SlideMagic Blog

This is an interesting representation from the investor perspective by Jason Lemkin why he does (not) want to fund you. Some are relevant to presentations (my words):

• Integrity: gaming metrics, locker room jokes
• Exit strategy slide shows that you are not committed (not sure all investors will agree)
• Pooh-poohing competition (better to show that you understand them, rather than hiding their existence)
• Looooong industry background sections before getting to the point, the first decision point at minute 5, if you survived that one, the second one comes in at minute 20
• Document formats that are hard to open

Image via WikiPedia

The traditional approach is to hand the designer a blank slide and say “we need a fresh PowerPoint template”. You will get a slide back full of supporting graphics, logos, page numbers which shows that the designer added some value.

Here is the better approach: give an actual slide with content and ask her to improve that, including the template. The likely result is a well-designed slide. Now delete all the content and see what you are left with. It is likely to be an empty page… Here is your new PowerPoint template.

Oh, and the most important part of the template design project is not the template (i.e, the blank page). It is to make sure that the standard colors and fonts are programmed correctly. That’s a programmer’s job, not a designer’s job.

In my presentation design app SlideMagic, things are easier. Upload your logo, use the color picker to select your accent color based on the logo, and you are all set.

Image by john.schultz on Flickr

There is an overlap and there are differences.

Overlap. At the core of both an investor and a sales presentation is some story that said what it is you actually do, and why this is such a great solution that you should buy it. Useful for a customer, but also useful for an investor. The latter will ask: “will someone want to buy this?”, but more importantly: “can this person sell in a convincing way?” This overlapping part of the presentation is the core company story.

Sales presentation only: add things that are specific to the potential client’s problem/situation. Add a censored competitive positioning (don’t bend the truth, but don’t volunteer weaknesses either). Add the administrative details about exact pricing, installation, etc. etc.

Investor presentation only: add a (more) candid competitive positioning, market sizing, profitability, pipeline, team bio, etc.

So, the investor presentation is the broadest in coverage. In terms of number of slides (hours at the computer), each of the above components could be equal in size. In terms of time invested though, the first part, the core sales presentation is the hardest to get right, it is the fundamental story of your company/product.

Bonus, a quick Venn diagram in SlideMagic style (make decent looking simple slides quickly) below. You can clone slides I used in the blog to your own SlideMagic account via this link.

Back at McKinsey, doing recruiting interviews was an integral part of a consultant’s job. I interviewed hundreds of candidates, mostly back at my business school (INSEAD). When interviewers ask a question, they are most of the times not trying to figure out whether you can produce the 100% right answer. Instead you want to check out:

• How a person is thinking and reasoning
• Whether something that is claimed is actually true or not, by forcing the conversation into some sort of depth/details
• What the integrity of the person in question is, is she lying/talking her way out of things or willing to admit that she does not know
• How it is to work with someone.

Potential investors or customer will do the same. If you copy some fancy charts, or put in some buzzwords / hollow statements, a few questions will quickly lay bare your actual understanding of a situation.

“[Approach A] is much better than [Approach B]” “Really, I did not know that?, can you give me a few examples of companies that tried Approach B and failed recently?”

Solution one, don’t put the charts in. Solution two, read up and do your homework and form your own opinion.

Should slides and your talk be in the same language? Ideally, yes. Visuals and the audio track are in perfect sync.

But I think for most audiences in Western economies, “business English” slides that support a talk delivered in a local language work perfectly OK. “Business English” is what I call the English that is spoken by most non-native English speakers. A very narrow vocabulary of English that enables you to express most common business concepts.

For some audiences having your slides might give you that added international appeal (a startup raising money across Europe for example, or here in Israel, where high tech slides designed in Hebrew would look really weird).

Slides in English raise the challenge for the presenter though. If you were planning on reading bullet points of the slides, it sounds boring in English, it sounds really awkward when you are live translating from English into your native language. Either things go really slow, or the translation sounds really funny, or - most likely - both.

As always, there are exceptions. Some highly conservative financial institutions have complicated investment approval processes where decks get forwarded/discussed without you being there. If your deck is primary for reading, then consider translating the whole thing.

