To make a compelling presentation, you need to be highly organized, conversant with your topics, prepared for questions, and at ease speaking in public.
There are three distinct elements to a
successful presentation: content, design and presentation, and the presenter.
Content
When talking about the content, provide an adequate snapshot of the company,its management, the market, and the return on investment. It is useful
for the presenter to tell about the product or service of the company up
front. Many presenters verbally wander around for much of their presentation
without giving the audience any clear idea of the business and product
being discussed.
Another area of concern, in terms of content, is the management discussion.
Oftentimes, companies that had some depth and experience in management
gloss over it instead of emphasizing it, while at other times, a company
weak in management does not tell the audience how it proposes to
solve that problem and beef up the team.
The presentation of financial information presents difficulties to most
speakers. Financial data in a short presentation needs to concentrate on
highlights and not minute details—provide enough detail to impress upon
the audience that you know what you are talking about, but not so much
that you put them to sleep. A presentation is like a business plan—one of
its principal purposes is to get a meeting where you will have an opportunity
to elaborate upon the details.
The Presenter
The third area to focus on is the actual presenter—his or her communicationskills and appearance. If you have not spoken in public quite a bit, seek
out opportunities to speak and become comfortable with oral presentations.
The quickest way to learn is—you guessed it—speak in public at every
opportunity. Join Toastmasters. Attend lead share groups and networking
events in your area where everyone makes a short presentation.
Professional speaking coaches are everywhere, and in some of the larger cities there are
coaches just for business presentations. The first skill is learning to be comfortable
with public speaking, and the next is learning to present your materials
in a compelling and persuasive manner.
Like learning to sing or playing a musical instrument, the well-known secret is practice, practice, practice. Always rehearse your presentation with your colleagues and include a practice
question and answer session.
QUICK Tip
Design and Presentation: How a presentation looks can be as important as
what you say in it. Consider hiring a graphic design firm or branding firm to
help put the look of your presentation together. Some of the tips they give
include the following.
• Avoid putting video clips in a short presentation or embedding them in
PowerPoint. A video, no matter how short, tends to eat into valuable presentation
time.
• Keep a color scheme that is easy on the eye and perfectly readable. Slides
cluttered with cute graphic images distract from your message.
Your personal appearance for presentations seems obvious enough. If you
are asking for capital, you need to make a professional appearance relative
to the business to whom you are presenting. A coat and tie or a business
dress or suit is always a safe bet.
However, there can be some variation to this rule. If you are a country
and western entertainer or your business is branded around a particular
image, then you may wish to dress a little different. Murray Burk and Mary
Spata operate a family-run business located in the village of Post Mills,
Vermont, making homemade-style marinara pasta sauces, ketchups, mustards,
and condiments (www.vermontfinest.com).
Murray has developed the persona of Uncle Dave, a colorful Vermont farmer in a red plaid shirt and
overalls. His products are branded with the character of Uncle Dave and he
appears at events in full costume. In his case, the overalls are a powerful
sales tool.
ADVICE TO PRESENTERS
Ike Gadsden, Managing Director of Diamond State Ventures
(www.dsventures.net), a Delaware technology cultivator, gives the
following advice to presenters.
First things first.
The primary objective of your Diamond State Ventures presentation
is to get a meeting with a potential investor. This ten to twelve minute
presentation is not a forum to defend your intellectual property position,
prove your technology or science, or give a demonstration. For now, the
audience will give you the benefit of the doubt on these issues. The objective
of this presentation is to persuade the audience that your business opportunity
is worthy of a more detailed look.
Your presentation should be clear, concise, and to the point. A one-page
executive summary about your company (written by you) will be provided to
the venture forum attendees. That is where most of your details should reside.
Your presentation should cull out the most salient and profound points and
emphasize those. Some suggested topics for slides include:
Introduction. What is your company name, what does your company do
(high-level)? Provide a real-world setting/example the audience can relate
to.
Market Need. What is the pain (cost) associated with this problem? How
is the market solving the problem currently?
Company Overview. How do you solve the problem better than anyone
else? What is your unique niche and value proposition?
Product/Service. What do you sell?
Competition. Who else is providing solutions to this problem? Where do
you rank against/amongst them? (Don’t say you have no competition. There
is always competition.) How are you different/better?
Intellectual Property. What is your IP? Do you have proprietary processes? (Don’t go into the nuts and bolts, but instead present that it exists and the basic premise surrounding it from a business value perspective.)
Sales and Marketing. What is your go-to-market strategy? How will
you drive revenues? How will you reach your customers and convince them
to buy?
Management team. Who is committed to your company and what is
their relevant experience/expertise?
Financial Projections. Assuming you receive the funding you need, what
do you anticipate revenues to be Year 1 through Year 5? If you asked for
more money, could you scale faster and become profitable sooner?
Sources and Uses. How much money have you raised so far? How much
money are you asking for now? How will you use the new funding?
Summary. Review the problem that your solution solves and the importance
of it in the marketplace. Review your unique value proposition.
