Get your hands dirty

The other day I was doing the first sales presentation design interview with a startup that soon will start selling storage systems for large data centers that will eclipse the performance of the big names in the industry. Two presentation options

1. Flaky chart: 2 columns, our performance, their performance.
2. Substance chart: a series of charts that explains how a totally new type of storage architecture can deliver these performance figures

The first approach does not stick, the second one does, even in the absence of a large number of customer examples.

The check list goes in last

How do you make up your mind? Think of this, consider that, go back, look at this. A slightly random process in which you jump from one aspect to the other. Once we are done with this process, we go through a more orderly check list to see we've covered everything.

Here are the implications for many of my presentations:

• Upfront, tease the audience something great is coming, but do not try to summarize or explain the whole pitch in a structured (=boring) way
• Tell the story using the structure a movie director would take, not the author of a business school text book
• Come back with an organized summary, the check list, to show the audience that we have covered all.

Microsoft Office 2011 Service Pack 1 (version 14.1)

Microsoft posted its first Office 2011 for Mac update yesterday, and as I can see now, it took care of the instability issues in PowerPoint 2011 that I have been complaining about (fingers crossed). Still, there is a long feature wish list for SP2 to bring it at par with the Windows version, of which custom font embedding sits at #1. See my earlier review of PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

My NYU presentations on SlideShare

Last week, I spoke at a SalesSchool event at NYU in New York. Here are the slides I used during the 2 evenings. Both presentations start off the same, but then diverge as they focus on VC pitches and sales meetings. SalesCrunch will post video fragments of the evenings later on their site.

SalesSchool - designing powerful VC pitches

View more presentations from Idea Transplant

SalesSchool - designing sales presentations that sell

View more presentations from Idea Transplant

At the end of the presentation, I touch briefly on the challenges of presenting without eye contact. For more suggestions about presenting remotely and in webinars, see this post by Olivia Mitchell.

Reduce the leading of large font sizes

Leading is the horizontal spacing between lines of text. For regular font sizes, PowerPoint adjusts the leading fine. When you start getting to huge font sizes though, things tend to go wrong, the distance between lines of text is too large.

To reduce the leading in PowerPoint, select the text, right-click, select paragraph, set spacing inside the spacing group to exactly, and lower the number that pops up.

Reading decks on the go

This guest post by Jakob Jochmann on Jon Thomas' blog triggered this observation: more and more, I start to email out intermediate versions of my presentations in PDF format because people can read them on mobile devices. This format is good enough for high-level comments on early drafts. The final round of edits needs a bigger screen.

What happened in Fukuchima in PowerPoint

This presentation is a good example of building up a complex systems diagram in multiple stages. Keep 99% of the diagram the same, and provide a text explanation of the 1% that changed.



Via Elan Dekel.

Back from New York

No major insights regarding presentation design today as I am getting myself organized after returning from a fantastic week in New York. I really enjoyed the 2 speaking events at NYU, and want to thank Sean Black from SalesCrunch for inviting me. Sean will publish the content of the 2 evenings in chunks on his site.

I also would like to thank venture capitalist Mark Suster (author of Both Sides of the Table and one of the "3 musketeers" of VC bloggers together with Fred Wilson and Brad Feld) for spontaneously agreeing to introduce the first event (on VC pitching) in person.

I enjoyed my week tremendously, met great people, and am really impressed by the buzzing startup scene around Union Square in New York. If you were in the audience and would like to connect and/or have additional questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

No red in financial data

Red is a great accent color to make text stand out from other elements on the slide. Do not use it for financial data though, people are associating red with negative performance and losses.

A new ergonomic chair

One of the easiest ways to become better at presentation design is to have a calm and relaxing work environment and an ergonomic chair and computer setup. I have not found the idea chair solution yet. Simple kneeling chairs put too much pressure on your knees after long use, complicated ergonomic chairs are so huge that they seem to come straight out of  a science fiction movie. Maybe this simple elegant solution, the Tip Ton by Vitra might be a good solution to put next to my regular office chair (nice commercial by the way), it will be launched later this month.

"Clients don't understand their success is reliant on standing out, not fitting in"

I came across this quote by the fictional character Don Draper (Mad Men) on the Advertising is good for you blog. It does apply to some of my presentation design projects, especially when there is some resistance to let go of the common bullet point approach.

Image via Wikipedia

How to present your team to investors

The founding team is a one of the most important inputs in a venture capitalist's mind when she decides to invest in your startup or not. For a large part, an investor will size you up during the pitch by judging how you present and how you answer questions, information that is not written down anywhere on a slide.

Still, the team slide is a crucial part of any VC presentation. It is difficult to put CV information in a slide. There is lots of information, and CV entries require lots of text (long university, company, and position names). So I usually end up designing 2 versions: one to go in the front and one with full details to go in the appendix (the latter is meant for reading, not presenting).

You should adopt the design of your high level team slide, depending on what you want to say:

• We have many of years of experience, a very long time line
• We have worked together before, multiple time lines circling the overlap in your careers
• We worked for big name companies: company logos
• We have complementary skills, some sort of (slightly cliche) puzzle that shows what skill set the individual team members bring to the table.

And if you can:

• Put in high-quality head shots of the team members
• Or even better: an energetic group picture.