SlideMagic Blog

Marketing managers always want to make sure that every single benefit and feature makes it on to “the benefits slide”. ROI. Low cost. Flexible. Scalable. Effective. Efficient. Affordable. Listing more benefits means spending less slide real estate on each individual one (words, visuals). Your remarkable story gets diluted into a generic cloud of buzz words that people find on just about every other benefits slide that they have seen.

You conformed. Marketing managers expect this benefits slide. Customers recognize it as: “hey, here comes the benefits slide”. Everyone follows the script. Presenter presents. Audience does a quick email check. The usual stuff.

Benefits are all about standing out from the competition. Let your benefits slide stand out as well and focus it on what is really different about your company and your product.

Last week I was presenting at a startup pitch competition at the Technion University in Haifa, Israel. After my talk, the contestants had 3 minute each to pitch their business idea. Some observations inspired by the evening, and not necessarily related to any of the contestants.

• Do not speak too fast. It is better to make sure the audience gets all you say, than cram in a 10 minute pitch in 3 minutes. OK, do not go the other extreme and speak so slowly that it becomes boring to listen to.
• Say what you are doing early on. Starting with a nice story and revealing your venture at 2:10 gives the audience 50 seconds to assess your business. While I always advocate to sell the problem, not the solution, sometimes you might have to cut the problem section short if you have just 3 minutes. “Gasoline prices are high”, that is it, time to move on to what you want to do about it.
• Decide what is really important in a first pitch. Some details such as extensive elaborations on revenue models or team backgrounds can probably wait for your second 30 minute pitch.
• Do not bring up concerns that take a lot of time to explain, you want to keep the excitement and momentum going. Examples: complicated comparisons against the competition, or a defense why you picked a small market segment to start. Three minutes is not enough to present the results of a strategy consulting project.

Just a reminder that I will be speaking at the Technion tonight about designing investor pitches. I will be opening the Pitching Competition at 18:30 in the Industrial Engineering building in room 424 (4th floor).

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that video pitches have a great future. Especially as an alternative to startup fund raising decks that now get emailed “cold” to potential investors. Why?

• The world is moving to a minimalist presentation design style that makes it harder to understand decks without verbal explanation.
• Somehow, I find audio tracks not very interesting to listen to. They take too long for a situation where you do not have direct interaction with the speaker. They just go on and on
• Startup pitch competitions have shown me that it is possible to get across a lot in just a few minutes of presentation time. You just need to prepare. Videos are high profile, people will invest a lot of time in getting it right. The result will be a higher quality pitch than someone “winging it” in front of a live audience
• A very important part of an investor pitch is the team. A video of the presenter gives already some clue about the CEO of the business.
• You can make sure people will listen to your entire story. When you set expectations (watch this 5 minute video) and investors see the counter counting down I think it is highly likely that they will go through to the end. Much more likely than a slide deck: click, click, click, “bleep” from the Blackberry and they get distracted.

Other big applications could be job interviews, or university applications.

Just a heads up that I will be speaking at the Technion university in Haifa next week June 1. My presentation will be part of BizTec’s Annual Pitch Competition. I will be talking about how to design effective fundraising pitch presentations to venture capitalists and other investors. The details of the event can be found here.

Many presentations end in some sort of Q&A session. During this discussion, the slide show usually comes to a standstill, and the last visual used stays on the projector for a long time. Make sure it is a useful one, since it might be the image that the audience will remember best. To be avoided:

• A completely random slide from the deck (the one that sparked the discussion for example)
• A “thank you” or “Q&A” slide
• A slide that addresses one of your weaker points (i.e., you got a touch question about the competition and did the best you could using the competitor comparison slide), move it after you used it.
• A dry list of bullet points recapping the content of your presentation using language full of abstract concepts (“ROI”) and buzz words (“key competencies”)

What could work: a visual that links back to a key point in your presentation. For example, if you spend 5 slides on describing how a teenager will use your mobile social network, just putting a picture of her back up will remind the audience of the story. (This time you can leave out the bullets arrows, boxes, just an image to refresh the memory).

The Internet is full with layouts of investor pitches, they all go something like this:

• What’s the pain
• What’s the solution
• What’s the revenue model
• What’s the edge over the competition
• Who’s the team
• What’s the traction of the company

Your pitch should address all these issues, but think about your potential investor’s mind when deciding about the structure. You might have to deviate from the text book approach.

Investors are constantly evaluating critical questions. And when they (think they) have answered them, they move on to the next one. Questions are not always in the order of your pitch deck.

