SlideMagic Blog

A good pitch should be a crescendo of energy and excitement. Ideally it goes up all the way through the story. But it is hard to avoid even for the best story tellers that in the middle of the presentation the audience attention drops a bit. Make sure to bring everyone back to the tip of their chairs at the end tough.

A sure energy sapper is a last presentation slide full of bullet points that recap the entire presentation. “Oh no, he is going to read out the entire thing!” When the presenter is at bullet 2, the audience has finished reading the entire page full of things they already heard over the past 20 minutes.

A better approach is to repeat one crucial visual, diagram, image on the last page that reflects a key point in your presentation. It will be visual memory anchor point for your entire presentation.

Art: Paul Klee, The Red Balloon, 1922

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…They all have their own traditional language. Complicated contracts, evasive and woolly statements, illegible prescriptions, religious books only written in Latin, and bullet point-filled PowerPoint presentations full of jargon and buzzwords. These languages were formed by tradition, and some may argue are here to protect a profession (who needs a lawyer when you can seal agreements with a simple paragraph?).

And yes, I put business presentations in the same category. Change is already happening. Formal letters are replaced by short, informal emails. The woolly Microsoft Word long hand memo was replaced by PowerPoint bullets. And for very important presentations (1% of the total?), businesses start investing in visual, custom designed, presentations (the work I do under the Idea Transplant name)

But change can go further.  The other 99% of business presentations can be different as well. These documents do not have to be graphically stunning, loaded with the latest animation and zooming effects, or full of exciting video clips. They need to look good, and they need to have a clear, crisp, direct, visual language.

It requires a change in the corporate language that corporate executives are using. And making that change is hard. Requiring a new complicated piece of software for it would kill the change before it even starts. The idea behind my presentation design app SlideMagic is to stop comparing business language to that used by lawyers, politicians, doctors, and priests…

Art: Benjamin Ferrers, The Court of Chancery during the reign of George I, circa 1725

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Management consulting stories are always divided in 3 or 5 components (optimally starting with the same letter), and each of these is then divided into 3 sub components as well.

Connect, communicate, control. And to achieve connect we need to aggregate, accumulate, and accelerate. This works reasonably well in documents for reading (if the verbs are chosen meaningfully and not using a dictionary looking for words starting with C).

Verbal pitches are a bit different though. A human, person-to-person story is flatter, more linear. It is hard to go up one level, down to the second point if we do not have the hierarchical structure in front of us. Also, using too many words that start with a C make you sound like a consulting report, not like a genuine speaker.

Listen to yourself: if it sounds wrong it probably is wrong.

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.

Many presentations degenerate over time. What started fresh, clean, and straight to the point gets diluted over time.

More people start editing the presentation. They do not understand all the slides 100%, so they add bubbles and bullet points with text just to make sure that the point gets made somewhere in the presentation. Bits of the same messages start appearing on slides throughout the document.

Over time, the company positioning can change a bit. Rather than starting with a clean sheet, the old presentation gets adjusted. The result: a bit of the old, a bit of the new.

Do spring cleaning now and then.

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.

Professors, researchers, and teachers like to start their lectures with an extensive discussion of the background and/or context of an issue. Talking about the background is useful if it adds to the story, if it does not it is boring content that fills up those important first minutes of your talk where the audience is still sharp and awake.

Some examples of excess background:

• Tangents, side steps
• History that is important to you (when your company was founded), but irrelevant to the audience (unless you are a Champagne house that goes back to the 1700s)
• Preaching to the converted: spending slide after slide with data the audience is already familiar with, or arguing about issues the audience already agrees with

You are not giving a lecture in economics or history, you are trying to sell an idea.

Jokes can be great ice breakers in presentations. Jokes can also be incredibly awkward when introduced in the wrong meeting, at the wrong time, with an audience who is not ready for them.

Here is my advice: do not hardwire risky jokes into your slides, but rather, keep the option to tell them verbally. If the mood is right, go for it, if the audience vibe is not right, you can bail out at the very last moment.

Borat bathing suit slides cannot be unseen, even when double clicked really quickly…

A summary slide in a presentation is not a slide that repeats your entire story. Repetition is boring, and unless you are preparing your audience for an exam, there is no need to force them to remember the precise content of your presentation. What you want them to do is take some action (invite you for the second meeting for example). The best punch you can give at the end is to repeat a key visual from somewhere inside the deck and keep it to that. The audience will connect to it and think of it in the context of all the other things you said before.

And after that we come in with the usual “blah blah blah” pitch. I hear this often in briefing meetings.

1. You are offending your audience
2. You probably do not believe in your own story
3. You have become tired of given the same pitch all over again
4. You are probably winging the story, a true blah, blah, blah experience for your audience

Invent a fresh approach to telling your story, believe in it, and stand for it. No more blah, blah, blah in the story outline.