Having worked in the startup space for nearly three decades, I have seen a lot of amazing ideas that live inside awful pitch decks, sales presentations, and marketing materials. I’m not talking about the color schemes or design choices (though those can be bad too!) I’m talking about how the content itself is presented.
What Does Your Business Do?
Sadly, a very common problems show up on the first page, a bad business description. People often have a hard time explaining their businesses. Two common mistakes are: 1) heavy jargon, and 2) a generic description. And sometimes both.
Let’s start with jargon. No one wants to read a sentence that requires a decoder ring!
“We provide an end-to-end, scalable, AI-enabled, suite of HR solutions leaving you to optimize your ROI.” Huh?
How about some simple language, like: “Our technology solution takes away your HR headaches so you can focus on serving your clients and growing your business.
Not only is it understandable, but it sets up nicely to discuss the specific “headaches” the product or service solves. It’s the “why” or the benefit that matters to the customer, not the “what” or the feature.
While jargon can be annoying, being too generic and or using sweeping language to sound impressive is almost worse. How many times have you read a description like this:
Company X is your complete IT solution provider. Our experienced team delivers customized, innovative solutions to solve any business problem.
Really? Any business problem? How about focusing on the company’s strongest areas or indicating what kind of customers you serve? Perhaps something like:
Company X provides custom IT solutions to power call centers, procurement processes, accounts payable departments, and other administrative needs of small to medium-sized businesses.
At least we know what you do and who you serve.
Tables, Charts & Graphs
Once the reader understands the business, it’s time to provide some information on the problems facing the customer and the solutions your business offers. Again, there are two common mistakes: 1) too many words, and 2) poor graphical design.
My eyes immediately glaze over when I see a slide that was clearly made by copying a Word document and dropping it into PowerPoint. Ugh. People don’t read carefully — and they definitely don’t want to see text crammed on a slide. Here’s a classic example:
In addition to being visually difficult to read, both App X and Customer are repeated throughout and there are tons of filler words used to complete sentences when bullet points would do. Worse still, features and benefits are jammed into the same paragraph, so nothing stands out. Even with my limited graphic design skills, this table is a huge improvement.
Above we have the same information, many fewer words, and a clear separation of features and benefits. Also, instead of “Data Goals” the title now expresses why the data matters to a customer or investor reviewing this deck.
Titles are a whole other issue of their own! Why waste space (often in the largest font on the page) saying something meaningless like “Customer Profiles” when you could tell a story, e.g., “Company X targets 3 distinct customers: A, B, C.” But I digress…
Poor graphics can be an even bigger problem than wordy slides. If you want a deep-dive into how to make excellent charts and graphs check out any book by Edward Tufte e.g., Beautiful Evidence. Even if you don’t read his books thoroughly, please commit right now to never, ever using 3D shadow again!
As with all communication, charts and graphs should be easy to understand. Below are some examples of simple charts comparing unit sales of candy and cookies over five years.
A side-by-side column makes it easy to compare the two items over time. Here we can see that each product is growing over time and that cookies are growing a bit faster.
Another approach is to show how each product is growing annually, but also show the total sales for each period by using a stacked column:
These are not fancy charts, but they do follow some simple rules. The years are on the horizontal (x) axis, unit sales are on the vertical (y) axis, and each unit is spaced to allow for easy approximation of totals.
By contrast, the two charts below make it much more difficult to get a clear picture. The first is a side-by-side column where Candy and Cookies are shown by category, but it’s difficult to compare the growth of one product to the other. Also, time is represented by color which is confusing and adds no additional information for the reader.
In the chart below, the unit sales grouping is better, but the years are on the vertical (y) axis which is not easy for the brain to process as time is linear.
Also note that in the above two graphs, the axes representing the units sold are unnecessarily high (no data appears between 20K-25K) and 5,000-unit spacing makes it a bit harder to estimate totals. Small details can make a big difference.
Things can get even more complicated when trying to express a complex concept with a visual.
I recently reviewed a deck that included the graphic below.
I don’t know about you, but I have no clue what this picture is supposed to tell me — and the title doesn’t help. It took me several minutes to understand the axes and there is no information about the scale of either the Number of People or the Ups and Downs of the market. Even after discerning the axes, I am not sure how this information affects sourcing T&M (or what T&M means). The words “Dedicated Resource Pool” are written both in the gray section and to the right of the image, and there are four vertical lines on the right edge that I assume are essentially typos. Sigh. The reader should not have to work this hard to figure out what message is trying to be conveyed.
Final Thoughts
What’s the big lesson here? When it comes to presentations the KISS principle is paramount: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Don’t be afraid to send your presentations to friends or others who may not work in your industry and see if they understand what you’re trying to convey. This is especially true when pitching investors who may be entirely new to the industry. Even for internal documents where jargon will be more understood, don’t make your colleagues work hard to get your point.
It’s less about how pretty a presentation looks and more about the content. If you can say something with an image instead of words do it. If you can say something with bullet points and action verbs instead of sentences, do it. If your title can be informative rather than vague, make it so. And sure, if you can afford a graphic designer, hire one. But get the content right first.
