SlideMagic Blog

Many of my high tech clients hire me to design a product presentation that gets them higher up in the client organisation, the so called C-suite (CEO, CTO, CFO, etc.). The IT department buys features and equipment in a tight budget, the CEO can spend more money on what she sees as strategic priorities for the company.

The approach that vendors typically take is to frankenstein “business benefits” slides to the existing technical slide deck.

• Market research slides that show the ever growing bytes of Internet traffic
• 10-line quotes of customers who feel more flexible now
• An Excel spreadsheet that shows how one custom managed to save $42,345.87 in 2013
• A list of recent technology buzzwords (cloud, flexible, scalable, ROI)

I usually try to go for a different approach. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Trash the traditional system architecture charts. Cut the “business benefits” slides. Instead, I create a presentation that explains why this particular IT problem is so hard to crack, and how clever the client solution is.

The result is a presentation that looks “simple” to techies. “Simple” does not mean “simplistic”. It just does not use the complex looking visual language that engineers have gotten used to since graduating form university: network diagrams and acronyms.  Two engineers can communicate using these slides, but the content that is transferred actually has little to do with the network diagram on the slide. If you are not an engineer, you don’t get it. And as a result, most of the C-suite will not get it and send you back down stairs to IT.

Here is a question I was asked to answer on Quora:

“I heard a famous silicon valley investor saying that “the investors and the VCs are able to see if there is something going on through a bad pitch”. That being said, why should the entrepreneur care about having a good pitch?”

Here is my answer:

1. Not all investors are like that
2. Seeing through a bad pitch is especially hard when you are cold emailing someone a deck without explanation, Q&A
3. You probably also need to the pitch to recruit people, strategic partners, maybe even customers
4. Building on 3, settling for mediocre is not a good way to start creating an exciting company culture for the years to come
5. The pitch is likely to be the basis for other marketing collaterals: web sites, brochures, etc. etc.

Image by Wystan on Flickr

In a pitch there is always pressure to keep things as short as possible. It is therefore tempting to compress the problem you are solving is as few words as possible: “[x] is not very flexible”, because hey, people know this, right?

I tend to drag out the problem section of the pitch a bit:

• Remind people of the problem in an emotional way, that they “feel” it, usually with a picture or a statistic
• Point out what is the cause of this problem, it is often soften very trivial that people did not realise. (“Did you know the reason is that there are no batteries light enough to do this?”)
• Point out why it is so hard to solve the cause (not the problem itself). ("The law of physics that you cannot have this, and this at the same time)

Now you have set up the audience to show why your solution is so clever.

Image: Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr demonstrating ‘tippe top’ toy at the inauguration of the new Institute of Physics at Lund; Sweden

Many people start of a presentation design project with “we want a presentation like Apple”. A great intention. But after you come back with a first version (black background, a few words per slide, no bullets, no agenda pages, no summaries, no logo, no page numbers), people feel that it looks too dark, the flow is not clear, they want to summarise upfront what they are going to say, it is hard to refer to pages, it needs some branding, and to make sure that a certain point comes across, you better spell it out word for word on the slide.

Image by Danny Lion

On Quora, I see questions like which presentation software did [company X] use at [event Y]. For the audience there is no difference. The same simple, good slide can be made in PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, and Adobe InDesign. The exception is probably Prezi and its complex zooming capabilities.

The process that got you there makes a big difference though. How easy is it set up a basic presentation template (colours, fonts, positions of titles, page numbers, aspect ratio), how is it to create a basic slide layout other than a list of bullets, how easy is it to align items properly on a grid, how easy is to create basic data charts, how easy is it to keep everything consistent page after page, how easy is it to do basic image manipulation (cropping and repositioning).

Either the audience cannot tell in which program the presentation was made and you were either a design pro or have made a huge effort to master the software. Or, the audience can spot your software instantly (most likely PowerPoint), which means that you did not get much further than the standard slide template.

(A secret: you can get away with taking design short cuts in my presentation app SlideMagic and no one will notice).

