Seth Levine, a Principal at Mobius Venture Capital in the US, posted a handy guide on putting together an effective presentation when you’re calling on VCs to pitch your wares.
Reading the guide, all of it struck me as wholly valid in almost any situation where you have to explain something to someone in order to get an action from that someone. That could be money, willingness to do something for you, make a buying decision on your product or service, or even simply agree with what you propose doing yourself and support you.
It’s about clarity in communication leading to understanding (and, ultimately, acceptance).
So in preparing your presentation for whatever purpose, here is Seth Levine’s list of do’s and don’ts – a worthy checklist for planning any type of business presentation:
- DO have a 2 or 3 sentence description of what you do. This should be simple and straightforward. You grandparents should hear you say this and say oh – I get it’.
- DO make sure you start your presentation by telling the people who you are talking to what it is you do (I’m truly amazed by the number of times it takes 6 or 10 PowerPoint slides to get to the part of the presentation where I finally understand what it is the company that is presenting actually does).
- DON’T assume that the problem that you solve is obvious. Make sure you do a good job outlining what it is that you fix’.
- DON’T have a financial plan that shows you becoming the most successful [insert your company type here] company ever in existence. I’m amazed how many enterprise software companies show us with a plan that has them generating $50m in revenue in their 4th year . . . while at the same time insisting that their plan is very conservative’.
- DO make sure you do time checks – first at the beginning of the presentation to know how long you have an audience for, and then periodically to make sure you are still on schedule.
- DO make sure you then organize your presentation around the time you have (which is to say, understand the meat of your presentation and make sure you get to it in the time you have allotted); a corollary to this is to make sure that you skip sections that you are asked to skip. We regularly spend 10 or 15 minutes time going through something (for example the market overview of a market we already know broadly very well) that we’ve asked an entrepreneur to skip over, only to run out of time during the real guts of the presentation (ie, defining how the company’s technology is unique from that which we’ve seen before).
- DO make sure you practice your presentation out of order and interrupted – a lot of good presenters get completely flustered if they get off track or have to take things in a different order than they planned – you should expect that you’ll get interrupted with questions, asked to skip over sections and challenged on certain points – practice your presentation that way.
Read Seth’s complete post for additional information, including suggestions on what content to include in your presentation.
Extremely useful advice.
(Link via Scoble)
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
