Presenting

Practice Pitches -- Much More Than Delivery

You have a great new business idea, you have built the minimal viable product (MVP), you have some initial revenues -- and now you want to raise some angel funding. What do you do next? Before you reach out and apply to every angel group in town, consider the following.

1. Determine how much you need to raise and the milestones you will hit

Founders “sell” milestones to investors and leave it to investors to ask themselves two questions: 1. Will this team hit these milestones with this amount of capital raised? 2. If they hit the milestones will they be attractive to the next round of investors?

Be cautious about how much money you ask for in this round. Ask for only enough to prove the next level of market and product traction, building in a bit of a contingency. If you shoot too high you may have to score with multiple angel groups, spend the next six months fundraising, and risking having to return the money if you do not complete the round.

2. Create your elevator pitch

Write a 30 second pitch that you could deliver in a ride in the elevator, with no props. Try it out on people and refine it until it is just right. This pitch could be your outline for your pitch deck, which avoids the common problem of including slides in a deck just because the writer already had some great graphics

Read More

A Far Better Way to Write Documents

How often do you sit through presentations that contain so much text that the font size is unreadable from even the front seats? Then the presenter turns his or her back to the audience and reads the slides verbatim? 

How often do people share their slide deck as a record of the meeting, but no one can figure out what it says a few weeks later because the deck is full of pretty pictures and vague bullet-point topic sentences? 

How often do you sit through a meeting that is supposed to be collaborative but the presenter runs out of time just presenting the deck, with a slow reveal of the insights or recommendation?

Most people would answer "frequently" (if not "always") for each of these questions. In some cases the writer should take the blame for poor writing or communications skills. However, the real underlying problem is different circumstances require different document formats. A good presentation should provide minimal graphic support, so the audience pays attention to the words and makes eye contact with the presenter. By design, such a presentation makes for a poor leave-behind. In my days at McKinsey years ago company policy forbade us leaving a copy of the slides as the only documentation. We had to either write a complete text document to describe our findings and recommendations, or annotate the slide deck to make it more descriptive. 

Yet so many presenters today try to split the difference. They put enough on the slide to satisfy the documentation need, but still have graphics to make the presentation more interesting. They end up accomplishing neither. I almost scream each time I hear "I am sorry this slide is so tough to read" or "I apologize for this eye chart".

This paper on SlideDocs by Nancy Duarte impresses me. It is an interesting read. It is a game changer. I am already putting this approach to use in my businesses.

The key points are:

  1. Most people should share papers in advance of the meeting, so the group can use the time for discussions rather than presenting.
  2. We live in a visual time, so the visual impact of photos, graphs, tables, etc. are important in a document. We should borrow lessons from visual media such as Wired Magazine and Flipboard.
  3. The document should work as a stand-alone, which requires the more detailed text to tell the story. If the presenter wants to show some or all the pages in a presentation later, then he/she can remove the text and rearrange the graphic elements for visual appeal.

Duarte suggests people use PowerPoint or the equivalent. I believe Google Presentation is a better choice. It has nearly all the graphic functionality of PowerPoint. Teams can use the collaboration tools to create and edit the document together. The audience can view the presentation on just about any device with a browser, with no need to own or open the PowerPoint app. The presenter can share a web link with the audience members, so they do not have to open a file. And the presenter can make adjustments to the presentation before the rest of the audience views it, in case an early reader points out some typos or the like. 

Give it a try. My bet is most of us will be using the term "SlideDoc" before the year is over. And our meetings will be more effective.