SlideMagic Blog

We recently celebrated my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah and here is the process I went through to produce my short speech:

• I did not make too big a deal out of the speech, it is not the State of the Union, I wanted to express my feelings to my daughter, and focus the attention of the entire crowd for a few minutes on her.
• I created a digital notebook accessible from all my devices weeks in advance. Here I jotted down ideas: stories, memories, jokes, anecdotes, as they came along. It is hard to come up with ideas 24 hours before
• About a week before the event, I wrote down a whole version, and put it away
• A few days later during a bike ride a crafted an entire new story in my head, shorter, simpler, and less dry. Immediately after dismounting from the bike I wrote that one down.
• I rehearsed a couple of time and created a short bullet point lay out of my talk that I could print in small font and hold in my hand. Important points are the key element of a paragraph (you can summarize those in 4 words if you have to), and lists (“what was that 3rd character trait again?”)
• During the speech i made sure that I was really “into the story” feeling the meaning of the words while saying them (i.e, not pressing play from memory and just recite text without processing what it means).
• Instead of uttering “uhm”, I tried to keep the composure and pause to form the next key idea in my mind before speaking it out.
• And yes, I did not use slides!

You got 30 minutes with a senior executive to present your case in a highly politically charged issue. Many people bring a very long deck that starts slowly, industry trends, backgrounds, history, until finally at 25 minutes we get to the real issue.

These type of presentations are not TED talks were we take the audience on an inspirational journey. Everyone in the room pretty much knows the background and history (if they did not, they could have read it the night before in your document), probably knows the arguments both sides are making.

Your 30 minutes is best spent showing why the combination of your arguments is the best one. You need to get the point early in your presentation, and have at least one slide that puts all the options, pros and cons on a page. Other slides in the presentation are backups for the points you are making.

Yes, that one slide can be busy, but it should not be unreadable.

• Keep sentences short, think of every word you are adding to the slide whether it is worth it or not
• Group similar points into one overarching one
• Spend very little slide real estate at no brainers to which both sides agree
• Use colors, and layout to highlight the differences between the options
• Project the slide over a white board if you can, so people can scribble and write on it

When you start at a blank or partially complete slide, it is tempting to put that key message in. You don’t have the overview of the entire presentation, so the key point will appear - duplicated - on many pages.

The same thing I often see happening on corporate web sites: multiple people make edits on different pages independent from each other.

The slide and the page on its own make sense, the overall story looks garbled and duplicated.

Image from WikiPedia

Most product pitches go something like this:

• Existing solutions have this problem
• Existing solutions have this problem
• Existing solutions have this problem
• Existing solutions have this problem
• Existing solutions have this problem
• Our solution does not have this problem
• Our solution does not have this problem
• Our solution does not have this problem
• Our solution does not have this problem
• Our solution does not have this problem

The story gets repeated, which makes the whole things boring. A better option is to elaborate on the problems, but then keep the solution section relatively short. You can even show a grid of small screen shots of all your “problem” slides, with tick marks over each one of them.

Presentations have one audience. If you have 2 messages for 2 different audiences you need 2 presentations, or one presentation with 2 clearly marked sections. Using presentation A for audience B does not work, and diluting the content (a bit of A, a bit of B) results in nothing.

If you are lucky, you need to do some extra presentation design work. In the worst case, you might have to back to the fundamental positioning of your business, product, project, idea and cut one of the two options.

Every pitch starts with an informal, but often very good, story/conversation. Then we start to complicate things with slides, templates, storylines, structures until we get to some slide deck. Then, it is often useful to step back to the very fundamental investor questions:

1. What is it they are trying to do? (Often not clear in a presentation)
2. Will anyone want to use it? (Rational logic, emotional gut feel)
3. Can you make money from it? (There are many good ideas that do not deliver a profit)
4. Can this team pull it of? (Probably most important question)
5. (Can I construct a good deal given valuation, cap tables, Board seats, etc.)

Some of my client work is for managers of business units in a large organisation who need to convince the corporate centre to make a politically charged decision. Some mistakes I encounter in the briefing document:

• Most decks start with backgrounds, market trends, history of the unit, all information that is not directly related to the issue on the table. Only in the back (or on the last page), buried in a bullet point comes the central point of the meeting.
• The overall pro/con arguments are not well laid out, you need to distill them from the pages, or sometimes it requires verbal explanation
• Critical arguments that could be backed up by facts are not.

In these type of meetings with a busy senior executive I like to get to the point early. Lay out the options, and summarise why you think your preferred one is the best. Then dive with charts to support the points, where ever you can backed up by facts.

They are different

• A description is an exhaustive, dry representation of a concept. It is what education uses. It is better to add too much information, rather than being incomplete. Description have a standard format, structure (inside, outside, etc.). Descriptions are wordy translations of what can be transferred using an image in one second.
• Stories get to the point. Anticipate the audience’s obvious questions, take into account the audience context, build on what the audience already knows, use surprise and tensions, and a flexible structure that is not always the logical, standard one.

Image from WikiPedia

The bar is rising in presentation design. More and more people know how to design decent slide, more and more people know how to explain a business concept visually.

The challenge that remains is often a very specific point. In most cases, this is the answer to an “elephant in the room” question, a very specific answer to a question an ignorant but intelligent layman might have.

Most people burry these super important points inside a “standard” slide. “Oh, that is the point I make verbally when we present the competition slide.”

I tend to make these points more in your face. Dedicate a specific slide to it. Even sometimes putting things straight in the headline (“No, we are not another Google”).

These slides can be hard to design. The best approach is to listen really carefully when you explain it verbally to someone. “There are 3 groups of products, 1, 2, and 3, but none of them address y”. “Gasoline engines can do x, but with electrical power we can do this.”. “Up until now you could not see at nanometer level, but now it is possible”. Look at the sentences and see what they do. Divide things in groups (boxes), contrasts between two options, “From to”. Your language gives clues about what visual concepts to use. They don’t have to be sophisticated, they just should be clear.

Image via WikiPedia

Each pitch has a weak spot to overcome. How to deal with it in your presentation?

• You can ignore it, sweep it under the carpet. You will have had a very pleasant meeting, but you are unlikely to land the deal
• You can mention it, and support a very shallow case why it is not an issue. (Vague analyst quote)
• Overcompensating, give 15 different possible analysis that triangulate to the most likely market size number. This just might scare your audience. If 50% of you time/charts are about this issue, this must really be a big deal.

Better: admit the issue is there (you scored some realism points in the process). Give an honest defence, but don’t burry the audience in analysis (yet). Wait with that for the 2nd meeting which might have that issue as its sole agenda point.