SlideMagic Blog

I have been posting less on the blog over the past weeks. Given the current events in Ukraine, it would just not look right when the SlideMagic twitter account posts happy titles such as “A new and exciting way to crop your images” amid all the other stuff that is going on.

The current war is also a big communication war. And in times of conflict, it might be wise to count to 10 before saying things after seeing these horrible images coming out of the battlefield. Western leaders have been very aggressive in their language: ‘total economic war’ etc. etc. The problem is with all of this is that you need to keep a ladder for the other side to climb down, rather than throwing oil on the fire. The world already knows that you are (rightfully) upset.

The better strategy:

• Use a more matter of fact tone in communicating sanctions: “we don’t like what you are doing, here is what we do to show that we mean it, we will reverse if you do”
• Show unity and resolve
• Go after economic targets that really hurt, rather than things that are high profile but don’t actually mean very much
• Instead of leaking to the press how many arms you supplied or might supply, brief them on how to calculate the economic impact of the sanctions, now, in 1 week, and one month from now
• Maintain a cold and rational calculation of the financial damage done and communicate it
• Maintain a cold and rational evidence trail of wire crimes committed and communicate it
• Keep on ratcheting up the sanctions, without the polemic rhetoric.

English has become the default language in business. I would recommend anyone designing a deck for an external audience to use that language for the slides, but still present in your local language if that works for the people you are speaking to.

• Your business might be dealing with local contacts at the moment, but that could change in the future.
• Building on this. Increasingly, people use remote talent for certain tasks, having your documents in English helps these people getting on board
• People have gotten used to English text in advertising. A presentation in Hebrew (weird characters, written right-to-left, even looks strange to Hebrew speaking investor audience here in Tel Aviv.)

And there is another benefit. If you slides are in English, but you need to tell. your story in another language, you cannot easily fall back to just reading the text on your slides. Instead, you need to make it your own story.

In business school we learned how to write a business plan and which slides go with it: market size, competitors, business model, etc. etc. The resulting slide deck is usually the first “presentation” of the company and often used as the basis for an investor or sales pitch deck as well. (Same happens when the last Board strategy deck gets recycled into a sales presentation for a more mature company).

Board presentations and business plan presentations are well, sets of slides that serve Board and strategy meetings. A sales or investor meeting requires a sales or investor presentation.

If you noticed that you always deviate from your slides when pitching your company, you might have the wrong slide deck in front of you,

I saw these headings of a well-known story line structure being put up literally on a website in a big font size. What? Paragraph of text, how?, paragraph of text, why?, paragraph of text.

I like to use these frameworks in a more indirect way. Use them as guidelines to set up your story. Use them as a checklist to see that you covered everything, use them as a starting point if you are stuck in writer’s block, and most importantly, if they don’t work for your specific situation, pick another one or use your own.

The same applies to visual frameworks (SWOT, etc. etc.). They are designed to help you get started with grouping ideas, but if you find yourself forcing things in boxes that do not really fit, pick another one.

Guitarist John Mayer starred in the launch video for a more affordable version of his signature guitar for PRS Guitars. Some interesting presentation lessons in here.

• It worked, the video gets even linked to on a presentation blog
• A naked and vulnerable pitch. A bare bone background, just him and the instrument, putting his entire reputation at stake by recommending this guitar. “Skin in the game”. Different from celebrities wearing a watch, driving a car, or holding an espresso cup.
• A very nice use of the “best of both worlds” storyline. Up until now you had to choose between A or B, but as of today, you can have both.
• Very clever addressing of target audiences. Hard core guitar players that admire John for his skill, and die hard fans that admire John for his songs are included implicitly. But parents buying guitars for their kids (and maybe secretly for themselves) are addressed directly with a clear excuse to go and get one.

A great sales pitch

I took my daughter to Paris a few weeks ago (just before the new COVID wave) for a very short trip (Thanks Giving). She found it far too short, while I agreed that it was short, but still felt it was a nice and restful break.

The probable reason? I have been to Paris many times before, even lived right next to it for a year. For me, going back to it simply triggered a memory of all the stories and experiences I had there before. (A tip for prioritizing short holiday destinations).

The same happens with a presentation slide. For the person / team that made it that bullet point sentence (or even word) makes perfect sense, because it packs the entire 3 months worth of effort. For the first-time listeners, it is a cryptic sentence.

How do we end up with so many presentations that are mainly slides with bullet points?

A pitch usually has 2 types of slides. The clear cut ones: head shots of the team, columns with revenue forecasts, pictures of the product, screenshots of the app, table of the budget.

Then there are the ones that are less clear, the ones that need to tell the story behind your idea. When we start off,:

1. we don’t exactly know what they need to say,
2. we don’t know exactly what they should look like

These are 2 big challenges. It is not obvious to craft the story line with messages, and after you did that, it is not obvious to design a slide that delivers the message.

What happens? We open a slide editor and start putting in sentences on slides, move slides around. We can’t think about design, because we don’t know the content of the slide yet. As a result, the default bullet point list becomes the design that actually sticks.

We work really hard on the messages, get our colleagues to comment on them, get our boss to “sign off” that exact message (after we added the qualifying comment on line 3). And more and more, the presentation starts to make sense to us (the writer). The slides become mental placeholders, and in our bullet point frame of mind, every new slide will look exactly like the previous one. This is the mental model we are working with.

Professional communication is getting more efficient, informal, and to the point. Long memos, turn into emails, turn into quick messages. Polite greetings that used to be the protocol in letters are left out.

In certain settings, the formalities of the past are still present. The dinner speech for example. We look back at the past year, summarise our achievements, thank everyone involved. A good speech can be inspiring and a joy to listen to. It can be great to see someone get the thank you she deserves.

A routine speech is boring though: running through a long list of names, waiting for a round of applause for each one of them, becoming softer and softer as the we read down the piece of paper. The audience is polite, but is probably secretly hoping for the thing to be over, and/or, curious to hear what the real news is that is coming at the end of the talk.

When writing an update email (or update-presentation-attachment), the politeness is no longer required, you no longer have a captive audience. People speed read through your paragraphs to the things that really matter.

Keep that in mind when writing it. Make the things that matter stand out. Make that thank you that you really mean stand out.

Giving a demo of your application or web site to an investor or potential partner is different from teaching a new user how to use it by herself.

For the user:

• Where do all the buttons sit
• How to log in
• How to update settings
• Where to find your account details
• How to create a project from scratch
• Etc.

For the investor / partner:

• What does the app do?
• Show me a walk through of a “story” or use case
• Have a project ready to show
• Look, there is actually a piece of software that is working…
• Etc.

In presentations, you are most likely to deal with scenario 2. Do all the prep work (logging in etc.), and design a very clear script of what you want to show, cutting out any tangents and other delays. Keep it short and focused. Rehearse your walk through, and as a backup, have a series of consecutive screenshots ready just in case Murphy’s law kicks in.

Some article titles are click bait, others seem genuinely interesting and I am curious to find out the answer to the question posed. The disappointment is big when the journalist embarks on a very long story where characters are introduced and developed, background stories presented until the punch line comes somewhere halfway the 10 minute article.

A good product or company pitch does not have to be long.