SlideMagic Blog

When a small startup wants to sell to a giant corporate, the startup’s financial stability (or rather, lack of it) is often a big stumbling block. Spending slide after slide in your sales presentation about how financially stable and well-funded you are might just give the opposite impression. Maybe it is better to act and behave like a grown up company and the big corporate might just believe you (or “forget” that they are working with a fragile company).

Art: Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin and Baby Marcelle,1888

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If you pitch your product as a direct alternative to something else, the purchasing manager might say that it is a nice solution, but we already spent our budget on something that is acceptable. Often, it is better to convince the buyer that this is a new market, a new product, that has no substitutes yet. An opportunity for startups that are out there to change the world.

There are so many wonderful things to say about your idea. all the problems it solves, all the things it can do, all the thought you have put in to make it perfect.

In the middle of the “and also, and also, and also, and also” the audience gets bored and wonders what it actually boils down to. In 99% of pitches I have designed, there is one original idea that is more important than all the other features.

Design your presentation around this. When describing the problem (always easier to do than selling the solution), focus on the most important issue. When presenting the solution, hammer in that one crucial innovation. After that is done, you can mention other elements of your story as a “by the way”. But, watch out not to get carried away here.

Prioritising that one big idea out of all your smaller ideas is not a matter of diluting things with generic terms: “we deliver ROI”. It should be highly specific.

I often get this issue in client discussions. So we start out, and in that first meeting, it often turns out that the client can explain it in 5 to 10 minutes. The difference? Me impolitely interrupting monologues where I got the point already, and asking questions inviting conversation about issues that are not covered.

How to do it without the help of a probing presentation designer? Take a radical approach to how much time you spend on each element of your story. If a certain section is incredibly important, but at the same time totally obvious, old news, and well known, cut it to the minimum. On the other hand there might be a tiny detail that is completely counter intuitive and merits a total 5 minute deep dive.

You are not writing an essay about your brilliant idea, you are racing against the clock to explain your idea in 5-10 minutes.

I admit that this is easier to do in 1-1 conversations than in formal presentations. Test your story in 1-1 conversations with smart people before pitching it to larger audiences.

Some technology solutions appear to be magic, almost too good to be true. Complicated algorithms that are hard to apprehend for example. Your audience might not believe you, because they cannot understand it, you are trying to sell snake oil. How to pitch magic?

• Do not start of your audience on the wrong foot by claiming yourself that it is magic. It does magical things, but it is not snake oil, everything is science and engineering.

• Use two stories:

• One: a powerful analogy/story that explains the fundamental approach your system takes. This is to explain the concept.

• Two: a super detailed, super in-depth deep dive on one aspect of your algorithm, show how it works on one micro example. This is to show that it is tangible and real

Many people try to make story 1.5: an analogy that is too forced and complicated to understand quickly, and a technology explanation that is too vague that it leaves people wondering whether they are looking at a magician instead of an engineer.

Strangely enough, it is a visual analogy that might drive you to story 1.5. A simpler, verbal story might do a better job here.

Many investors will scroll rapidly with the page down key through a presentation that is attached to an email. They will skip the cover letter in the email body (too much text), they will skip the dense summary page one of the presentation (too much text) and will continue to scroll down your slides, stopping at pictures (newspaper readers read the caption of a photo before the headline of the article).

I have seen horribly looking presentations that pass the PGDN test. When scrolling rapidly through the pages you actually get what the author wants to say.

I have seen very sophisticated, professional-looking presentations that completely fail the PGDN test (many were written by consulting firms and investment banks).

To your own PGDN test before cold-emailing your pitch.

It is tempting to use an icon for everything in your presentation: enterprise customer, picture of a guy in suit; small business, picture of a chef; consumer segment, picture of a smiling woman. Alternative: a factory icon, a house icon, a face icon. Other alternative: browse the clip art library

There are a few problems with this:

• Unless you are pro designer, icons, pictures are hardly ever consistent in format/style
• Icons/small pictures add clutter to already busy presentation slides
• For the viewer in the back of the room, the small icons/pictures are actually hard to see
• Clipart looks so 1990…

Sometimes keeping it simple is the best solution: 3 boxes in 3 different colours with the words ENTERPRISE, SMB, CONSUMER will do fine. Throughout the presentation, use the same 3 colour to talk about your user segments.

The PPM (private placement memorandum) is a big book that investment bankers prepare when they want to sell a company. It contains all the facts about the company, the legal fine print, disclaimers, and warnings about risks.

Often, this PPM gets used without modification as the sales presentation (investor presentation) of the company. Unfortunately, your presentation design efforts starts with the PPM, rather than ends with it.

Why is a PPM a poor sales document? It contains too many pages, it has a logical rather than a story structure, it is not targeted at a specific type of investor, it is not very visual.

What to do? Finish the PPM, put it aside, and start designing a sales/investor presentation from start, for a specific type of investor. Tell why she should buy your company, and eliminate all facts and detail that are not essential for the first meeting.

The full PPM is the fact base that is needed for the 2nd, 3rd and subsequent meetings, not the first one.

Begin cryptic post…

A potential client discovered that what they are trying to offer in the market is really something that is needed, but nobody wants to admit that they need it. (If we admit we do this, our share price will go down by 20%) You cannot talk about this directly. As a result, the sales pitch diluted and dumbed down. The result: no sales pitch.

It is hard to hide a story, in order to tell a story. A possible solution: define the position of your company as something broader, and give 4 example applications of your technology. One of which is the one no one admits they need.

End of cryptic post…

P.S. The activities of this client are perfectly legal.

I have a number of clients in the IT security sector. My main challenge with them is to make them sound less similar to all other IT security companies in the world. IT security presentations or brochures usually follow this pattern:

1. Scary, scary, scary reminder of awful security risks. The audience knows this already. The visual images are unpleasant to look at.
2. A relentless stream of marketing abbreviations and buzzwords that sound exactly the same as the ones the competition is using.

I try to keep a positive mood in the presentation without using images of hackers wearing a balaclava. The marketing buzzwords can be replaced by a deep dive of one particular aspect of your technology that takes a completely different approach to IT security than your competitors use.