• “That guy looks 12!” “Oh, he is 28 and already climbed Mount Everest”
• “They are doing what exactly?” “Ah, something to do with mobile payments”
• “Isn’t that a Groupon me-too?”
• “That would take 5 years to develop!”
• “Great idea, but where are the dollars?”

If there is an obvious elephant in the room, you might as well address it early on in the pitch. Your audience will be calmer and more open to digest the other important points you want to make.

Far more important than sticking to the text book pitch structure.

Far more important than spending time repeating the obvious (i.e., stats on how big Facebook has become).

I stumbled on this post on the Dutch Presentatie Blog: 3 reasons why Prezi is not a PowerPoint killer. In short (and in English):

1. Non-linearity is great for conveying information, it is poor for building up the suspense of a story
2. Dramatic zooming effects take away attention from the speaker to the screen (the blog speaks jokingly about “Prezi motion sickness”)
3. The graphical capabilities of Prezi are (still) poor (colors, fonts, shapes, data charts) when compared to other applications

I must say, I tend to agree with the assessment for the traditional stand-up presentation. Does that mean Prezi should be written off? I am not sure either. Where it could be useful:

• In the hands of highly specialized designers, rather than the mass market. It could be the basis for a great way to let people discover a product or service interactively on a web site. It would be expensive and time consuming to develop, but once it’s there it should provide a great return on investment.
• For the mass market, maybe the product should be simplified to create a basic web-based presentation tool with great ability to embed things into web sites and blogs. With the advent of HTML5, I think we are going to see a dramatic shift in how web sites look. And there will be a huge market for a simple tool that can create great web content. Obviously here it is open to competition from Sliderocket, Google Docs, and others (a PC World review of PowerPoint alternatives via Tony Ramos).

A copy of a new section I wrote for my corporate web site.

In the very beginning, the only asset a startup has is often the VC pitch deck. Here are some suggestions for designing good VC pitch presentations. In the end I will list some of the resources you can tap in. There is a lot of information and advice available about startup pitches.

Different pitches for different meetings There are different investor presentations in a fund raising process. There is the line up in a big conference where everyone has 1 minute to pitch (not very effective). There is the 10 minute phone call, the 20 minute coffee chat. The first meeting at the VC office, the presentation to the full partner group. Prepare your story and deck for each situation. As you go through the investment process funnel, your story will shift from talking about what the company is about, to how the company will do it.

Do a pitch without a deck Practice a 20 minute pitch without slides in front of a friend. Record yourself, listen to your self. What sequence did you use to tell your story? What examples did you use? Where did you have the urge to take a piece of paper and sketch a framework? Where were you tempted to open your laptop to show a detailed chart with financials? All this gives you a clue about the sort of visuals you need to support your natural story.

It is about you When an investor looks at entrepreneur, 50% of the attention will go to the content of the presentation, the other 50% will be spent on making a personal assessment of you, the presenter. Are you a good person to work with, who takes input from a Board? Do you have a sense of realism? Are you fired up for the roller coaster ride or hedging by keeping your day job? Can I trust you? Can you actually sell? Can you pull it off? These are all questions that cannot be answered by the slides you are presenting, they are answered by reading in between the lines.

Sales presentations have a specific setting. Often, the audience is relatively small. Most of the time you would have time to discuss and prepare the meeting in phone calls before hand. Where as in a VC pitch presentation the audience is probably constantly testing for reasons not to invest in you, someone sitting through a sales presentation would actually really want to buy something from you. Here are some observations (in no particular order) to help you design better sales presentations.

A good sales presentation does not always equal a slide deckSome sales meetings can be conducted without PowerPoint at all. An alternative is a meeting sketched out live on a white board. For example, you could run your client live through a calculation of the financial benefits of your product. It will be clear that although there are no PowerPoint slides involved, these type of presentations might actually require more preparation than regular slide shows.

**Talk about the customer issue rather than yourself.**Pages and pages about the history of your company, how many employees you have, where your offices are located, are all about your, and not about the issue your customer is struggling with. If you are a startup and you need to establish that you are a financially stable company, do so, but in (most) other cases do not bore your audience with talking about yourself.

**Listen, listen, listen.**Each customer has specific issues, and customers are very keen to explain them to you. Listen carefully in the phone calls leading up to the meeting. Listen in the meeting. Focus your sales presentation exactly on the customer. Look the audience in the eye and see whether you maintain the attention, there is still eye contact. Rigorously sticking to your script even when the customer signals (questions, interruptions, eye movement) she wants to take the discussion in a different direction is a sure recipe for a turn down.