SlideMagic Blog

Cover emails that introduce a presentation are very important. It is the first thing the recipients sees. And given that more and more emails are read on smartphones that are not very good at handling attachments (still), they have become more important.

Here  are 2 poor cover emails:

• One that says too little: “Please see the attached business plan”
• One that says too much: the whole pitch cramped into the body of the email with out the visual support of your slides

The enemies we are fighting: getting ignored (the email is not opened), or getting deleted/archived before the whole message has had a chance to come across.

What can you do better?

1. A good subject line. If it is a cold email, use the full space you have, almost like a Tweet. Good subject lines intrigue, they don’t have to  tell the whole story. Good subject lines tell more or less what you want.
2. Write who you are, how you got to the recipient, what you do (no intriguing here, super factual and super short, let the recipient put you in a box) and say what you want.
3. The body of the email is all about intriguing. Unlike when you are in the room where you can stand in front of the door to prevent people from leaving, here, it is you versus the mouse click:

• Think very hard about what the intriguing aspects of your story are. Every pitch has usually only one, or two. (A completely counter intuitive approach to solve an issue, a truly unique team, etc.)
• Forget about the classical business plan story line, you need to get these intriguing aspects across as soon as possible, BUT think of a story flow that allows you to do that. In most cases you need to educate the recipient a bit before you can deliver the key surprise.
• As you add more content, think hard: does this line increase my chance of a response (pick up the phone, click the attachment, write a reply)? Sometimes the best is to keep things short. Cut buzzwords, cliches, any baggage.
• Look at the typography, line breaks, paragraph lengths. Do the right things pop out?

When someone briefs me on a new presentation design project, I usually do not scribble in a note book during the conversation. One, it prevents a direct dialogue. The client is not passing on his food orders to a waiter who looks down at a piece of paper all the time. And, when you write down, it is hard to inject questions. But there is a second reason.

Writing down your impressions after a discussion 10 minutes after the meeting is over is a wonderful way to let your brain do the first sorting of what is important, and what is not. I don’t write down the entire conversation sequentially, rather, I write down the big ideas that struck me. They are not in the right order, they are not at the same level in the story hierarchy, they overlap. Still they are all thoughts that "need to go in somewhere’.

Ten to fifteen minutes is the optimal delay, after that your memory starts fading and you will lose that thought.

Art: Jean Siméon Chardin, Soap Bubbles, 1733

PowerPoint (and yes, Apple Keynote as well) offers way too many styling and customisation options.

1. Non-designers pick the wrong options: shadows, gradients, colours, fonts, and position things all over the grid without worrying about balance or layout
2. There are technical complications as well: copying and pasting slides across creates a mess of different templates, with different defaults. And even if you want to change something because it looks bad, few people know how to do it (straighten out column sizes, fixing that hanging bullet).

The objective of my presentation design software SlideMagic is to free you of all this stuff. If you have to work in PowerPoint, my advice is: make things look like SlideMagic slides! The easiest way is to work in SlideMagic, then convert to PowerPoint. Second best alternative: stay in PowerPoint.

Here are some of the steps I go through when I am faced with the challenge of cleaning up 100 slides of PowerPoint in a very short time:

• Copy the file, delete all but 2 slides, open the slide master, and delete all but 2 slides in it, so you are only left with a title page, and a regular page.
• Fix the slide master
• Create horizontal and vertical drawing guides in the slide master
• Do a brutal font replace across all slides to get rid of any legacy fonts
• Set the colour scheme, save and apply to all slides
• Insert a blank text slide, and create a shape and and a text box. Fix fonts, alignment, line spacing, padding, colours, right click them and set them as default shapes.
• Open the original file and copy all the slides, paste them in the small file you just created
• Select all slides (except the title slides) and change its format to slide 2 in the slide master
• Open the slide master and delete all master designs you don’t need (i.e., you are again left with 2 slide masters)
• Do a global font replace again

I noticed that many of the pitches I have been designing recently follow this kind of narrative:

• [Something] has been going on for ages
• It is hard to understand that with all technological progress we still have to do [this], [this] way
• Well, there is a good reason for, because until now it was not possible to get [this] right
• Enter [company] that for the first time can offer [this] and [that] at the same time
• This is not as easy as it sounds: for example look how hard it is to do [this]
• It is not hard to see why in a couple of years, everyone who used [this] will now be using [that]

After this, the more standard “about” section follows with information about the company, the product economics, financials, team, etc. etc.

