SlideMagic Blog

I have a number of clients in the IT security sector. My main challenge with them is to make them sound less similar to all other IT security companies in the world. IT security presentations or brochures usually follow this pattern:

1. Scary, scary, scary reminder of awful security risks. The audience knows this already. The visual images are unpleasant to look at.
2. A relentless stream of marketing abbreviations and buzzwords that sound exactly the same as the ones the competition is using.

I try to keep a positive mood in the presentation without using images of hackers wearing a balaclava. The marketing buzzwords can be replaced by a deep dive of one particular aspect of your technology that takes a completely different approach to IT security than your competitors use.

Here is a comment I posted on Fred Wilson’s blog about the inevitable rise of market places for professional services, just like Uber did for taxi drivers and passengers.

Perspective from a freelancer.

Platforms/algorithms will do an “Uber” to many professions including probably my own field: presentation design. Competition/bidding to find effective market clearance. In quiet months, prices go down, you want something done tomorrow: pay for it.

For a freelancer, I think this is ultimately a race to the bottom (Godin speak). The only profitable way to build a freelance career is to work on a distinctive personal micro brand in a super niche segment, with an ever growing base of happy clients.

Maybe you use a platform to get started, but the winners will be able to wrestle themselves loose from the platform. Like the best freelancers today are often the ones that freed themselves from high paying consulting, advertising, or investment banking hierarchies.

The other day I had a potential client on the phone who was under time pressure. She asked me whether I could work on the structure/framework of the presentation (and the template) while in parallel they would start filling things in.

When you start a project and need to cut up work among multiple team members, a skeleton or presentation framework can be really helpful: someone works on the market, someone works on the competition, while someone else takes on the financials.

When you get to the stage where you have to present your conclusions to others (i.e., the analytical work is done), putting structure before content is wrong. As a presentation designer you need to know the content first, translate that into a story, and in the process you come up with a structure which is engaging and convincing, a structure that often will deviate from business school presentation templates, consulting pyramid structures and other logical frameworks.

Problem solving: structure first, then content. Convincing: content first, then structure.

Most investment banks and management consultancies have the luxury of an overnight, low-cost slide production factory in countries such as India. Raw slides (even hand-drawns on the fax machine in the evening, the result in your inbox when you are back in the office the next morning.

SketchDeck is now opening this production capacity to everyone. Prices are very attractive, and they can ramp up capacity quickly to work under very tight timelines.

Not every presentation is an all-or-nothing investment pitch or TED talk, and most PowerPoint presentations are visual documents that are put together quickly to support decision making inside big corporates (Nancy Duarte calls them SlideDocs in her new book). It is for these types of presentations that SketchDeck is a good solution.

As it competition for me? Yes and no. For long-standing clients, I have done slide make-over work helping them in emergency situations, going at such a speed that I could probably be price competitive with an India operation on a s $-per-slide basis (I have the advantage tough of having the confidence/ability to edit/cut/change wording put in by very senior executives in a company, something they might not appreciate from everyone). But ultimately, my 1-man operation will not be able to keep up with the race to the bottom (as Seth Godin calls it). I will continue to focus on bespoke work that is in a different price category, and - in my spare time - am busy developing a web app that can hopefully automate a large part of the work that a mass volume slide production facility typically does.

Doing the product spec slides of your sales presentation is relatively easy. The big picture, how you position yourself versus the competition is harder. It is tempting to start with the easy bits and worry about the difficult things later. Still, I suggest to take on the positioning first since all other slides will depend on it. Moreover, it is the overall product concept that you are selling, not the features of individual products.

So, you have been assigned the responsibility to get 15 senior business unit leaders all over the world to produce one coherent company strategy presentation in 2 months. Your role is just process, you are a relatively junior executive in the organisation, and the only leverage you have is backup by your CEO. A dream assignment…

It is tempting to try to make it as easy as possible by creating standard presentation structures, standard colour templates for everybody to follow. On top of that you could force deadlines on everybody to write down the key messages of the presentation first, ahead of the actual slides. You can write all this down in a beautiful Gantt chart.

In theory, this all makes sense. In practice though, I see that people only really start to focus when the actual content of the story is produced. So, here is an alternative and slightly more messy approach.

