SlideMagic Blog

Most clients give an almost perfect verbal investor or sales pitch in our first briefing meeting. Somehow, in one on one meetings it is easy to connect with the 1-person audience, and construct a compelling story with a natural flow.

As soon as the number of people increases, something goes wrong.  Luckily we have our presentation slides projected big on the wall to remind us to get on with telling our story just like we did in the 1-on-1 meeting.

And here is the secret of the professional presentation designer: I often follow that first raw 1-on-1 pitch very closely in my story flow design. But do not tell anyone.

1. A tangent that distracts from the overall story, especially confusing for a novice audience who comes in completely cold to what you want to say
2. A deep dive that serves as an example to support a major point in your presentation.

If your corporation consists of business units, than your corporate presentation is likely to end up as a series of chapters, each talking about a different business unit. If the corporate centre is organised, then each chapter might have the same repetitive template/structure. Each business unit gets airtime based on how important it is (usually in terms of sales). The order of the chapters is probably in line with the seniority of the business unit leader. It all makes sense in the political structure of the company.

Your real story might be different though. A small business unit might have all the growth potential that your investors are curious about. A more junior manager might be a captivating speaker. The same presentation template might not fit the specific story of each business unit. Seeing exactly the same template 10 times is boring. And how do all the business unit stories link together to a bigger picture?

Sometimes it is better going top down than bottom up.

Two approaches to pitching your product. I prefer #2

1. Engineering approach: explain the layered product architecture and the solution process, and after this theory lecture you can make a perfect logical case about why your product delivers this great value to your customer.
2. Customer-focussed approach: highlight the big issues the customer has (to get that nodding head), go through the benefits that your solution offers and only hint at the technical magic that allows you to deliver them. If the customer is interested, you can do pitch #1 in a second meeting.

This is a text editor that only allows you to use the 1,000 most common words in English (“thousand” is not one of them, hence they called it “ten hundred”). Try writing something, it is pretty hard.

Here is a blog where scientists use the tool to describe their research projects.

In the beginning of a presentation design project, things are fluid. You are open to different approaches to tell the story, the look and feel of slides. But once you created a good first draft, you become hesitant to change it, even when smart people give good advice. I have seen many decks that started with an apology: this was the slide deck that they used since last year, but now we tell the story a bit different. Have the courage to change your presentation as your story evolves.

Market positioning can be difficult for a product manager. Your product has so many features, you know the detailed spec comparisons versus all your competitors. Everything is not simple or black and white. But marketing is about making choices: who to target, with which benefits and turn that into a really simple story. And that means making decisions about what to cut out.

Designing a presentation is similar. Your story might have many angles, many background stories, an interesting history of how you got where you are, interesting perspectives on how your competitors are positioned in the market. A clear presentation has eliminated these distractions.

Remember, a marketing presentation is not a lecture about your industry, your company, or yourself but about solving your customer’s problem.

These are the best client situations. A presenter who has delivered a story a thousand times, the story flow is great but completely disconnected from the (poorly designed) slides. When I receive the existing slide deck without explanation I cannot make much of it. But as soon as the presenter ads the verbatim (“This is what I usually do…”) a powerful story comes out that is usually told over slide 1 of the presentation.

When redesigning a presentation, start with the audio track and ignore the existing slides.

Sometimes it is useful to frame your entire story in 1 table on 1 page. The other day, I had a client in the semiconductor industry. The story centred around 3 things that matter (the column headings). Then, the rows were: first: current product features, next row: why they cause problems, next row: what bottleneck you need to overcome to solve this, next row: how the bottleneck is overcome, next row: alternative product features. In a written management consulting report, you can stop here. A live presentation requires more work. The presentation design challenge is now to take this boring table and turn it into a compelling story, spreading it out over many pages and many minutes. The table is a little cheat sheet to make sure you have captured everything.

A story works great in a TED talk, but a cute personal anecdote might be less effective in a highly charged and political Board room meeting where a strategy decision has to be made. What can you do when you are in the hot seat? Some thoughts.

Cut to the chase. In a typical Board meeting, most attendants are probably familiar with the basics of what is being discussed. Leave out the descriptive intro, send big data fact packs before the meeting as background reading.

Create some sort of pro and con chart that summarises your logic for picking a certain option. Group the no-brainers on both side of the argument to avoid losing a lot of presentation time on issues that everyone agrees on. Single out the more contentious issues that should be debated. Keep coming back to this chart if someone brings up a point that has already been discussed, or that is a no brainer.

Push the rational argument with quantification and analysis all the way to the end. Not just the inputs (market share, customer satisfaction) but take things right down to a metric that matters (profit in scenario A, profit in scenario B).

Think about how to push the emotional side of the argument. Focus group quotes by customers look like just another text slide, adding a picture of the participant makes it a real person, putting a video snippet makes it even more credible.

Good luck!