Art: Vincenzo Campi, The Fruit Seller, 1580

The majority of business presentations are not TED Talks, are not major product launches, are not State of the Unions. Corporations automate and simplify many processes: accounting, HR, planning. These non-critical “presentations” are the glue/oil on which corporate middle management runs. Decision making and deal making is done around endless iterations of confusing and boring PowerPoint decks because we do not have time (see the irony) or are not in the same place to communicate directly and clearly and sort things out on the spot. Asking for another version of a PowerPoint deck and a meeting next week is the most convenient form of procrastination.

My presentation app SlideMagic (sign up to try it) has been created to kill this inefficiency and give everyone a simple tool to create good enough, decently designed business documents that can be created in an instant, freeing up time to do more interesting and important things.

Here are 2 types of internal corporate documents and reasons why you spend too much time creating them, and the audience is spending too much time decoding them.

• Big decision trade offs. The audience wants to understand what the options are and a clear set of pros and cons (preferably quantified and comparable) to make a decision. And, yes, they want to know which option you prefer. You write endless pages with market context, general trends, project team history, description of the work, without getting to the point.
• M&A deals. Consultants produce endless amount of pages with company backgrounds, company history, description of assets. While the buy side is out to make a DCF valuation model. It needs to understand what the basic business units are, how the economics of the business work, and how to think about forecasting things in the future. Maybe you should not write down a generic business description, but instead create a document that spoon feeds assumptions for a valuation model.

Social media is full of inspirational quotes, and some of them make their way into business presentations as well. I am not a big fan of them. A few nice ones from Quartz:

“By maturing, we self-actualize.” “We dream, we vibrate, we are reborn.” “Choice is the driver of purpose.”

And now there is research that found a negative correlation between people who like these quotes and IQ (it looks genuine).

When are quotes useful in presentations?

• When they are relevant to what you are talking about
• When they are given by someone with credibility
• When they have a nice, unexpected, twist or contradiction
• When they are not cliche
• When they are easy to read/digest (most of the time, this means short)

It is not very often that you find one that matches all these criteria.

UPDATE February 2018: I have added a new post about using quotes in PowerPoint to the blog

Image: The book of nonsense by Edward Lear

Many of you are requesting PowerPoint conversions of the templates that ship with SlideMagic. You will see that the conversion works nicely, but that it is inconvenient to make structural slide edits in the PowerPoint version of the file, doing them in SlideMagic is much easier.

If you want to check out how converted SlideMagic presentations look, I have put the files all in this shared Google Drive folder.

In every client project, I try to get rid of the dreaded summary page in front of the presentation. Instead, I give a very clear description of what we are actually talking about, and a teaser of what the presentation is going to show.

Here is a check list of things I regularly see on first pages.

• It is written in font size 8, in looooong sentences that stretch over the screen (especially on 16:9 wide screens)
• It is an invitation to tell the entire story (too detailed for a summary, but not detailed enough to cover the content correctly)
• It is written in chronological order, then we did this, then we did that, then we did this, rather than an order that makes sense to the audience
• The same point / bit of information is repeated multiple times
• It is loaded with quantitative data, but because of the text format, this data is impossible to understand / relate to each other
• It contains dry information, and no encouragement what so ever to be excited about the content that is going to follow
• It is full of values, mission statements, generic trends, buzzwords and other vague concepts that are context, rather than the core of your idea
• It is full of details (number of employees, founding year, etc.) that are not a crucial part of the “summary” of your story
• It has sub bullets, and worse bullets that have just 1 sub bullet hanging below it. It uses different font sizes for the main bullets, and the sub bullets. Bullets are not properly intended, (space space space space)

We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way. We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way. We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way. We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way. We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way. We are not trying to be a social network, it only looks that way.

If you have to repeat it that often, people might just think you are.

Image source

1. The curse of knowledge, you are so deep in the material that you:
   • Cannot see anymore what points of your story are obvious to an audience, and which points are not (and vice versa, which points are difficult to understand while you think they are very clear
   • Cannot see anymore which details are important / add flavour to the story, and which details are tangents that lead to nowhere
2. You probably hang on to a story structure that you designed for your first presentation a long time ago. Your company and your story has moved on, but your slide deck has not.

Art: Franz Marc, Die großen blauen Pferde (The Large Blue Horses), (1911)