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I am in the business of designing presentations that I hardly ever need to deliver myself. Now and then I come up with this brilliant visualization/analogy that simply does not stick with the client.
First she asks what it means. I explain. “OK”. In the next call: “remind how that chart works again?”. I follow up with a passionate explanation. During rehearsals: “So, here we have an [um] great example”, and the energy in the pitch grinds to a halt.
Time to take the chart out.
It is tricky to make a good technical diagram. Challenge one: make sure it is technically correct, challenge two: make sure it is easy to understand, challenge three: make sure it looks good. An engineer usually gets to level 1. Most software tools such as Microsoft Vision help you… only to get to level 1. How to reach the next 2? Some pointers:
Some potential clients walk away after a first meeting to discuss a presentation design project, and you can read the face that clearly says “he does not understand it (and how does he have the courage to charge such a fee for the project”.
Well, that is exactly the point. If you failed to explain things to me in a low risk 1-hour briefing of a presentation designer, you will for sure fail in a high-stake 20 minute investor pitch.
There are 2 important milestones you need to pass as a presentation designer:
Getting number 2 right is a lot harder than number 1.
The most expensive part of the project is getting me to a level where I understand things, once that happens, designing the slides is the relatively easy part of the process.
I am not a believer in copy-pasting Excel numbers into PowerPoint. Excel is for analysis, PowerPoint for presenting, and presenting numbers is different from analyzing them. The charts I use to present are often so simple (only one data series, rounded digits) that I tap them in by hand.
There is an exception though. If you are the junior analyst on the team, and you are the last step in the “supply chain”, i.e., constantly updating charts with new versions of numbers that roll out of the spreadsheet, it might be time to change working practice. Personally, I remember many McKinsey projects I did as an analyst where I designed a model in week 1 of a project, and ended up updating numbers on slides for weeks after that.
In these cases, add a worksheet to your Excel file, and pull the numbers from the analysis. Apply all rounding, i.e., if the chart or table requires millions, divide by 1e6. For tables, put all numbers in the right order, invert rows, columns if required.
You can go further and actually create objects in Excel that can almost literally be copied into PowerPoint. Create data charts, fix fonts, colors, etc. exactly as in the PowerPoint file. Format Excel cells exactly as the table in your PowerPoint document.
The cost of this effort is time: it will take some effort to get it right, but it will pay off in subsequent number update rounds, and it can prevent you from making mistakes in last minute model changes.
The number of screens on which your presentation will be viewed is expanding:
Do a test run on one of these devices if that is the one that is critical to your presentation, and adjust colors accordingly. The result might be a presentation that only looks good on that display, you have to keep separate files. The crappy office printer version has gray shadings that are far too blunt for the HD monitor, the crappy VGA project version has no thin fonts.
Image via WikiPedia
Some entrepreneurs think they can leave out the “details” of the technology, or the mechanism of action of a new biotech drug: the potential market size is all that matters. “Technology is detail for nerds.”
Not really. It depends on the stage of your company, if your company is early stage and the only asset it has is basically a PowerPoint presentation, technology is not really a small detail, it is the main thing the investor puts her money in.
“Will it work, what are the risks?”
“Does this person know what she is doing?”
“How much does it cost to develop it?”
These are fundamental questions, and a good way to address them is a deep dive in one part of your solution to give investors confidence that the risks can be managed, and that you can trusted with doing that.
One chart with a few circles explains the product roadmap, pricing strategy, customer segmentation, and competitive differentiation. Perfect!
When I push back, clients are often surprised. The problem: the chart works perfect for people who have been sweating over it for 6 months. They remember how they inverted the direction of the arrows back in December, how they added the color layer, how they got rid of these long sentences that used to sit at the bottom left.
The person who sees the chart for the first time misses that context. It is the visual equivalent of the poetically beautiful but utterly vague mission statement.
Two solutions:
Art: Malevich, “White on white”
Experts, anyone who is deeply into a subject, usually finds it very hard to explain a concept to a layman. They no longer see what is obvious to the novice and what is not, and lack the full, rich, memory picture that is associated with a buzzword or industry jargon term.
So often when I sit down with a client, they will point me to a website or presentation of a competitor / similar company that is beautifully designed: nice pictures, nice fonts, nice infographics. “I want something like this”.
They forget that these marketing materials are mere pretty packaging of the same buzzwords. Yes, they look pretty, but as a layman, I usually still do not have a clue what it means.
In these cases, I usually start asking questions. The client explains without noticing initially why I am asking the questions. After 10 minutes. I remind her what I asked her about and give proof that a pretty presentation does not equal a clear presentation.
Image via WikiPedia
“Cover letters” that introduce a pitch are often poorly written. Think about the latest spam email that you received from a head hunter offering to help you with recruiting staff for your startup. You open it (maybe the subject line was decent), and as soon as you started reading 3 words you knew what was going to come and deleted the message.
A cold email is a shot at someone who is looking for the earliest opportunity to shorten the email inbox with that satisfying “delete”, “archive”, “done”. The skill is to postpone that moment.
These observations by Jason Lemkin are spot on. By the time you have made it to final presentation to the full partnership of the VC, it is likely that the partner you were in touch with until then wants to do the deal. The main challenge in this presentation is not to make mistakes in front of an audience who has done far less homework than that partner. Do your thing that worked before, and treat ignorant questions with respect.
