SlideMagic Blog

The speaker puts up the “Company background” as the first slide with bullet points full of founding dates, employee numbers, when the second office was opened, etc. etc.

You probably lost half your audience.

For the presenter, the company history is incredibly relevant. It summarises your entire path (10 years) that got you here neatly on 1 page. It makes total sense.

For the audience, company history does not matter that much (maybe with the exception of luxury brands), what solution are you offering today? Also, company history slides tend to look remarkably similar across companies. So the audience probably saw it before, somewhere else.

Often, the history slide is a left over from when the company was still small. It always was page 2 of the deck, we just updated the employee and office numbers for each presentation. And the same slides are probably used in different presentations. When the founder addresses the annual sales staff gathering, the company history told directly by her, might actually be funny and/or insightful. But she is unlikely to stick to the bullets on the slide. And, the same bullets in the hand of a sales rep sound boring and without context.

Photo by Pawel Kadysz on Unsplash

Everyday strategy presentations are not TEDTalks that makes the audience cry. The subject matter is usually a bit dryer, and the audience is not there to sit back and watch the show, instead, the objective is to get out of the room as soon as possible.

So, what can “move” a business audience? I thought back about decks I have seen, and here are some examples:

• A surprising fact, something that goes against the common believe of the audience. If you have one like this: put it incredibly bold on a slide (a simple comparison bar chart with 2 bars can be all that you need).
• A logic flow that involves 2nd and 3rd order effects: especially when discussing scenarios, game theory, options, uncertainty, possible outcomes. Thinking beyond tomorrow and see the inevitability where things are going on the current path, can wake/shake up the audience
• A brave quantification of something that people think cannot be quantified. Yes, you know you are wrong, but with ranges and focusing on what matters and what not, you can put things in perspective.
• Being complete, putting up all the available options for discussion, options that include “this is not how the industry does things”. This can sometimes be mathematical process of generating all possible combination of actions
• A case example, customer story, that could be extrapolated to the entire company and could have huge implications

This is not a complete list, but something to get you started.

Cover image by Tanner Larson on Unsplash

In some cases, a stand up presentation is an emotional story telling performance that moves your audience to do something they did not know they wanted to do 60 minutes before.

However, not every presentation is like this. The majority of slides are presented in small conference rooms, the “trenches” of the economy, where middle management tries to get a decision agreed in the middle of opposing viewpoints, office politics, and interpersonal meeting dynamics.

In these meetings your deck is actually the agenda for that meeting. Make sure things get discussed, make sure people have the facts, make sure the right trade offs are presented, and make sure a decision is made in the end.

Think about this when putting your deck together. Which facts are obvious, which facts are disputed, what info is counter intuitive, what is likely to spark a big debate, what not, etc. etc.

The presenter is telling a story, but also orchestrating a number of humans.

Cover image by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

Everyone knows (from experience) that bullet point charts full of text don’t work. Still, now and then, I need to make a chart that is full of points, literally.

Why?

To make the point that there are tons and tons and tons of arguments in favour of something. The business, the abundance of points, IS the message of the chart.

How do I keep it readable?

Separate the chart that makes the point that there are lots of points from the slides that actually explain the points:

• Show the overview chart that lists all the points, but not as written out sentences. For example, you can use circles with short descriptors in them: “low cost”, “quick”, “beautiful”. Resist the temptation to go into detail about each of the circles,
• Bring all (or a subset) of the arguments to the forefront with individual slides, here you can show your cost comparisons, speed comparisons, etc.
• After the supporting slides, bring back your original chart with a slightly different headline

Note that this is an exception. Most arguments can be nailed with 3-5 decisive points. Rarely, I encounter the logic that “Each of these points are ‘mah’, but if you add them all up, a compelling case arises”. In that case, use the above approach.

Cover image by averie woodard on Unsplash

Want to use a cartoon in your presentation? Here are some things to consider:

• Humor in a presentation can work, but be careful what sort of jokes you pick. A cartoon that was very funny late last night when you prepared the slides, could not fit the meeting context the next morning after that earlier remark that did not go down well. If you hardwired the wrong cartoon in your slide deck, make sure to click-skip really quickly.
• Do you have the copyright for the cartoon you just found on Google Image search?
• Does the cartoon actually add something to the presentation, or is it a business cartoon cliche?
• Can the audience actually read what is written on the cartoon from the back row?
• And finally, do you give the audience enough time to read it? As soon as you put a cartoon on the screen, everyone will start squinting to read what Dilbert has to say, and no one is listening anymore what you say at the same time. It might be best to pause your presentation until the first giggles start emerging from the audience. And remember the audience reads the cartoon for the first time, and needs more time than you to understand it. If you have to, you might have to read out the cartoon to the audience.

