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PART 1: HOW TO DESIGN STUNNING SALES AND INVESTOR PRESENTATIONS
with Jan Schultink of IdeaTransplant
“Basics of Slide Design”

We are thrilled to finally share this series of videos with you from our recent event at NYU called How to Design Stunning Sales and Investor Presentations. Jan Schultink of IdeaTransplant traveled from Tel Aviv to come share his wisdom and experience in creating presentations that will get you noticed and leave a lasting impression with your audience.

Idea Transplant is a professional presentation & pitch design firm that creates sales, conference and investor presentations for pitches that are too important to fail by using beautiful and effective visuals.  The Idea Transplant blog has over 750 posts around how to make stunning presentations that captivate your audience.

To see more videos from this event be sure to check these out:

Part 2: How to Design Stunning Sales and Investor Presentations: Slide Design and Presentation Flow

Part 3: How to Design Stunning Sales and Investor Presentations: Flow, Content, Integrity & Realism

Part 4: How to Design Stunning Sales and Investor Presentations: The 10-Second Pitch

Part 5: How to Design Stunning Sales and Investor Presentations: Coffee Chat and Why It’s Important

Part 6: How to Design Stunning Sales and Investor Presentations: Q&A (Part 1)

Part 7: How to Design Stunning Sales and Investor Presentations: Q&A (Part 2)

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Part 1 TRANSCRIPT:

JAN SCHULTINK: Sean, thank you very much for the introduction, and Mark also for his surprise visit. Today we’re going to talk about investor presentations – to pitch them. And probably there is no need to convince this audience here that the investor presentation is a very important document because often, in most of the cases, it’s actually the only physical asset that a company has in its fundraising arm.

Why am I talking to you here? I am presentation designer based in Tel Aviv, often referred to by people as “startup nation.” A very vibrant technology community. You can see my office here just on the waterfront very close to some other places that have been in the news and are in the news far too, too often. In this environment I have been working for the past eight years in designing presentations. And you could almost say that I clocked my 10,000 hours of presentation time, as Malcolm Gladwell says, that you need to become really good at something.

There’s two hats that I will be talking to you tonight.

One is my graphics experience and presentation design experience.

The other one is my previous life, like Mark Suster actually, who has a background in management consulting, so have I. I spent about ten years for McKinsey in Amsterdam and London and the situation in which I was put in there was, actually, very similar to the type of audience that you will get in your investor presentation. These are senior people, they are smart people, they are busy people. In the McKinsey team, you had the challenge of presenting your data and ideas to these people who didn’t have a lot of time to listen to them.

So, two types of input that I would like to give to you tonight, two backgrounds. There’s good news that technology allows you today to do actually the same thing that a professional graphic designer would do. PowerPoint is a good program, Keynote is a good program, you can find images, you can find fonts. You have all the tools in your hands that professional graphic designers also use at the moment.  It’s a level playing field and your objective is to make sure that your PowerPoint does not look like PowerPoint and if you have achieved that, that is a good looking presentation.

So I’m going to talk a few topics tonight. First I’m going to start explaining about slide design, all these graphics design principles irrespective of the narrative and the story that we talked about. This is a generic, sort of background, and some tricks about how to make your slides look better. And I’m going to explain to you a process that took me about 5 to 8 years to go through because I have no background, whatsoever, in graphics. I have no training in graphics. I come from a business background, very similar to you, and over time started to apply some of these techniques to slides.  So here we go at a high pace.

The most important slide of tonight is probably this one. You should set yourselves [an] objective of not using any bullet points at all in your PowerPoint presentation, and it’s perfectly possible to do. Bullet points are a bad, bad thing in presentation design and this slide sort of explains it.  Why it’s…[laughter] If I turn my back to you and try to, sort of, read it out. You are much, much faster than I possibly could ever read those bullet points to you, and it’s totally not a way to excite an audience or get your audience excited about your messages. No bullet points. There’s a reason for it in psychology, in neurology. A bullet point basically means we have to read the letters, construct the words, make a sentence, create an impression and finally the idea gets stored in your brain. Why not make a shortcut and go straight to phase five and use images instead to make your point?

