SlideMagic Blog

You have a sales presentation that - despite the fact that it is loaded with bullet points - has been very successful in 1-on-1 meetings with customers. Now you have an invitation to speak at a conference for an audience of more than 100 people for a maximum of 20 minutes. What next? Here is a recipe.

1. Trim down the content. In the conference audience are competitors, analysts, journalists, all kind of people that might not be suitable to receive the ins and outs you would discuss with a prospective customer. Remember, the object of a conference presentation is not to close a deal, it is to tease people into calling/emailing you to set up a first meeting.
2. Flatten the story. Take out overview/summary slides, and spread them out: one slide covers one bullet. We want a story, not a structured table of contents of a business school text book.
3. Beef up the “problem” section of your presentation to let the audience connect with the issue you are trying to solve. The problem might be totally obvious to you, and 60% of the audience, the other 39% is not there yet.
4. Avoid repetition. If you talk early on in the presentation how highly accurate your product is, group that together with the a slide in the back that shows test data confirming accuracy.
5. Find big bold visuals that support your points (one point per slide). Stretch images to a full page size, and cut text.
6. Take out any live demos or demonstrations
7. Use your videos (if you have them), BUT only if you can integrate them seamlessly in your presentation flow. Embed it and test it 300 times to make sure there are no technical glitches. Think where you want to insert the videos. Videos are excellent wake up calls, anticipate where in your story the audience runs the risk of getting bored.
8. Practice, practice, practice, until you can deliver the whole talk in 15-17 out of the allocated 20 minutes.

I get this question often from startups who are in the process of fund raising. If you are on a tight budget, you might be able to hold off the big expense of producing a video.

1. There are videos and videos. Many of the animated videos you see today on the web (“So, you want to [FILL IN UNMET NEED]”) are presentations in disguise: an animated sequence of static slides. For some products, showing moving footage of the product is really useful. Examples are gadgets and other hardware that you often see on sites such as Kickstarter. If your product does not depend on a live demonstration, a sequence of presentation slides can be as effective.
2. Unlike consumers, investors are usually perfectly happy to click through a sequence of slides instead of playing a video
3. Videos are permanent and very hard to edit. Startup stories always evolve and change.

So, the best approach might be to start with an animated series of static slides. You perfect the flow over time and if you really feel you nailed the story flow (and you have the budget), you can make the expensive of creating a pitch video.

I am in the process of beefing up my software skills (Logic Pro X, nothing to do with presentations), and am spending a lot of time watching screen shot movies. I am just wondering why in these training sessions, the face of the presenter is not shown? OK, the screen real estate needs to be as big as possible, and a constant “talking head” on your screen distracts, but maybe a small introduction, at the beginning of a lesson?

This could be an idea for presentations that are used in cold email approaches: put a very short, very short, intro video of yourself on page 1 (to keep file size emailable and not take away the attention from the slides that follow).

Some clients ask me whether a project can be cheaper if we cut the number of the slides, the answer is: not really. If your presentation designer is charging you by the slide, it means that she is likely to focus only on beautifying graphics page by page, rather than turning your entire story upside down and designing it from scratch.

Every presentation design project has a big fixed cost component: getting to know the client, getting to understand the story, setting up the overall look and feel of the presentation. After this, you need to put in however many slides it takes to tell the story, and I tend to err on putting in more than less. 30, 40, or even 50 slides, it does not make a lot of difference in the cost of a project.

Many tech presentations contain have the feature laundry list table in them: 15-20 great things your application can do. Here is how to make them better:

• For reading: reduce the font and add more text to make the feature and its benefit explicit: from “historical overview” to “Compare usage levels over the last 30 days and spot unusual drops in demand”
• For presenting: Option 1: if you only want to show that you have lots of features, keep the text short and put 20 boxes in a nice 4x5 grid on the slide, do not even bother to go into the specifics. Option 2: if you want to go into the specifics, create 20 slides addressing one feature/benefit each, make sure you can present each slide in 10 seconds while at the same time being specific enough so people can understand things beyond a vague description.

With smaller screen sizes, icons are becoming an increasingly important element of user interface design. Not everyone of you is likely to be using PowerPoint to design a web app (hey I do), but icons can also be useful in regular presentation design.

I am not talking about floppy disks and other ancient icons we still use, but stylised symbols that can be an effective visual short cut to a category of (pick the appropriate) products, benefits, user problems, etc.

One option is to create your own icons in PowerPoint, set the zoom to 400% and create miniature shapes using shape booleans. Often you can use a quick Google Image search to find inspiration for your icon.

Stock photo sites sell endless amounts of icons, but there are compatibility issues when using them in PowerPoint or Keynote. Most icons are design as a vector graphic in Adobe Illustrator. It makes them infinitely scalable (like a PowerPoint shape), but PowerPoint does not read this file format. Copy-pasting Illustrator objects (if you have the software installed) is unpredictable and results in a shape that is hard to manipulate (changing colour for example).

Cropping icons out of a JPG or PNG file is not a solution either, if you forget to compress the small image file, you end up storing a huge image file with all your icons multiple times on a PowerPoint slide. Cropping also kills the vector-like scaling of icons, and background transparency.

A recent trend in web design might provide a solution: custom icon fonts. Modern successors of Zapf Dingbats (what?) provide clean icons that are scalable and can be manipulated (colours, shadows, and - do not use this - reflections).

Option 1: lots and lots of benefits, but each one is described in just one, really short bullet point (i.e.: “A flexible solution”) Option 2: Only 3 benefits, but each is described with rich and elaborate stories

The same amount of words, but guess which option will be remembered best. Too many benefits equals no benefits.

When you write a presentation, it can be helpful to have a real person in mind that you need to convince. With real I do not mean the actual sales prospect you are going to pitch to next week, but someone who you know better, personally.

The hard-nosed venture capitalist, the hipster designer, the over-loaded IT manager, the stylish marcom lady, the social media expert, the alpha-male sales director, the super-bright hedge fund manager, the Israeli wheeler-dealer, the geeky startup founder, etc. I have a cast of characters who always travel with me and are always willing to receive a mental pitch.

One of my clients has a technology that can save cost for a retail business. They did a pilot implementation at one retailer and have a lot of cost saving data as a result.

You can present this data to other potential clients (sanitised of course) in 2 ways. Approach one is the absolute number: we helped save $x,000 in costs. But this is hard to relate to for other retailers with different types of businesses. Better is to do it relatively: “we shaved 10% of the cost of item x.”, but it is still a bit generic, any startup with a cost saving technology has a sales pitch deck with these types of numbers. A credibility issue here.

Even better is to go into the nitty detail and highlight simple case examples of things that go wrong every day in a retail store, and how the solution helps to prevent it. It shows that you know what you are talking about, and lends instant credibility to your story.

At McKinsey we used to say: retail is detail.

Almost every presentation by a tech company has a big architecture slide in it, lots of boxes that are connected to the cloud. This slide does not explain what your products are, let alone how these products help solve your customer’s problems. It does show that though that your product is a master piece of engineering. If you want to say the latter, use the big architecture slide, but probably not on page 2.