SlideMagic Blog

When you have invested in a great animated promotion video to put on your website, why not use it in your presentation? A good video can tell a relatively complex story in under 2 minutes. Most of these videos contain high quality art work that is great for use in a presentation.

Embed the video in your presentation (I prefer putting in the actual file rather than linking to an YouTube video) and create visual connections later on in the deck using screen shots of the video (either page-filling or small thumbnails).

Do not feel embarrassed that that video just cut your bullet point product explanation from 15 minutes to just 2, your audience will appreciate it.

If you got the attention of a potential investor in a random setting you can decide how to use your 2 minutes. One option is the 1-way monologue, where every single one of these precious 120 seconds is filled with information and facts.

The other option is pitch your idea briefly, read someone’s face, interpret a quick question and adjust your story to the concern you see.

I think the second approach is better. Maybe you lose 30 seconds of airtime, but the other 90 seconds are definitely more effective.

More and more of my presentations start to use video, and my preferred format for emailing/Dropboxing decks is PDF, so how do you insert a video in PDF? It is easy with Adobe Acrobat X:

1. Save your presentation (PowerPoint or Keynote) as a PDF without the video
2. Open the deck in Acrobat X and select tools at the top right
3. Select multimedia, select video, and draw where your video should go with the cross hairs
4. Select the video file, or insert a YouTube link (I went for the first option, the video size was below 10MB)
5. Select advanced options, and select use poster image from file to pick the right cover
6. Click done

The investment bankers of a recent client insisted on the traditional Executive Summary to send to potential investors. I used this video and a 3 column dense text layout to turn a boring bullet point list into a nice looking one page document meant for reading and watching.

Unfortunately, the video does not (yet) play on an iPad…

The slides hurt the eyes, but the content is good. VC Dave McClure just posted an update of his deck with advice on how to pitch a VC.

How to Pitch a VC (or Angel)

The other day I could a project inquiry. The current deck looked like an infographic, it was very nicely done: soft pastel colors, retro fonts, nice icons. Still, the company had difficulty finding traction with investors: where is the meat, where are the numbers, this looks like an ad.

Many VCs come out of the world of engineering or banking which has a certain quantitative, macho communication style to it. Even if your product positioning is “cute”, your investor presentation should probably a bit more testosteron-loaded.

In my previous life as a management consultant, I have spent many years inside consumer goods companies. Believe me, their management presentations do not look like the ads they put on TV for their products.

I am not saying that you should kill the cute slide deck (the world would be a lot more boring if that happened on a large scale), I just wanted to emphasize that if you decide to go with this style to be aware of your audience and compensate in some other way.

Case studies in investor and sales presentations are most of the time hollow and fluffy quotes that were clearly the result of an email saying “Do you mind if I quote you saying that our solution is highly flexible and scalable?”.

Here are a few ways to make a case example real:

• Focus on one specific benefit, if you try to put your entire story in the mouth of your customer, you need 30 slides, not one
• Cut the fluff
• Be very specific, and very detailed, quantify if you can.
• Add an image of your client to make things more authentic.

Case studies can be more than a simple quote of text. If you want to show that your system can be installed within 6 weeks, why not show a bar chart of your last 10 customer installations, with the exact time it took to install the system?

Tell a real customer story.

Sometimes it can be useful to create a slide that is hard to understand. If your technology is really complicated and impossible to replicate, why not show it?

They easy way to show a complicated chart is to take a few pages of code, and shrink them down to font size 7. While this gives you a complicated chart, it does not convince your audience how clever your technology is.

The best way to show complexity is take a micro case example, show that it is complex, but explain it very clearly. A recent client had a very powerful real-time customer screening algorithm. To show the power of the technology, I visualized all the checks that are conducted within 0.1 s. The chart was highly readable and very clear. Still it was complex. And that was exactly the message we wanted to convey to potential investors.

It can be tempting to omit some details about your company in an investor presentation. Especially in the healthcare industry with its complicated data from clinical trials it is definitely possible to hide something from a potential investor until very far into the due diligence process.

A due diligence process that can takes weeks, sometimes months. You enter an exclusivity period, stop talking to other investors, continue to burn money until… the investor finds out. You lose the investment, probably not because the company all of a sudden looks completely bad, but because of you burned your integrity, your trust with a potential new Board member. And by that time your company could have run out of finances and have no other investors to talk to anymore.

Do not make an investor presentation that emphasizes your weaknesses with all the visual power in the world, on the other hand, be honest.

I sometimes get that reaction from a client. Very few slides, very simple graphics. Sometimes the most powerful stories can be pitched really sweet and short. No need to waste more words/time/slides. Consider yourself lucky.

If you are in the high tech sector you face the challenge of demonstrating your product in an investor or sales pitch meeting. If that meeting is short (an hour or less), my advice is not to show your product in a live demo, but use a series of carefully planned screen shots.

Murphy’s law says that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. And it seems to apply especially to high tech demos. There are just so many variables that can go wrong: Internet connection, screens, the application itself.

If you are in the middle of a short pitch, any interruption will pop the momentum of your story. Ideally you want your pitch to be one focused burst of energy that gets the audience craving for more at the end. A hiccup because of WiFi password will definitely not get you there.

There is another problem with demos, not all application functionality is Interesting. Logging in, creating profiles, entering some data, all things you have to do, but they are not the piece of technology that will wow your investors or customers. And finally, a live computer screen is most of the time not readable when put on an overhead projector, most fonts are probably smaller than 12 points.

So, what to do instead. Prepare an interesting story, set it up beforehand in your application, take lots of screenshots and paste them in the right order in your presentation. Zoom in to those aspects of the screen that are interesting, crop out those window bars, ads, anything that you do not need. Circle what people,should be looking at. Put big bold explanation text boxes on the slides.