Edgar Degas, Rehearsal on stage, 1874

One of our clients back at McKinsey in the 1990s used to say that “the paper in McKinsey documents is always warm”, i.e., they came of the printer only minutes before the meeting. Now that documents/presentations are all in digital form there is even greater opportunity to make last minute changes, especially if you travel by taxi to the meeting.

It comes at a price though. First of all, last minute analysis is prone to mistakes. But secondly: “frankensteining” quickly a chart into a presentation might break that super professional and impeccable look of the presentation.

If the change does not involve the correction of a major error,  it might be better to make that missing point verbally.

I get this question a lot from (potential) clients in Europe and here in Israel. Ten years ago, I would have answered the question with a usual rundown of presentation design basics: not too many bullet points, visual slides, etc. etc.

But in 2016, I think the playing field has levelled. Audiences in any country now recognise a good or a bad presentation.

There are still differences between audiences though, but they do not differ across geographical boundaries. Here are some contrasts that I often come across. It is especially in these situations that an outside presentation designer can help to bridge the cultural gap.

• Engineers that need to present to more sales & marketing oriented people
• Engineers that need to present to potential customers
• Founder/inventors that need to present to potential investors
• Small company that needs to present to a big trade show and/or large Fortune500 company
• Internally focused managers (production, logistics, finance) that need to present to an outside audience (M&A due diligence for example)
• Local subsidiary that needs to present to corporate headquarters
• CEO that needs to present to Wall Street analysts
• Sales Director who needs to present to distribution partners

When presenting to someone outside your typical circle of “audiences” it is important to put yourself in their shoes. Simply recycling your usual presentation is unlikely to work.

Art: Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954

Management consultants produce tons of charts that might look professional, but in most cases, they are actually not that good. (Most management consultants will admit this if you ask them).

Why does this happen?

PowerPoint is a slide design tool that can be used in many ways.

1. The tool to create beautiful keynote address slides
2. A quick canvas to jot down an analysis
3. An alternative to a word processor that is better at handling graphics, tables, and shapes

Management consultants use PowerPoint as 2. and 3., and forget to make the jump to 1. after they are done with the analysis. Most verbal presentations go OK, management consultants are usually reasonable presenters and when a horribly dense slide goes up on the screen, the explanation is usually clear.

Still, the visuals can be better, and here are some steps to clean things up based on the work I did for a management consulting client yesterday.

• Cut sentences down to the essence and leave out filler/buzz words. This is probably the biggest improvement you can make. “Value creation potential”, “customer success journeys”, “centers of excellence” you know what I mean
• Rethink the basic setup of a page. Sometimes you start of with a straw man or template: a number of rows with “category” - “elaboration” for example. After you filled out the whole thing, maybe the categories are not right, maybe you don’t need the categories because they say exactly the same thing as the elaboration.
• If you are left with some bullet points, at least make sure that they line up properly, have a small indent, and leave more than 2 words on one line
• Add movement to your slides. If there is a sequence, put the boxes in sequence. If there is an impact, use an arrow to point at something, if there is an overlap, draw a circle
• Don’t repeat the headline message in a bubble on the chart, one is enough
• Make sure all slides follow the template: headlines in the same font, in the same place, if the headline does not fit, cut words until it does, do not be tempted to reduce fonts, or go beyond the margins
• Try making shapes without box lines around them, usually colours have enough contrast. This makes the slide a lot calmer
• Clean up logo pages: use the latest ones, use high res logos, line them up properly. If things get too cluttered, make them black and white, or fall to back to just names. Not every company name needs to be expressed in a logo.

I usually spend 80% of the production section of a pitch on the problem, and 20% of the solution. That might seem an uneven balance. But in fact, these two sections are one and the same thing, they go hand in hand. The way you frame the problem, sets up the way you introduce the solution.

Image: Wikipedia

I have been working with a client on a presentation with 2 different pieces of software: she on Keynote, me on PowerPoint. She kept importing and exporting. The conversion is actually pretty accurate (a compliment to Keynote). The only glitches are in drawing guides and page numbers and the occasional font here and there.

Image by Kreg Steppe on Flickr