Images are good because of two reasons: one, it’s basically a very efficient way to package a lot of information. If I had to describe the contents of this picture in language and words, I would use a lot, a lot of text. It’s almost like to old cliché, the picture says more than a thousand words. Pictures are good to get across in a short period of time a lot of information. The second important component: a picture is an emotional piece of information and the brain likes to use emotion to make associations and boost memory. People who have seen the movie Ratatouille, the food critic takes a bite of a dish and all of a sudden his entire childhood flashes in front of him and remembers how his mother used to cook similar dishes back in Provence when he still was a child. So this one piece of emotional input triggers more range of ideas or memories in a split second. You can use it in your presentation, your investor deck. In particular in, sort of, the key slides that Mark also was talking about. If there is a specific point that you would like to make.  For example, in this case, I used this image for a company that makes websites more ‘sticky’ to prevent you from basically zapping, basically, away to another site quick. So to put this daunting image, a very, sort of, strong visual impression and use it as a background slide to make your point, that sort of burns a visual trademark in your head. And it’s very likely that if you bump into the investor three or four weeks later, that he will still remember the slide with the remote control pointing at you and if, instead, you used a few bullet points to describe this idea, he would have forgotten all about it. So you can use strong and bold visuals to, sort of, program something into someone’s mind.

Where can you find these images? There are very useful sites. iStock Photo is an example, istockphoto.com. For a few dollars you can buy images, search them by keyword, by color, by format – you name it, it’s all available – high quality images for you to use. There’s a little warning with these stock image sites. This is Debbie, and Debbie has appeared thousands of thousands of times in ‘contact us’ sections of websites. You can see these pictures are not real pictures. These are models that create a very artificial pose. They look so tacky, cheesy, not real. So when you weed through these image sites and try to get some visuals, skip the ones like this. And there’s also, like, very good and natural looking images in iStock Photo. You just need to try and get an eye for picking the right images. There are free sources, obviously, as well. Flickr is fantastic as an archive of images. The drawback of Flickr is that the quality of photography is judiciously variable. There are great photographers on Flickr and there are people that snap pictures with their camera late at night.  So, 1) find the right images, and 2) make sure that you use images with a creative commons license. Creative commons license means that the photographer has agreed for you to use these images in a presentation if you give them a small credit in your presentation. Otherwise you’re violating copyright and can get you into trouble.

Some basics about images, how you can immediately see that the presentation is not professional. I cannot look at a big plasma screen that is, sort of, at the wrong aspect ratio to it. So you can see images here are stretched and it just doesn’t look good and [does] not look professional.  So make sure that the aspect ratio for the pictures that you use are correct and everything looks as it’s supposed to be. ClipArt and other sort of things that Microsoft had invented in the 1990′s, you probably remember the string bean the character that used to appear in every PowerPoint presentation, to avoid at all costs and replace with images. A very good training school of graphic design is to, basically, look around you, to look in the newspapers, to look at billboards and think about what sort of advertising or images are actually really good ones and I like and which are not, and what are the sort of techniques that these people use that I could use in my PowerPoint presentation. This is an image that you could completely recreate, a concept like this in PowerPoint very easy. Pick out a “U” and a mini logo, you’re done.

Again, the techniques are not the limitation, it’s your mindset, your creativity, your ideas that enable this.  And this image is an important concept here. Its called “whitespace,” a large part of the image of the slide is actually left blank or empty. And often I meet people who see this as an opportunity. “The investor said I could have only 10 slides, there’s this half slide empty, I can make this presentation look a lot better by just filling it up with as much information as possible.” I think it’s time to take the opposite approach that there’s no limitation against us discussing it many times, “How many slides can I present? How many slides from a deck? 10? 15?” I totally ignore that question. Instead think like, set yourself a time limit. So I have 20 minutes or have 25 minutes. Regardless of that, how many slides can I use? It’s irrelevant as long as you stick within your time boundaries. In my case, I use, actually a lot of slides and a remote control and go, basically, at very, very high pace through my deck. I even encourage my clients to ignore rules that people say you can only bring 5 slides, but our 5 slides have turned into 15, but trust me, you’re going to stick into your window of time.

Jan Schultink:

Stay tuned for the videos from the event with HubSpot at MIT in Boston to come soon!

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Topics: presentations, sales pitch