Be aware that languages can create technical challenges as well if people do not have the right fonts installed on their computers, and mobile devices create additional problems. Always send PDFs.

I have done many of these types of projects for presentations aimed at local Israeli institutional investors. I would start with an English design (but laid out right-centered, graphs flow from right to left), the client would translate (challenge 1: Hebrew, challenge 2: business/science-specific jargon in Hebrew), and would clean up afterwards with a 50% understanding of what’s inside the text boxes.

Google for “market developments” in a specific industry, and your search engine will serve you thousands of consulting charts that fit the bill. It is tempting to “Frankenstein” a deck together with 25 of these and call yourself an industry expert and/or convince investors that you are one.

Here are some health warnings.

• Frankensteining a deck (stealing charts from different presentations and stapling them together to form a new slide deck), will never give the most coherent story. Start with the points you want to make, and decide in what order they come, then create visuals
• Google has a long memory and most of the consulting charts out there are dated: old data, expired insights and stale, overused case examples
• Most charts designed by consulting companies are written for their core customer base: large corporates who are trying to catch up with smaller, leaner, more innovative startups around them. If you are a startup yourself, you are a different audience.
• Many of these charts are complex frameworks that aim to visualize some micro-economic concept. These frameworks are great for solving a problem, they are less suited to communicate the conclusions. If your message is “it is complex”, use a consulting framework as a chart, if it is something else, try a different one.
• Every consulting project covers the basics: figuring out market sizes, growth rates, segments, shares. All the results of this analysis gets put in charts that shows the homework that has been done, but they are unlikely to be the key insight from the work. Presenting slide-after-slide with growth rates by subcontinent is not going to excite your audience.
• Long-winded recommendations out of a consulting project specific context or quotes from experts people have never heard of never make for the most appealing or convincing charts in a presentation.

Back in the 1990s at McKinsey, a very senior Director told me that while the Firm does high quality work across the board, in ever project there is usually one insight, one piece of analysis, one original idea, just one, that stands out and makes all the difference. And that one insight is enough to break a deadlock where the client or other consulting firms could not solve the problem.

In sales and investor pitches that is pretty much the same. Yes, smart phone use is growing, yes the team consists of a bunch of very smart people, yes security is a major concern of enterprises. People have seen it before. But that one unusual combination of technologies, or that completely new approach to a problem that is interesting.

Show why it is so tricky to solve. Show the solution. Show why it is so clever.

Image from WikiPedia

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When I have to write something (this blog post for example) or need to come up with a visualization for a tricky concept, background music disturbs me. It like the melody of the music highjacks my brain and takes things in a different direction than the storyline in front of me.

Cleaning up charts (make-over work), or building financial/economical models works great with music in the background though.

That’s maybe why many people end up writing things late at night: finally it is quiet.

Image from WikiPedia

Design is all about uncovering patterns and proportions that are somehow hidden in the cosmos. Architects, music composers, graphics designers, chefs, film directors, painters, authors, each is hoping to uncover a genius composition that has been hiding in plain sight for a few billion years.

Recently, I was introduced to the patterns that jazz guitarist Pat Martino is using to teach chord shapes on the guitar. The diagram in the video (if you are interested) shows how he uses turning triangles and squares (visual objects) to construct chords (audio).

In other videos, Pat explains how he uses words as musical inspiration. For example, he assigns a note to each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, and then creates words (“beautiful” for example) to see what they sound like.

This screen shot is typical for many logo pages in presentations:

Images files are copied into the slide after which a background shading is added. The shadow creates an instant frame around the logo which is too tight, definitely not the framing the logo designer intended. Now that all logos have a box around them, the eye immediately wants everything to be distributed and aligned properly in a grid, which is impossible to do given the different sizes of the boxes. Finally, the drop shadows actually do not look good.

My approach to logo pages is to adhere to a strict grid and keep everything on a white background to give the logos space to breathe. In PowerPoint or Keynote it is a bit fiddly to line up all the logos, I usually put in a temporary table to make sure everything is lined up in rows and columns. When every logo is in its place, I delete the table.

My presentation app SlideMagic makes it easy, it is impossible not to align images in a proper grid.