SlideMagic Blog

Some corporates manage by strategy frameworks and push down a prescribed template down the hierarchy lines: “Tell your story by filling this out”. Should you obey and stock to SWOTs, 7Ss, Porter boxes?

Strategy frameworks are useful to solve a problem. Managers can make sure that everyone covers all the right things. If a framework worked before in a similar business, or during last year’ strategy discussion, then there is a good chance it will work here as well. If you are the CEO of a number of similar businesses, having all your strategy presentations come to you in the same strategy template makes it easy to compare them.

The problem is that strategy frameworks are often too dense to present to a live audience, and that generic templates often do not completely fit the specific situation of a business.

My suggestion: if you are somewhere in the middle management layer of a big company, it is probably best to do your homework and fill out the boring strategy templates. But I would not stop there.

After you created the required pages, do not invest any effort to make them look more interesting, but rather stick them all in the appendix section. Then step back and start crafting your story from scratch ignoring the prescribed frameworks if you have to. When submitting your presentation call your tailor-made presentation the - overused word alert - “Executive Summary” and say in the body of your email that your homework is still featured as the appendix of the document.

Marketing messages cannot be translated 1-on-1 into a presentation. Do not forget to make the translation. The language translation requirement is obvious (everyone can see that marketing jargon does not resonate with a consumer). Sometimes though, you have to further than that and cut messages out, or move them from the explicit text, to the implicit part of your presentation: in between the lines, or told in the verbal explanation of the slides.

Image found on Things real people do not say about advertising.

James Bond movies always start with an opening scene before the title roll. You get lifted out of our audience chair and thrown into the action. In presentation design, you have a similar option.

The conventional route is to put up a summary chart with the key messages you want to give. The James Bond option is to start with some interesting stories and case examples that are not completely tight together in some logical structure. After that short introduction you can put up the page that puts it all together.

Life is tough in the corporate world today. Endless (often useless) meetings, short-term requests that frustrate your attention to get the big job done, a relentless stream of emails. With all these distractions, it is hard to find the time to simply sit down and design/write/dream the story you want to tell. And on top of that, managers assume (correctly) that they know what they want to say, so there is no point wasting two hours to go over the obvious. Incorrect.

Managers suffer from the Curse of Knowledge. Yes, they do know the substance inside out, but cannot explain it to outsiders. Buzzwords and corporate speak have become a morse code, a short cut, that management understands perfectly, but that does not stick with outsiders.

Moreover, outsiders might have difficult questions that do not follow the business-school-like structure a manager would use to explain her business. Writing a story to lecture someone on a new topic is different from writing a story to address the concerns of a highly cynical audience.

And finally, writing a presentation without a proper story brainstorm takes out those personal anecdotes and jokes that can make your presentation so much more interesting.

In the end, many corporate presentations work out and are great. But very often this is the result of a reset in the middle of the design process. After the presentation is almost ready to go, people take a step back and start discussing the story, which often in  a complete redesign of the deck.

Some presentations are a series of ideas, a number of products, a string of business unit updates. Most people try to force some sort of uniform framework to discuss all options: market potential, challenges, next steps, etc. But often you find that that one framework does not work for all the stories you want to tell. In those cases, feel free to drop the uniformity and pick the visualisation that fits best for that particular story.

Many clients insist on making sure that all the big points of a presentation are made by page 3. Why? Decades of boring PowerPoint has shown them that things past page 3 get lost in an endless stream of bullet points. Making sure your point gets made by page 3 means making sure that your point gets made in the first 20 minutes of a pitch.

The result: you are stuck in the middle. The story up to page 3 is too long to serve as a really crisp summary, and falls short on conveying the message with full impact (the real killer chart sits on page 37). A shame that people will switch off on page 4 and beyond.

Here is a better strategy: design a deck that takes 20 minutes to present with all the important points inside, telling your story once instead of saying what you will tell them (by page 3), saying it, saying what you just told them (slide 78).

Yes, many of the slide decks I design for clients are meant as support for a stand up presentation. But I think these cases are the minority.

What most clients are after is a different concept: the documentation of their story. The idea in their head, captured, recorded, somehow. This story can then be emailed, shared online, discussed in a 1-on-1 meeting and yes, presented live.

And when I stand back and see from which perspective I design, I think - to my surprise - that it actually is the 1-on-1 personal dialogue. When that conversation is nailed, I make the adjustments for bigger audiences.

Maybe not so strange after all though. Everything starts with a simple human conversation.

How do you showcase your application in a 20 minute pitch? Doing a full, live demo is hardly ever an option:

• Murphy’s Law will strike, and your Internet connection will break down, and if not, another technical issue will hit you
• Some aspects of your app are interesting to show, others are boring and time consuming (loggin in, entering some data, etc.)
• It is hard to stay focussed and on script in a live application, before you know you have lost yourself in an interesting feature and spent far too much time on your demo.

In a short VC pitch, doing a live demo is likely to take the energy and momentum out of our talk. The other solution is showing a bunch of screen shots. But how can we transform a series of uninspiring screen shots into an exciting use case of your product? Some steps to consider:

• Base the whole section on a story. The best stories are real: find an actual customer, disguise everything so it is impossible to expose private information and build the entire screen shot demo on her case.
• Alternate between regular visuals and screen shots. Use a map to show locations, use images taken in the street to give things a sense of place.
• When using screen shots, crop out all the clutter that is irrelevant: operating system window bars, icons, browser navigations and put huge arrows or circles to focus the viewer attention to what you want to see them. Use big text to emphasise what you are doing and why it is so great (“We open an account in just one click”).
• Throughout your story, stay consistent: the same user, the same location, the same issue she is trying to solve.

To many, this might sound as an obvious question. “Hey, this deck is here to get my idea funded!” While this might be the ultimate goal of your presentation, it is usual to break down the process in its individual steps.

The objective of a short elevator-pitch-like-chat or coffee discussion is not to receive the investment, it is to get to the next meeting. And reaching that next stage involves intriguing your audience enough, maybe leaving out some of the tedious detail, while not forgetting to completely  nail that big elephant-in-the-room-issue (even if it means going into excruciating detail).

Probably one of the few areas where visuals do not contribute to more effective communication is on restaurant menus. When I stand outside a place and see a menu with an image of a greasy hamburger on a laminated piece of paper I decide to move on, because I have eaten in too many bad restaurants that use food photography on their menu. My brain has hardwired the relationship: food image on menu -> bad food.

The greasy hamburger image effect also applies to slides. The second you put your first one on the screen, people compare that visual to the 1,000s of other presentation slides they have seen. If it is a list of bullet points, you have lost your audience before you uttered your first sentence.

(P.S. I think typography is a big opportunity for bad restaurants: cut down on the images, replace the laminated menus with pictures for nice heavy paper with freshly printed menus (new every day) using lots of white space and a chique font, and business will boom in your tourist trap. But hey, if you are willing to put in this amount of effort into your business, why not start improving the food…)