Making your Pitch Presentable

If you are a recent entrepreneur and quite likely from a development background, I assume you have little experience in creating presentations. I assume you have little experience also because you have no other reason to be reading this article. You probably prefer to write thousand lines of code than create a 10-slider deck. Presentations? That junk is for marketing guys and for those damn consultants. Right? Hate them as much as you want, they do get paid a lot precisely for making compelling cases through presentations. Somewhere down the line, you too will have to either make a pitch to a VC or to a potential partner. You will also have to don the cap of a presenter in a boardroom someday.

Now there are two types of presentations. One is where you give a live presentation to the intended audience (like a b-plan) and the other is where you are required to email (like the specifics of a b-plan).

The first type is simple: Keep the presentation short (not more than 10 slides) and keep the text font large with only a few words on each slide. Just follow venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule and you’ll be fine i.e., 10 slides, not more than 20 minutes of presentation, and a minimum of 30 font size. In such meetings, you are actually the presentation. What you say will matter more than what you add to the slides. For heaven’s sake, never read from your slides in a live presentation. Slides here should only act as cues for the next set of passionate blah that you going to throw at your audience.

The second type i.e. email presentations can be tricky. There is no voice over so your slides should be self-explanatory but at the same time they should not be so detailed (or text-heavy) so as to put the CEO or VC to sleep in his office. The idea is to strike a balance between the two. The following presentation tips are literally of religious importance to consultants and they abide by these more than law itself:

• Storyline

Imagine a movie with scenes all jumbled up. Like a movie, a presentation is simply a story that you are narrating in a structured way. Every slide is a scene of this story. Every slide is connected to the previous one. For any entrepreneur the story is: “Our solution (Product) will help the young generation (The Target Customers) solve this problem (The Opportunity) at an affordable price (Pricing) and also help us grow as a company (Return of Investment) in this period of time (Timeframe)”.

Always remember who is going to read your presentation. Typically, it is a high-level executive or a VC. Believe me they have no more than 2 minutes to go through your deck on their iPads. They are not always going to read your entire presentation. It is always wise to have an Executive Summary (2-3) slides at the beginning that summarizes the entire deck in plain and simple bullet points that together flow like a story. It is also a good practice to have a tagline on each slide which summarizes the entire slide.

• Content

While it may feel compelling to add as much data as possible, you should only put information that is relevant to the topic at hand. Do not add data to the slide that makes the reader go “Why are you telling me this?” Every point, sentence, and word should be relevant and useful for the reader. Dumping data to make the deck thicker will land you nowhere. Remove all the extra junk or push it to appendix if you are not sure of its relevance. Limit your data and ensure that your slides do not look text-heavy. If they wanted to read paragraphs, they would have just asked you to send a word document.

• Visual Appeal

Like new-gen consumers these days, CXOs and VCs are also bored easily. They need continuous excitement and adventure in their lives. Give them a boring black-and-white presentation and they will move on to the next thing on their calendar in less than two yawns. So add colors to your presentation. Create graphics. Put headings and text in boxes. Make arrows to show flows. Put text in bullets. Remove text and add images, wherever possible. Remove names of your competitors and add logos. You are required to captivate your audience with visual appeal.

• Consistency in Formatting

Nothing discloses your inexperience more than a formatting error. Experienced professionals are very quick in noticing even the minor errors such as font size differences, inconsistent font type, non-aligned boxes, and even line spacing. It is natural to think that who will care about a few non-aligned boxes once you disclose your revolutionary and path-breaking product. They probably won’t care but in most cases it distracts them. It irritates them. Years of conditioning have made them like this. Noticing and correcting minor errors have literally become an OCD. Don’t take a chance. Don’t let a misplaced comma delay your grand scheme of changing this world.

• Language

It goes without saying that your language should be grammatically correct. In addition, it is wise to also keep your sentences crisp. Nobody wants to read long sentences and after four lines think “Why am I doing this?” Keep it short and sweet. Keep it to the point.

Obviously, every presentation can be made better on a case-to-case basis with a few tweaks here and there but these were the few points that are always applicable. If you too have great tips that have worked wonders for you, put them in the comments below. Just like happiness, knowledge is also not very useful until it is shared.