SlideMagic Blog

When an investor asks a question, many pitching entrepreneurs, don’t finish listening to the question, interrupt the investor, say she is completely wrong, and then unload a torrent of words, facts, and slides to squash the issue now and forever. (Israeli entrepreneurs often display this temperament)

Before unleashing, count to 10:

• Is this really a fundamental deal breaker for the investor, or maybe an opening into a conversation about your company? Is she trying to attack, or actually be helpful in a constructive way?
• Does the investor have the credibility to ask the question (i.e., could she actually be right)? Listen carefully what she bases her question on.
• If you don’t know, or if she made a good point, you might be better off acknowledging it. The presentation is a test case about how you are as a person to work with on a day to day basis. Explosive reactions to feedback does not give you points.
• If the investor is wrong, and you have good evidence to show it, answer the question politely, showing people they are ignorant, possibly in front of her colleagues is not very good for your relationship.
• If the question is very fundamental, you are unlikely to win the argument within the 30 minute time frame of a pitch. Better to leave that debate for later.

In all of this the opposite can also happen. A quiet, introvert investor might just ask a quiet question, looking worried, then might ask it again later in the meeting, and maybe again “are you sure”? This could be the tell-tale sign of a deal breaker issue that sounds like a casual conversation. Still, pounding the investor on the head in reply might not be the best solution, but this is one you need to squash somehow, either in the meeting or via follow up.

This quote applies to telephone sales people, but it is relevant to presentations as well.

When a presentation is still fresh, the presenter clings on to her slides which contains the flow of her presentation. Good presenters get away from stage 0 (reading the slides aloud) and can fake spontaneity by really knowing them by heart. The next level up though is feeling so free and immersed in them that you can almost leave them out al together.

A bit like a guitarist, play the song, memorize the scale and improvise, and in the end, just flow with the music.

There are endless types of data charts out there: lines, bars, scatters, pies. Which one to pick depends on the type of data you have, and what message you want to convey. Here is a new handy tool that can make life easier for you: chart chooser.

A box of handy cards that guide you step-by-step through a selection process. Excel templates are an optional add-on that could be useful, some of these diagrams are tricky to recreate.

Many early stage startups that need an investor presentation do not have a proper logo and graphical identity yet. Is this a bottleneck for a presentation?

Not really. I do not believe that you need to put your logo prominently on every page of your presentation. Hence, it is not very important in presentation design. The most important design element for a presentation is color. The color scheme will decide how your slides look.

So, pick a color scheme you think is appropriate for your business. It can be done very quickly. Every investor will forgive you if you decide to change it later. In the early days, you can simply use a text logo without any design to show your project’s name. If you are not sure, a temporary project name can be a better solution than a poorly chosen brand name. That brand you chose late at night while brainstorming with the founding team might work great for you, but could be less optimal for your target audience.

Obviously if you are launching in the market than logo, identity and picking the right color becomes (a lot) more important.

With my presentation app SlideMagic I aim to change the communication culture in corporates. People spend too much time preparing slides. They produce documents that are unattractive to look at, and spend far too much time falling asleep in conference rooms.

The solution: splitting the communication tools: Excel and PowerPoint for logging the analysis, and a new tool 100% focused at communicating an idea and getting to a decision. A super simple visual language does not allow you to get lost in crafting complicated slides, or worse - give up all together and just use bullet points on every chart.

In a business presentation you need very few visual concepts:

• Listing and organizing stuff (yes, the dreaded bullet points)
• Comparing, contrasting, things
• Showing growth, trends, forecasting
• Showcasing things (products, people, clients)
• Linking one thing to another, impact, cause/effect, from-to

When you hit “insert” in SlideMagic, you get presentation with this list of slide templates. In my opinion they can cover 99% of your business presentation needs. Think about what you want to do (listing, comparing, forecasting, showcasing, linking), pick a template and adjust row/column counts and you are done.

