Amongst the chaos of the Omicron outbreak in New Zealand and the worst flooding in history in Australia, I recently went to the Emergence conference in Sydney.
A special client of mine wanted me there for coaching preparation for their investment pitch. We’ve been working together over the past 5 years and our first pitch together they won the best pitch of the night award at Ice House Ice Angels in front of over 900 potential investors.
Including the work I was going to be doing in Sydney, I was also excited and expecting to see a level of presenting and pitching that I’ve not seen in New Zealand, I mean it’s the big smoke, it’s a showcase of the era of exponential innovation, it’s Sydney!!
I’ve been collecting images and photos of terrible PowerPoint over the last few years from here in New Zealand, and I’ve kind of laughed to myself ahh you know New Zealand is behind the times and needs to catch up to the rest of the world and start producing some functional PowerPoint, that focuses more on image based, emotion triggering, minimisation that’s made for the audience and not for the speaker.
All this time I’ve been seeing companies fly Australians out to New Zealand, because they come from overseas, the big city folk that can show us the error of our backward backwater ways and drag us kicking and screaming into the 21st century
They pay stacks of cash to bring in the experts, the big cheese, the Whopper with fries.
So I went to Sydney with big expectations
And I got let down hard.
Throughout the entire day, I watched as one after the next, the speakers got onstage and were introduced, and without delay, they dived straight into their PowerPoint, or it would be more fitting to say what it really was, their PDF, their Document or in some cases their about us page copy and pasted from their website.
There were two large screens at the bottom of the stage, set up so the speaker could see their PowerPoint, usually only used as a guide to keep track of the presentation, however everyone was using the screens to read their PowerPoint.
Now, this is pretty much the most basic “don’t do this” stuff that I talk about with people and one of the biggest pet peeves of an audience, the reaction is always the same, if you were just going to read off your PowerPoint, we could have done that ourselves.
And that’s another part of the problem, we read faster than you talk, so we have already read ahead of you and that’s a pointless presentation.
In all seriousness, if you’re going to read from notes then read from notes, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to make sure you get your message right, it is important.
But do it on purpose and with purpose, pre think and pre design your script and PowerPoint, with the intention of reading a scrip from the lectern and commit to that course.
That way you can have minimal content on your PowerPoint because you will have a dedicated script that you’re going to read off separately.
Now there is another reason why those PowerPoints are overflowing with information and that’s because people will sometimes ask for you to send out your deck. Especially if you’re pitching for investment .
That slide deck should be the one you make specifically to send out afterwards, that slide deck can be full of all the relevant information because they will have time to read it at their leisure and by then you have hooked them with your initial presentation and they want to know more.
That’s when you give them more, the initial presentation is like they found your profile online, they like what they saw and now they are asking for a second date. The initial pitch is to wow them with an idea in the simplest way possible.
How you present information says a lot about how much you respect the person receiving it, you either care that it’s short simple and easy to understand or you don’t. You either do the hard work yourself in simplifying your content or you expect them to do it for you.
And that’s what kind of person you might also be like to work with.
It can be tempting to try and give the audience all the information in one go, but thats just not how we as humans take in information.
And what I’ve yet to mention that really blew my mind, all the speakers had paid to be there, so why didn’t they or their company invest in some coaching to make sure these things were fixed, and the invested time, energy and effort was given the best chance of success.
Now there’s something to think about.
So, my trip to the big smoke taught me that whether you’re the big cheese or the whooper with fries in New Zealand or in Sydney, these problems are universal.
And there is a very small number of people that invest in solving those problems and they stand out above the rest in a sea of mediocre they are easy to recognise
My client got off stage, and the person who had been doing the headset mic setup over the course of the conference said, that’s the best pitch I’ve seen.
And that’s exactly what you want to hear and why you invest in coaching.