Emphasize the dedication of your team. Ask for the money.
An effective presentation:
• focuses on a single objective (get a meeting!);
• is clear, concise, to the point, and readable;
• does not include jargon, scientific terms, or acronyms;
• uses color and graphics appropriately; and,
• does not use hard-to-read graphics or small text.
An effective presenter:
• does not read the slides to the audience;
• is confident and enthusiastic about his or her business;
• establishes eye contact and speaks to the audience;
• respects the time allotted; and,
• brings plenty of business cards and aggressively networks the room.
Remember, the audience knows if you are less than prepared. The audience
knows if you are less than convinced.
Speaker Tips
The best speaker tip is to be prepared for anything—things will go wrong
with varying frequency. The following are some very practical things to
consider.
• If possible, check out the room in which the presentation will take
place in advance.
• Stand at the podium, if there is a podium, and visualize the audience
and your ease and confidence in presenting to them.
• If there is not a podium, which is rare, you will not be able to rely on
note cards. The PowerPoint outline may be your savior.
• Check out the sound system—it is rare for most presentations to have
a professional sound person running the show.Will there be a microphone?
Is it stationary or portable? Is there a lavaliere-type microphone
available (the one pinned to your clothes)?
• In the event that the presentation is being filmed, find out the range of
the camera and stay within its visual boundaries. Also, do not turn your
back to the camera, if possible.
• Rehearse your presentation several times before the big day. Watch the
clock and time your conclusion accordingly—nothing is more irritating to
the sponsors and audience than a speaker intentionally squeezing more
time from the presentation than allotted. Arrange for your colleagues to
comment on the presentation and ask you some tough questions.
• If you are going to use PowerPoint, make certain that the updated version
is installed on your laptop and double-check that a projector and
screen are available.You may need to buy your own projector to be certain
one is always available.
• If you suffer from stage fright, you are not alone. However, that is a
small consolation when you are expected to get up front and speak.The
best way to overcome stage fright is to speak in public often. If you are
distressed about this presentation, pick a person or two in the audience,
make eye contact and give your presentation to that person or people,
as if it were a conversation in your office or living room.
• Be careful about using humor—particularly the planned joke variety—
in your presentation. Apart from the fact you are at a business presentation,
humor, unless you are an after-dinner speaker or a comedian, can
be tricky to deliver and a disaster if it does not work. If you are a naturally
funny person, use your sense of irony and timing to charm your
audience, let them see the natural humor in your personality.
• The final and most important tip—enjoy yourself. The presentation is
your time to shine for your company.You will feel a real high when you
have nailed it, even if money does not flow the first time.
THE RULES OF POWERPOINT PRESENTATION
- The use of PowerPoint can be a powerful presentation tool or a crutch that
distracts the audience and derails your presentation. Aided by the ease of
creation, data-driven presentations to the investor audience can be
deadly.
When preparing your presentation, be cognizant of the way your slides
look and the information they convey. In a ten- to twelve-minute presentation
you may want to restrict the number of slides to five–seven, using the
slides as you would an outline for a speech, evoking the concept and then
filling in verbally. In any event, avoid chart junk. As Professor Tufte stated
in his seminal essay on PowerPoint:
At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the
PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content.
Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play—very
loud, very slow, and very simple.
A guideline for presentations is no more than four bullet points per slide
and never more than one line per bullet point. Reading the words from the
slide has the same effect as reading a speech—you lose contact with the
audience and your credibility fades.
Print your presentation and do not look at the screen incessantly. Also, it
helps for you to hand out a copy of your slides at the presentation so the
audience can review them at their leisure. Make certain all of your contact
information is included somewhere in the presentation.
Learning to Close and When
If you grew up in an average middle-class family, you probably had littleoccasion to seriously ask for money. When you did, it was probably awkward
and unpleasant. Most of us started out asking for our weekly
allowance.
Unless you have spent the last several years in sales—actually calling on
customers and getting sales—you need to reprogram your approach and
learn to ask for the money. If you cannot give an investor or a banker a level
of confidence that you are comfortable asking for the necessary capital and
that you have the ability and sense of mission to spend the money wisely,
you will not fund your company.
It is all about closing the deal. If you are presenting to angels or venture
capitalists, the closing will be a process of additional meetings and diligence
before it is time to close. If you are presenting your private placement memorandum
to a selected audience, it is appropriate to identify those persons
who have an active interest, answer their questions, and ask them to invest.
Declining Money
Believe it or not, there are times when you should decline the money. In thecase of larger investors, you should perform your own due diligence on the
potential funder. What has been the experience of other companies they
have funded? How active a role did they play in the management?
If the funding was incremental, did it come on time and when promised? Did
they add value to the company and its mission? If the funder refuses to give
references, run—do not walk—away.
The reverse of the big funder is the couple on a fixed income who love
you and want to put their last savings in your company. Do not take that
money—it is unethical, ill-advised, and always more trouble than it is
worth. Some investors just are not right for your company. Learn to recognize
them, be respectful, and let them go.
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