SlideMagic Blog

Continuing my post from yesterday about interpreting feedback and deciding who to ignore, and who to believe.

In very short presentations (15 minutes) you can get away with a small glitch in your story flow. Your audience will get the whole picture fairly quickly, even if there was a slide bump in the way you told the story. You like to tell the story this way, the test audience liked it the other way, so be it.

A big red flag though will come from the sort of (content, substance) questions people ask.

• Do you find yourself answering a question by giving a completely new mini presentation on a white board to explain something fundamental to your idea? Time to incorporate this into the main presentation.
• Does the test audience ask questions that are totally trivial to you? Example: the reasons why current solutions do not work. Maybe you are going to fast in the opening of your presentation. Time to back up and take it slower at the beginning.
• Do people try to compare you to specific other players, competitors? It is rarely a good idea to overly emphasise your competitors in a presentation, but if an issue comes up all the time in Q&A, it is better to take it head on in your main story.

Questions are important indicators of whether the audience got your message, or not.

The Associated Press will start using a bot to generate verbatim on company earnings reports. The system takes as input the financial data, and then recycles that into human stories: earnings went up 3%, which is 0.5% higher than the financial services average and leads to an expected gross margin of 46% in Q3.

I never understood the point of journalists spelling out information in sentences that is much better communicated in graphs. Proof is that this translation is easily automated. The only use I can see is in translating data to audio for people who cannot take their eyes of the traffic and still want to digest data.

Instead of using the bot, AP should invest in better data visualisation.

Every story has a few key messages. And a message is not something like “We are a highly flexible, customer-satisfying, and scalable platform, that delivers return on marketing investment.” Things need to be more specific.

For example, you have a company pitch that makes your startup sound like - yet another - social network to the ignorant outsider, and you are not. Rather than making this important point verbally, explaining around the slides, it is better to take the issue head-on: write “We are not a social network” at the top of the slide and design the most powerful visual you can think of to visualize it.

Maybe use 2 charts. One can be incredibly simple: 2 circles, one says ”Social network”, the other “Us”. Then in the next slide (using the same headline) provide factual evidence/explanation why you are not. And factual evidence is not the same as writing a long bullet point: “We are not a social network” (duplicating the headline). You need to list some sort of feature comparison between social networks and your application.

In many presentation design projects, I start by building some sort of overview slide that is highly dense, complex, but has the whole story/solution on it. This enables me to shuffle things around, split things up, merge things, until I feel confident that I can move the other way: simplify. The designer has to go to the bottom of complexity in order to save the audience from having to do the same thing.

Here is another argument against dense bullet points.

Most business presentations today are read on a screen (increasingly a tablet), rather than watched live. You might think that bullet points are actually good for reading on a screen. They are, BUT. People have become so impatient, and overloaded with presentations that they just “page down” a document quickly, reading the headline and thinking “OK, I get it, next…” [click] [click] [click]

The only way to slow that reader down is to break up that bullet point chart in multiple slides and write the important messages clear and in her face, supported by the right visual.

Often, detail can be good. Big-picture pitches are vague and generic, and sometimes even insulting to an intelligent audience. Diving in deep in selected aspects of your story shows that you know what you are talking about, and often, the big innovation might be coming from something very specific.

This is detail to adds to, builds on, one story line.

Details that distract from the main story confuse. Going off on a tangent, getting bogged down, are not going to help to convince an audience that comes in cold and which has barely had the time to get used to your funny sounding English accent.

Leave the side tracks for later (if at all), wait for the key idea to sink in.

Today, everyone is talking about “story telling” in presentations. That is great: stories are much more memorable than dry descriptive bullet points. But business presentations are not action-packed thriller movies, and when you force story telling on a business presentation, you will know, and the audience will know as well.

I take a pragmatic approach to story telling in business presentations. Rather than forcing myself to come up with a story, I take a step back and think about what makes a good story, and what makes a good story teller, and applies those elements to my business presentation.

• Use human language, and cut all marketing speak and buzzwords
• Establish some sort of connection to the audience before you dive into the content. Tell something personal that explains why you are passionate about the subject you are talking about.
• At the starting point, set a setting, or a stage that is familiar to the audience. In a sales pitch, this is often the confirmation of a specific problem that a customer is facing.
• From this starting point, build up to the surprise, the unexpected, the contrast. This tension makes a story stick. If possible you would go through multiple waves of the familiar setting, and the contrasting surprise. As a result you might well have to give up on your business school style logical presentation structure.

The other day I had a potential client on the phone who was under time pressure. She asked me whether I could work on the structure/framework of the presentation (and the template) while in parallel they would start filling things in.

When you start a project and need to cut up work among multiple team members, a skeleton or presentation framework can be really helpful: someone works on the market, someone works on the competition, while someone else takes on the financials.

When you get to the stage where you have to present your conclusions to others (i.e., the analytical work is done), putting structure before content is wrong. As a presentation designer you need to know the content first, translate that into a story, and in the process you come up with a structure which is engaging and convincing, a structure that often will deviate from business school presentation templates, consulting pyramid structures and other logical frameworks.

Problem solving: structure first, then content. Convincing: content first, then structure.

In presentations, clear and stunning are not the same thing. I have seen many stunning infographics that are not clear at all. And more importantly, it is perfectly possible to make a clear and convincing business presentations without stunning visual effects.

Especially in business presentations, people often want to go for stunning first, and commission expensive graphics design or video creation work. It is wiser to hold of with this until you have a simple presentation that 1) makes it clear what you want (touch the head) (believe me, I have seen many presentations that do not even pass this hurdle) and 2) convinces people to do something (touches the heart).

A company presentation will be used for many different audiences: investors, Board meetings, sales meetings, people who know the company, people who see the company for the first time. There is the temptation to start working on a different presentation for each different audience. Resist.

First of all, I hope your story is the same for all these audiences. I have seen companies that want to change the story depending on who they pitch to. I think it is very hard to build a successful with an inconsistent market positioning and purpose. So let us assume that there is one story.

Even though different audiences require different amounts of detail for specific parts of the story, each audience still needs to put everything in that overarching framework. Leaving things out will break the flow of the story. So, even for highly a knowledgeable scientist audience, I would still put in one (place holder) chart to remind us all of the very basics of a certain medical condition.

From a practical point of view, it is also very difficult to maintain multiple versions of the same presentation. A small correction on page 10, needs to be duplicated everywhere.

The bottom line, I create one overall master deck and sit down for before every presentation meeting to cut down the presentation to size.