfolio of drugs in development, the audience need to stay on top of what we are actually talking about right now.
• Dwelling forever about your technology, or doing a very long product demo does not help, but the other extreme is equally worse: summarizing your product in 2 sentences. The audience need to “feel” what the current pain is, how brilliant your product is, and how clever the underlying technology is put together. Each individual case has a different balance of these 3 points.
• Certain businesses are basically apps. When the app is still in development, crafting a grand pitch deck might be overkill. Money could be better spent on some great-looking screen mock ups to explain investors or potential partners what it is you are actually doing. Graphics quality is not super important here, you can include 1-2 screens that show that your company is able to produce a good looking product. What is more important is the flow of the application demo you are showing. In these cases, designing the app experience, and designing the pitch deck can go hand in hand.

“Cover letters” that introduce a pitch are often poorly written. Think about the latest spam email that you received from a head hunter offering to help you with recruiting staff for your startup. You open it (maybe the subject line was decent), and as soon as you started reading 3 words you knew what was going to come and deleted the message.

A cold email is a shot at someone who is looking for the earliest opportunity to shorten the email inbox with that satisfying “delete”, “archive”, “done”. The skill is to postpone that moment.

• If your email is a huuuuge amount of text, people don’t read but eyeball and hit “delete” after spotting the usual “that’s why you should invest” at the bottom after pagedowning the text. A lot of text in one block is scary.
• How did you get to the person? “[x] gave me your name”, is OK, but “[x] told me that you should be really interested in this” is better if that is what she did.
• Line break, then a super short and to the point sentence what you are: “Startup raising series A, with x in sales, in the drone market, with [famous investor] as a Seed investor”
• Line break, this is a critical moment where you can feel the finger going to the delete button. You need to present the hook. “Yes, everyone know that drones will be big, but there is something that is blocking progress and we fix that [name of thing you fix]” Or "our team consists of [famous person, famous person, famous person]
• Then point to a short slide deck that you attached that explains your company. The objective of that slide deck is not to land the investment, but to create enough intrigue to initiate a phone call. (Confidential) product details and financials, long market backgrounds, detailed implementation plans, are all for a later stage of the dialogue.

It is tempting to describe your product in a completely new vocabulary to illustrate that you do things differently.

Still, the first thing that a potential customer or investor will do, is to translate that back to the old vocabulary in order to figure out what is different, and what is not.

Often it is better to do part of the work for them. This is especially true for impatient investors who are not always convinced that something that sounds completely different, is in fact, completely different.

Image: The Treachery of Images

Client “I don’t want to talk about this, because it reminds people of [X] which failed. Let’s call that differently because there was that research project 10 years ago that did not work. Hmmm, let’s not put that on page 3”.

Me “But your technology solves all these problems from the past right?”

Client “Yes”

Me “And in meetings, where do you end up talking about all the time”

Client “People confusing me with technologies from the past”

Sometimes it is just better to take things head on and stop avoiding the big elephant that is sitting in the room but nobody wants to bring up in a conversation.

Image via WikiPedia

Product marketers can get bogged down in identifying endless lists of product benefits, each slightly different for different customer segments.

There is a problem with this for potential buyers of a product. The long list of benefits waters down what is truly unique about your product. All benefits sound exactly the same as the benefits that are being claimed by about every company in the world.

There is also a problem with potential investors in your company. Investors are interested in buying your company, not your product, so the scope is broader than product benefits. Also, they are buying into someone who is hopefully able to sell. “If I were a potential client, would I buy this product pitch?”

Back in the 1990s, “Executive Summary” pages were summaries that you put in front of a strategy consulting document. They were meant for senior management / decision makers. There was almost something offensive about them, reminding you of your junior position in the hierarchy. Senior managers can skip the detail that you have been sweating on for months and get straight to the point.

The good thing about these summaries was that you actually had to think what it is you wanted the senior management to do, and you had to frame your argument in the best possible way. Writing these summaries often caused major shifts in the recommendations of the project.

Clients ask me frequently about an Executive Summary of a presentation. This time, it is about a summary document that they can email to someone ahead of a presentation, or in most cases, a document that should convince the recipient to agree to a presentation.

I think the classic Executive Summary memo is not the most engaging way to get people excited about your project. There are a number of differences between your need for a summary, and the Executive Summary of the strategy review that is addressed to the CEO of your company.

The CEO is probably very interested in the recommendations (what price should I pay for the acquisition target), and is fully aware of the broad context of the project. She just needs the underlying logic to complete her own understanding of the situation. And, she probably knows you, and can pick up the phone quickly to clarify something that is not clear.

When I meet with a startup for an investor presentation, I am usually the first external “marketing person” they meet with. (Understandable, no investors, no money, no marketing budget). Some CEOs are nervous about the daunting task (and cash expense) of getting all those marketing materials ready as the company expands beyond product development. Sales presentation, investor presentation, one pager, leaflets, website, introduction video, etc. etc. (“Do you do those as well?”)

My advice: take things one step at a time. An investor presentation is a good place to start, since any investor presentation needs to include some sort of customer sales presentation as well. (Investors need to be sold of the product).

The company/product story is often not completely set in early stage startups. So, freezing the spec and commission a lot of money to all kinds of designers might cause problems down the road. A presentation is actually a useful format to play around with visual concepts. Graphical execution might not be the best, but things can look decent enough and are easy to change.

After you feel that the presentation starts to work, you can consider upping the investment in the design of other marketing material. But here, I would do things gradually as well.

When working with video and video producers/designers, make sure you have a version of the footage that does not include text (in a specific font, containing a positioning that could go out of date) and logos (that could be changed later on). Video footage can be useful for a long time.

Three ways to show understanding of an industry in 10 minutes:

1. Construct a 90 minute lecture trying to cover everything, and squeeze it into 10 minutes
2. A very detailed deep dive in one aspect of the industry, showing an insight that nobody has ever heard anywhere else
3. Do this deep dive on a random subject that is brought up by your potential investor or client.

1 won’t work, 2 is better, 3 is best

The presentation needs to “transplant” your idea in the head of your investors or customers. They need to understand what the idea, and then be excited enough about it to buy or invest.

Paying a professional presentation designer to do your slide deck is not a guarantee to succeed. I see many presentations that might not be top notch, but which look professional enough and are clear enough to convey the idea. In those cases I am honest and say that the startup’s funds might be better spent elsewhere.

Remember: investors might not like you, investors might not like the idea, investors might not like the market segment, investments might not believe that it will work, there are thousands of potential reasons for “no”, and misunderstanding the story and/or the visual quality of the slides is just one of them.