Cover image by Samantha Lorette on Unsplash

Sometimes I work on presentations that border on legal or regulatory disputes. Two parties need to convince some independent party or regulator that they are right, often with the help of independent experts.

The briefing presentation at the start of a project usually is a left over of the original project presentation, it makes the case for the project in general but buries the actual smaller issue that is being discussed now, for example environmental impact.

What follows is a verbal discussion with the old slides as a background: then we did this, then we hired her, then we installed this technology, then they disputed the data, then we did a test (but changed it a bit), they came up with these counter arguments, that do not really apply to this situation. To the outsider who has not been part of the process it is completely impossible to understand the arguments.

In a situation like this:

• Start from scratch and build a presentation in which 95% of the time is spent on the issue at hand
• Make sure that your flow of logic is clear
• Separate the arguments that are undisputed, from more contentious issues
• If the other party has a major counter argument, there is no point in hiding it, you might as well put it in your presentation prominently, and with your solid argument why it is not a valid point
• Pick your battles, if the other side has a point that is pretty much true and hard to disprove, don’t spend energy trying to make an impossible case against it. You will loose credibility when making other points that really count

The other day, one of my clients simply wanted to give up on explaining his concept to the typical 50% of people who “simply did not get it”.

In life there are many situations where you “give up” on certain people. Students who fail the entrance exam of a university, job applicants that did not make the cut, athletes who miss the qualifying threshold for the Olympics, contestants who did not make it to the next round of American Idol.

When presenting your company, you need to put the blame not on the audience, but on your presentation. Your targeted audience should understand your message. And that audience can differ: a presentation to a general audience, journalists, scientific experts can build on different levels of pre-existing knowledge and background.

Often, as a presenter you suffer from the curse of knowledge, you are so deep into your own story that you cannot possibly imagine how someone who is new to the subject cannot get it. Another reason for the disconnect is different types of reasoning/thinking of people. When people frown in disbelief, it might not be because that they did not understand what you are trying to say, they might have a valid different approach to evaluating your pitch that you have not yet covered in your presentation.

When you leave the room, your chosen audience of high school students or elite academics should understand your message. Whether they agree with it, that is a second challenge, but they understood where you are coming from.

Looking back at more than 10 years of presentation design work, I noticed that my best decks are often the ones that were designed for very short time slots, usually pitch competitions where a speaker would have 5-10 minutes to give it all.

Why?

• These requests would often come after the client and I completed the “regular” presentation: I went through the process of getting to know the company in-depth, but, and this is important, I had given the content some rest, and when coming back to something after a couple of weeks, you often get an even better perspective on how to tell the story
• The all-or-nothing 5 minutes makes the client more confident to take visual risks: bolder, simpler slides
• The client would rehearse more (it is easy to run through a 5 minute story twenty times) and as a result would stumble on imperfect story flows more often

So maybe there is a natural evolution in presentations:

1. The internal strategy/board deck where you lay out your company’s ideas and make strategic decisions (management consultants stop here)
2. An attempt at a bullet point story line for a pitch (most pitch presentations stop here)
3. The properly designed company pitch deck (my projects often stop here)
4. The “let’s give it one more go deck”

Photo by Mitchell Hollander on Unsplash

The majority of business pitches do not have the entertainment value of a Harry Potter story. It is hard to transform that customer case example where you installed new servers that are 4x faster into a fast-paced, spell-binding campfire story. And no, few people will be interested in the 30 minute mini episode of a “day in the life of” your hypothetical customer in Amsterdam who had a scalability issue.

So what elements of “story telling” can we use in everyday business presentations? Some ideas.

• A sequence or flow that keeps the audience interested to hear the next point. This flow might be completely different from a text book business analysis.
• Some sort of framework, context that keeps the whole thing together. If you use a quantified case example, us the it throughout the presentation to explain different concepts. If you use analogies, keep them comparable.
• Show data points to which the audience can relate to. Per bottle, % of sales, hours saved. Abstract numbers don’t talk
• Slow down in details that are interesting, relevant, have the courage to skip over content that is obvious and or repetitive
• Introduce unexpected transitions, “You think this is obvious, right? Well it isn’t. Did you know that…”

Business presentations can use elements of story telling without having to open with “let me tell you a story…”

Image via WikiPedia

All my clients want that presentation that uses story telling and captivating images to hook its audience emotionally and gets them to sign an investment check right here, right now.

But sometimes that beautiful story is not the issue. Ideas can be pretty simple to describe, the market size easily understood, what is left is the concern that company can actually make it happen.

Business models, cost structures, go-to-market routes, hiring plans, product releases, all “boring stuff” that pretty much only can be captured in McKinsey-style tables. Ah, that annoying presentation designer who keeps on pointing out inconsistencies between the slides.

These cases also highlight why certain companies can do incredibly well in big audience pitch competitions, but fail to raise money from professional investors scrutinizing the details in small conference rooms.