Start with the substance. Have each business unit Frankenstein together a deck of existing slides, and use that first presentation as a basis for a discussion what the business unit actually wants to say. What matters here is the sound track, the verbal story, not the actual slides. You need a trigger for them to start talking to you.

Second, try to get a fellow junior executive in every business unit who takes ownership of the presentation. This person will be easier to access and more skilled in PowerPoint than the business unit leader.

Now, start working with your 15 colleagues on getting to a uniform presentation. Create the common PowerPoint template and sketch out the structure of a business unit-specific deck based on the verbal briefing you had. Give home work to your 15 colleagues and follow up with frequent progress reviews. Create some competition by putting up draft presentations for everyone to read throughout the 2 months progress.

Some venture capitalists might invite you for a “5 minute meeting”. The idea is not to conduct a full formal pitch, but rather have a casual get together to get to know you and start a longer-term relationship that could end up in funding later on in time.

Of course the meeting will be a bit longer than 5 minutes, the time limit is just a deterrent for your to craft a huge 1 hour pitch deck. Also, the 5 minute meeting enables to VC to interrupt and question more without coming across as rude by cutting you off all the time. This dialogue is a quick way for her to zoom in on issues.

How to prepare?

1. Prepare a very short verbal pitch: cover yourself, and cover the idea.
2. Cover the idea. Make sure that the VC actually can understand what it is your doing (I have seen many pitches in pitch competitions where the presenter failed on this very basic requirement). This means, using normal buzzword-free language, and cutting content that is not yet relevant in this stage of the fund raising process (detailed financials, system architectures, etc. etc.)
3. Present yourself in an interesting way. There is all the professional stuff, but maybe add a bit of unusualness, so the VC will remember you as the guy who likes to monocycle (for example). And do not forget that the main way you present yourself is in between the lines, how you come across in the meeting.
4. Only prepare slides when your really cannot describe things with words: a 2x2 matrix of all the competitors in the field for example, which takes 30 seconds to describe but can be communicated in 2 seconds with a drawing. Have these slides in your back pocket: either on an iPad, or - yes - as a paper print out.
5. When the VC is not deciding whether to invest right now at this moment, it is actually OK to show some uncertainty and vulnerability and ask advice about how to build your business.
6. Listen. Pay attention to what feedback you get, answer the questions you get asked rather than pressing play on your standard pitch. This is a dialogue and a test case for what it is like to work with you in the longer term

The objective of a technology sales presentation is to convince your potential client of how great your product is, and how poor the competition.

Assumption: the above is actually true, which makes designing a presentation a lot easier.

One approach is to list all the benefits, and in a few more charts show that the competition does not have them (most of the times, without naming names explicitly). This story does not stick very well, a feature list that seem unrelated.

Better is to dive in a bit into the detail. Often technical products have one specific innovation, one characteristic of the architecture, one design approach that triggers all of the goodness mentioned above. Now that the customer understands this (and Einstein said that you can explain anything to everyone - even a 6 year old), it becomes a lot easier for her to understand the full picture.

Most sales presentations go on and on and on about an issue that the client might already be convinced of. Worse, if you present slide after slide in an amateurish format making the same point, your client might actually start to doubt what she believed when entering the meeting room.

That is time and slides wasted. More time efficient and effective ways to tackle this:

1. A couple of really professional and serious looking slides with the highlights, plus an invitation to visit your web page for all the details
2. Discussing the weakness of your competitors verbally and informally: it is hard to put this on paper. Suggest your client some tough questions to ask when they meet the competition. Note that this is actually a presentation design challenge, without creating the actual slides. You need to have this story prepared, maybe even with the help of a “spontaneous” flip chart sketch

Now spend the time you gained on the issues that really matter: are you expensive, is it hard to switch supplier, etc.? Preaching to the converted is never a good use of time.

If you are writing an investor presentation you can Google what questions should be covered:

• What is the market?
• What is the competition?
• What is the business model?
• Who is in the team?

Or, you can take it one step further and already anticipate the most obvious questions an investor might have:

• I am doing something similar to Google, is that smart?
• I look like I am 21, isn’t that a bit young to run a startup?
• We have been working for 18 months and still there is no prototype, will it ever arrive?

Smarter questions lead to smarter investor presentations.