SlideMagic Blog

Last week’s conference is a gold mine for presentation pitch examples.

The receiver of a pitch of a new idea will almost always try to pigeon hole you in a product category they understand well, so it easy to compare the new thing you are offering to the familiar world they are living in.

We were pitching 9xchange that does not really fit very well in anything (yet). One of our audiences was someone in operations and IT. At the very basic level you can think of 9xchange as, well, an IT system. We have a web site, a server, etc. And this triggered all the red flags.

• We currently have already IT implementation projects running
• We already have a system that does […]
• What, we just switched all our employees to system x
• How do I get buy in from department x, y, and z for this, the previous project was a huge pain to get approved
• We are behind schedule in rolling out this system

We did not even get to pitch the core idea behind 9xchange and got stuck in the hassle of running major IT integration projects in very large companies.

This prospect was the wrong person to pitch to, we did not even try.

More reflections on last week’s conference. We stayed 6 days, with probably an average of 8 - 10 meetings a day, plus 3 - 5 cocktail receptions each evening. That boils down to hundreds of pitches to hundreds of people, in a time zone that is 10 hours before yours.

Everyone is in the same boat (people who pitch, people at the receiving end of pitches)), and the dynamic of the meetings changes over the course of the conference. Towards the end of the event, people get really tired, and have seen the dance many times. The result: meetings actually get better. The small talk is about the shared experience of the conference. The setting is more informal. People are more flexible to meet outside stuffy hotel rooms, just somewhere in the corner of a hotel lobby. The pitch is much more direct (“ok, what do you want”), feedback is more candid.

But I am not sure there is a way to get to these last days of meetings without having to go through the first ones.

Image by Jeffrey at https://www.flickr.com/photos/48889052497@N01/11342817773

Getting logos to line up properly is one of the hardest things in slide design. I have not been able to come up with a set of rules to do it, every time I need to eye ball things to see whether things somehow look right. Below is an example from the 9xchange web site:

There are a number of (conflicting) inputs:

• The middle of the image file
• The typographical baseline of the text
• The middle of the non-text part of the logo
• Tag lines above or below the brand name

Always fine tune logo pages because any automated adjustment will for sure not get it right.

Thinking back at last week’s pitch meetings in San Francisco:

• Connect. In some meetings there was instant personal connection with the other side, in some meetings completely none of that. Usually, in the first minute of a meeting you know in which category you are.
• Understand. Most people got our idea, some actually did not. Because of different factors: language, the required background and context, and probably our presentation skills
• Agree. Even if people understood everything, some people did not actually agree with us. Fair enough.

You don’t always need a connection for people to understand and/or agree. Getting someone to agree without understanding is a challenge though…

SlideMagic is back in 2023 after the holidays, and a very intense, exhausting and drenched JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco (I will share some insights about pitching from this event over the coming days).

The starting point is this table:

What I did:

• Use a stacked column chart instead of a table
• Simplified the data to boil it down to what matters
• Some fiddling to get the car images to a comparable scale (I hope I did it right)

The result is below:

I have added this slide to the SlideMagic template database so you can use it in your own presentations. Search for something like ‘BMW” in the app and it will pop up. Pro subscribers can convert slides like these to PowerPoint or PDF. SlideMagic has a free Pro plan available for students.

I am off the grid for a few days (finally had a chance to see the northern lights, see the image below). All the best for 2023!

My venture 9xchange is new in the world of healthcare, wo we need to establish credibility by showing that we have significant experience and are backed by significant people. Here is what I came up with (see the 2 screenshots below).

I put up a dense grid with the bios of the people involved. Below this table, are a few recognizable brands from the world of healthcare. When you hover (or click on a tablet) over a person’s bio, a relevant subset of the brands light up.

Alternatively, when you hover over, or click the brands at the bottom, relevant people get highlighted, including the relevant small print in their CV.

You can check out the progress of the work on the 9xchange website.

In most cases, it is not worth the time and effort in a short presentation to take the audience through a demo or a series of screenshots of your application. At this stage in the pitch process, understanding the exact flow of your application is not critical.

What can matter though is the simple question of whether you have a decent product or prototype or not. The role of a screen shot here is not to show the exact detail of your app, but more a proof point.

One way to make this point is to use an office background with some screens, and paste a number of screens on the monitors. That’s what I did in a recent deck for my other venture 9xchange. I made the office background black and white, to make the screens pop a bit more.

(Look how I managed to Photoshop the screen shot behind the standing desk light)

I find the world of marketing and branding agencies very confusing. You ask them what they do, and you get a description of a process that sounds and looks very similar to everyone else you ask the same question. But in practice, people are actually very specialized. Defining the personality of a brand, creating the competitive strategic positioning of a company, making the pitch deck, generating leads, designing ads, running online campaigns, designing logos, etc .etc.

The best strategy to find out what people do is to ask them to describe a project, and see where in this whole jungle they played a role, and most importantly, at what stage in this description see you light up the eyes of the person you are considering working with.

There is a lot of science and analytics available for eCommerce web sites. Changes in layout, design, and content immediately translate into changes in clicks and sales. The story is a bit different for a corporate web site that is not transactional, it does not sell anything, it does not have a big signup button, but plays the role of a digital business card for a company. Let’s say the first web site of a startup aimed at investors and the first enterprise customers.

Some things to look at:

• The most important aspect is probably the look and feel of the site, regardless of the content. Does it look professional and serious (as in of a serious company). If that funky or complex graphic somehow does not look quite right and you can’t put your finger on the spot why, take it out. A professional looking simple graphic is always better than a botched attempt at a complex one. Make sure that copyright year is the current one.
• This seems obvious, but is often lacking, the site should actually state what it is you do. Try it on people that have no background at all in the market you work in, try it on people that love to put you in well known boxes (i.e., venture capitalists)
• Different companies need to emphasize different things. For most companies, the founding team and its head shots will be buried in some ‘about’ section of the web site, for very early stage startups, it might need to feature prominently on the first page since it is basically the only asset it has.
• No one reads a web site top to bottom like a newspaper article. Instead, people glance. Read a headline, look a the small text below a photo, read a random paragraph. Don’t arrange content in order of importance solely, but think about the visual hierarchy. A small picture might grab more attention than the big cliche headline.
• It is tempting to lift stories from presentations and translate them to the web site. The founding story of how it all began to where you are now including that big pivot in 2020, the market gap analysis that is the start of your investor pitch deck. These stories need a place, but maybe not on the home page of your web page.
• Avoid jargon. “Ah, this site is filled with blah blah” and people will stop reading. But do include language that is common in the industry you are working in.
• Make sure that the site has the details that should be there: contact details, etc.