If you want, you clone this entire slide deck in your own SlideMagic account via this link. Let me know which concepts that I have left out you cannot live without. Maybe processes, timelines?

People ask me whether I take care of the “messaging” of presentations as well. I do, but I do not really connect to the concept. Maybe it is because I come from the world of engineering and consulting, not advertising.

“Messaging” is often used in a marketing context for a consumer audience, not an investor audience. Should we emphasize that this gadget is beautiful, or powerful? In marketing presentation you would say “now in 3 gorgeous colors.” In an investor presentation you would put a competitive analysis that show that the marketing strategy will focus on esthetics.

“Messaging” is often the basis for a design process that revolves around words and sentences. How should we call the benefit exactly. What slogans to use. I tend to think visual, and like to brainstorm concepts visually.

“Messaging” can sometimes come in the form of a prescribed flow of a presentation, we finished the messaging, now “just implement it”. Not my kind of brief.

“Messaging” can also mean sorting out the company/product positioning. This is a big piece of work that usually falls outside the scope of a presentation design project. No story, no presentation.

Source: http://tpdsaa.tumblr.com/post/3106513440/submitted-by-copyguy

So do I do messaging? It depends.

As an employee you get “please do this, it will look good on your annual performance review”, “or do this, because your colleagues obviously have no problem with it”. As an independent freelancer, this is replaced by: “please do this project (more or less) for free, and we will have lots more work in the future”.

If you start out new as a freelancer, or if you have hired a few employees yourself, creating a fixed cost base that needs to be filled, this button still can work. But I think for most experienced freelancers with some sort of brand and a large base of existing clients, this does not work anymore. These people probably all work at capacity, and pick projects because they are interesting, push their skill level up, or help out a long standing client even if the work is not interesting.

Filling empty capacity is hardly ever rewarding. SEO, shallow “content” that is pushed on social media. It is better to do great work, get clients excited about you, and get them to refer you to more projects.

I agree that it takes some investment in the beginning. If you are in the early stages of a freelance career, maybe you can suggest to do this project for the full price, but the second one at a discount. The client said she has lots of more work, so that should not be a problem for her.

Art: Marie-Denise Villers, Self-portrait, Young Woman Drawing 1801, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I did a 30 minute podcast interview with Sally Koering Zimney who runs the “This moved me” public speaking blog. Have a listen here. I talk about slide design and the philosophy behind my presentation app SlideMagic.

I have seen hundreds, maybe even thousands of company pitches coming across my desk. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. Here are some stereotypes:

• An overload of scientific data hides the brilliance of a invention (often in the healthcare field)
• A very straightforward story of an Internet startup is perfectly clear, but somehow looks very amateurish, making the team look amateurish too.
• Super long-winded description of the what this technology is going to do, without any substance on how it is going to be solved, and who is going to solve it by the 3 months time frame put in the presentation
• Feature/benefit overload, making the audience doubt whether there is any distinctive benefit at all
• Failure to explain what the brilliant idea actually is/does
• Buzzword overload: “these people must be lacking substance of they need all that padding”
• Default Microsoft Office color scheme
• “Holy Grail” type of ideas, we will combine this, this, this, this, this, and this to stitch together the ultimate offer (we only do the stitching though)
• Step 1 of the action plan: hire someone who is actually going to do the work
• We started in 2003, then in 2005 we added, then in 2006 this happened, then in 2010 we hired, etc.
• Let’s use the one dollar shave club video as an example
• The bulk of the presentation consist of IT architecture diagrams
• “This presentation is almost perfect, you just need to edit the messages a bit”

In some projects I am literally stuck with lack of inspiration. The slides don’t look good, the concepts don’t pop out. To get going again I actually send the draft slides to the client, who inevitably will come back to me with “hey, we are not there yet”. But in addition, it is often the few other comments that she makes, that provide a way out of the impasse.

It is hard to force creativity…