How to start a presentation
I see many slide decks, a large fraction of which are screwed up right at the beginning. Here are some thoughts on doing better. This post goes together with others that relate to presentations or press releases, including:
- Presentations for small audiences (August, 2014)
- Short lists of concise claims (July, 2014)
- Faith, hope and clarity (May, 2013)
In the first post linked above, I wrote:
The most generic and reusable part of a slide deck is its beginning — the “setting the table” part. A natural sequence is:
- Whatever seems necessary to introduce and identify you.
- Some validation as part of the introduction — company size, customer logos, whatever.
- The big business problem/need you’re helping with.
- A little validation about the problem/need.
- Some common difficulties in satisfying the need, which are happily absent in your solution.
- Specifically how you meet the need.
Let’s drill into some of those points.
Tips for company validation include:
- If you’re big enough to have validation as a market leader, of course offer that. Analyst firms (industry or stock) are generally the providers of such validation, either directly (those stupid quadrant graphs) or indirectly (via market share numbers and the like).
- Customer logos are great.
- Also great are strong aggregate claims about customers, e.g. “over 70 of the Fortune 100”.
- Financial or fund-raising success is solid validation, and has the second benefit of suggesting you have the resources to deliver on your promises.
- Mere influencer mentions are a weak validation. Also, beware of insulting influencers by quoting competitive influencers at them.
- Founder resumes are validation only for companies so small they can’t be expected to have stronger kinds.
And you might as well disclose headcount. You can keep revenue secret, but not headcount.
Expanding on the last four points and the distinctions among them:
The big business problem/need is something like “making the right offer to the right customer at the right time, exploiting the kinds of data that are now available to support the decision.” I.e., it’s something everybody has heard of, and has probably deployed some kind of technology to try to at least partially meet. Of course, there may be many application areas for your technology; then recite some of them, either right before or right after you state some unifying theme.
Truth be told, this is a short part of the presentation companies usually get right, so let’s move on.
If the need is obvious, how and why should you validate it? I can answer the “how” part of the question in one word — “quickly”. 🙂 As for why validate — speaking strictly logically, you don’t have to. But it can help with emotional buy-in, and also gives an excuse to get a little more specific than, for example “know your customer by leveraging big data”.
Where things commonly go wrong is … well, in discussions of where things commonly go wrong. 🙂 Vendors much too often paint a picture of life without them that is inaccurately bleak. If you say that enterprises who don’t have your technology “sometimes” or “often” are mired in long turnaround times, high costs, bad performance, etc., that’s fine. If you say or imply it always happens, you’re digging yourself into an early credibility hole.
That such exaggeration is commonly part-sincere doesn’t help. Kidding yourself into actually believing the weak-competition nonsense is one of the major pitfalls for Pollyannas. Your optimistic and future-oriented sales pitch needs to be compared to other vendors’ optimistic and future-oriented sales pitches, not to proven reality in the few well-established (and hence not the newest) production implementations you have detailed insight into.
Finally, let’s suppose you’ve navigated all those shoals, and want to summarize how you avoid common problems, before diving into the true technical meat of the presentation. This is a great time to draw on the layered messaging model:
- You have unique aspects to your architecture, which you quickly describe.
- This lets you have unique combinations of features, which you quickly describe.
- These, in turn, overcome the challenges you chose to mention before.
And with that the introduction is finally over, and you have at least three good choices about how to proceed:
- Walk through some specific success stories.
- Go into technical depth.
- Shut up and allow your listener(s) to get a word in edgewise. 🙂
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[…] closest I’ve come to posting about this template in the past was perhaps when I wrote about how to start a presentation. I recommend that post as a companion to this […]
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